Mike Snow On Boston Calling’s Lineup, Culture [INTERVIEW]
Here we go behind the scenes of the the acclaimed Boston Calling festival to hear from Mike Snow about the challenges and opportunities of organizing and choosing a lineup for such an event, and what a band should do if they're hoping to land on the billing for next year.
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Guest Post from PledgeMusic News
The latest in our Festival Spotlight series is Boston Calling, an acclaimed twice-yearly festival held at City Hall Plaza that is curated by The National’s Aaron Dessner among others. The line-up for May’s production was just announced and features another stellar cast of artists, including Sia, Sufjan Stevens, Disclosure, Odesza, Robyn and many more. We recently spoke with co-founder of Crash Line Productions Mike Snow about the challenges the festival presents and the emotions before releasing a new line-up.
You guys recently made the announcement of your line-up. Does it feel like there’s an emotional build-up akin to an artist releasing information like a new album?
With us being a smaller company and operating two different festivals, not 200, we have such a personal connection to it. We’ve said “yes” and “no” to a hundred bands along the way. A hundred bands have said “yes” or “no” to us. So yeah, there is a personal connection. I don’t do the booking. Thankfully we have an actual talent buyer who does our booking for us in the office here, but our whole team is really super involved in it. I think it’s a fun exercise for us all.
I’m the operations person. I deal mostly with schedules and timelines and vendors and sales, and that’s why I still have my hands in sales because that’s the one avenue I can still be creative. Having worked in radio for years, I think it’s the same as when the ratings came out. I wasn’t on the stage, but you still wondered, “Okay, do people still like us?” You kind of build this big hype thing of, “What are people going to say? What are critics going to say?”
It starts for us at the beginning of the year, because Coachella announces first. Then the first articles come out on Consequence of Sound and Brooklyn Vegan and Paste and Spin — these sites we commonly read — and they have these 10 bands and we’ve got four of them. “What do they have to say? Oh they love Sufjan Stevens and good we have him, too.” The parts can come together and make one thing, or they can come together and make three separate things. You never know how the general population is going to receive it.
It’s the same thing with ticket on-sale day. That’s always a fun 48 hours around here, and it never gets old.
Different festivals come with different cultures. Not every one, but different ones can have a varying feel or ethos, if you will. What values or ideas are most important that feed into that for Boston Calling?
I can’t speak for everyone on the team. I certainly know that Aaron Dessner gets to really survey his livelihood, being a musician and music producer and just taking in art all of the time. For him, it is a little bit of a personal thing and he also knows it’s a business and nobody ever loves every band on a line-up. So that’s one thing.
I think the hard part for us, or where the line-up is so focused, is that we’ve got a pretty hard scape over there. It’s a short window to build the show and take it down. It’s a short amount of space to be able to do everything we want to do. So I think our line-up has to find the mood a little bit. I just don’t have the real estate to put up giant art installations and say, “Okay, this year’s poster is going to be all about palm trees, so when you get to the show, you’re going to see palm trees all over the plaza.”
But a lot of shows get to do that. They get to set the mood by choosing another color palette and choosing a different way to accentuate the landscape. We’ve been pretty fortunate with the festival we operate in Wisconsin Eaux Claires where Justin Vernon from Bon Iver and Michael Brown [creative director] who live there, these guys are like, “No, we understand a lot of people are coming to this part of the world for the first time, and we’re going to have this backdrop along the Chippewa River and tie everything into it, because that’s the way of life around here. We want to share that with everybody who comes to the show.”
Now that that’s been embedded, you get to play with the theme and do more along the way, but yet we’ve got a very natural landscape that’s green and lush with trees and fields. All you can do is say, “Okay, I’m going to paint some colors on it throughout — from the main entrance to the last piece of fence you put in.” So I think we bring a little bit more line-up based in Boston, and the line-up is a function of what’s touring, what’s out there at the time, and what’s going to work with schedules and routing. So we start at the top and we lock in a couple of those headliner bands and the rest of the festival takes shape from there.
For a band who wants your attention, what advice would you give them?
We have so few slots in Boston that every single one of them is poured over. On a smaller band side, the rest of the line-up has already taken shape, so if there’s a great Boston hard rock band is out there, but we’ve got Sia, Sufjan, Odesza and Disclosure and Elle King, there’s really no way to slot that person in as good as they are. I think some bigger festivals have whole stages curated from a local side or bands who don’t normally get the chance.
My only piece of advice is that festivals are being planned right now for 2017. You gotta be on top of it. You gotta be sending your stuff now. You gotta have that impressive live show. You’ve gotta have whatever your niche is, you gotta strive to be the best at it and then festivals will take notice. But unless the festival says “more to be announced,” emailing over your band is probably not the greatest thing because the booker is focused on this line-up they’ve put together and they’re nervous how it’s going to do. They’re not going to pay any attention to your band at that time.
Are there things you’re still trying to figure out, a hurdle you can’t cross?
As a company, I think it’s still just curating a line-up that people who become Boston Calling fans over the years would always go to. We don’t do this intentionally, but we’re a pretty creative team and when a line-up starts to come together like this one did, we get excited about it. But the person who came last year to see the Pixies and Beck probably doesn’t understand this line-up. I think that for us, the roster having 20 bands instead of 40 bands is something that is the hardest thing to get it slotted where we absolutely are in love with from start to finish.
Personally, it’s mastering that plaza. Every show, we still make tons of tons of little tweaks to where equipment goes, to where speakers go, to where different lights go because it’s such an ever-changing landscape over there.
How much sleep do you normally get that weekend?
We start building that Monday and the really long days start Thursday morning. I’d say for those four or five nights that if I get right around 20 hours, I’m doing pretty well. But it doesn’t bother me. I’ve always been wired that way. My dad was a contractor growing up and I watched him work until 11:00 every night and get up at 5:00 every morning because he was working on some project. The thing is that this is still a passion center for us. You finish work and you’re tired, but everyone went home safe and you probably got a short list of things to do before anyone shows up the next morning and you hit the alarm and you’re like, “Okay, let’s go do this again.”
