Athens Community Music Fest 2002 Preview.
By Matthew Toledo - 8/14/2002
The Athens Community Music Festival returns to downtown Athens for the 4th year. The fest was founded by Union booking manager Scott Winland and local insurance agent, music enthusiast, and community activist Jim Fuller. This year's fest will showcase local talent at several Athens venues. Proceeds from the event will go to the Appalachian Community Visiting Nurses Association and My Sisters Place. The fest has raised dollar amounts in the thousands in previous years.
$9 provides you with an all access pass which allows you to enter all the participating venues that night without having to pay an additional cover charge. Or, you can pay $4 at each venue of your choice.
The ACVNA helps provides at home nursing care for people who can't afford such services, or have no family members. For instance, they help people coping with a terminal illness or chronic condition, or people who are recovering at home after a hospital stay.
My Sister's Place provides shelter for people who are living in abusive situations. Domestic violence is the repeated and deliberate abuse of one person by another, and includes verbal, psychological, physical and sexual abuse. My Sister's Place can provide you with a safe haven anonymously.
This year's fest begins at the Front Room on Saturday, August 17th at 6 PM. The Front Room is located in Baker Center on Union Street. In addition to performances by Chris Biester, Mike Elliot and Tony Xenos, there will be lots of free food and prizes. The Front Room show is free to the public, but donations are encouraged.
At 9:00 PM JD Hutchison and Realbilly Jive perform at the Union. "This special show is a ACMF tradition not to be missed", states Winland.
At 10:00 PM the event branches out to 4 separate venues: The Blue Gator, Casa Cantina, O'hooleys, and The Union. Each venue will feature 5 acts a piece.
Visit The AMN's local venue listing for maps and contact information for each venue.
|
AMN: Scott, what were the roots of the ACMF?
Winland: It basically started with Zach Fuller of We March wanting have a show on top of the parking garage. Zach's father, Jim Fuller got with Lou Lenart, and myself - who both thought it was great idea - a logistical nightmare of sorts - but a great idea. We decided to make it a benefit, and got together with some other folks- Jim Phillips, Bruce Dalzell, and Tim Hogan.
Winland: We came up with a loose plan and made it happen - on top of the parking garage. We had roughly 11 acts play - the highlight by far being JDs set at sunset - truly a beautiful moment in Athens music history! Unfortunately, the lights on top of the parking garage never came on - so the last band played with headlights beaming on them - the show must go on, eh? The following year the parking garage was unavailable, so we split the festival into 4 venues - the front room, the union, the casa, and o'hooley's. This required a lot more on the way of timing.
Winland: The idea is to mix the shows up genre-wise enough that everyone is getting a little bit of everything. The other tough factors were not booking people like The Universal Sidemen, or Brian Gibson (who play in multiple bands) in more than one place at once, and trying not to book bands who draw similar crowds at the same time in separate venues. This gets pretty complicated - but it worked. Every venue booked for the event was packed - one crowd would leave, another would arrive. This ended tripling the money we raised for the charities, and gave the local music venues (who host us every weekend during the school year) a nice busy night on what would traditionally be the deadest part of summer. The new format seemed to work out!
Winland: This year the festival has grown with the inclusion of The Blue Gator - and five slots at each venue instead of the 4 we did in previous years. The idea is to try get everyone involved with local music to be a part of this thing. Hopefully by next year we can figure out a way to include even more venues which of course would mean more bands!
