On the farm. (Sudbury, MA)
Ahh… the first Road Journal post of 2010. And what a place to be making it from – the historic Victorian farm where we stay whenever we tour New England. I’m (Russ) in my usual room at the front of the house, with a view looking down the long driveway lined with lanterns, colonial stone walls, and varied deciduous trees. Beautiful. Of course it’s nighttime right now, but we got a lovely view of the dirt and peastone driveway on our way in this evening, with a light dusting of snow on the ground and the lanterns lighting it all as we pulled up to the house.
I realized tonight that we’ve never stayed here at the farm in the winter, only during fall and spring, as those are our typical Northeast tour seasons. We’re here for a good reason, though, and it’s two-fold. Tomorrow night we host a benefit concert for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society at the Boston Sheraton hotel, sponsored by you, our Backstage Community members. We rented an event room, set up a couple of cash bars, hors d’ouevres, a silent auction, a raffle, and a stage for ourselves and a local Boston band, Brothers McCann, to play. We did 100% presale for the tickets, and the event sold out as of tonight, which is really exciting. Tickets were $10 apiece and we sold 200 of them (the capacity of the room), which means that we’ll be able to donate $2,000 to the LLS plus whatever we raise in silent auction and raffle proceeds tomorrow night. We’re donating every penny to the charity, which feels great.
The second reason for our trip is that the National Association for Campus Activities “(NACA”) is having their National Convention in Boston starting on Saturday, running through Tuesday night. We book college shows all the time, but it usually involves a lot of time spent searching online for who the concert chair / booking person is at the school, getting their contact info, making a cold call, sending them music, etc. – and then eventually [hopefully] leading to a show on campus. The nice thing about NACA is that it is an organization of all of those kids – the students who specifically book entertainment on campus – and the vast majority of them are attending this weekend’s convention. We became members of NACA late last year and purchased a booth for the convention, at which we’ll be meeting as many of these students as possible, introducing them to our music, and hopefully booking a bunch of shows as a result. We’re really excited about it, but also really nervous, as it’s a huge investment for us (about $5k all told – that’s the downside to NACA), and from what we hear, this event is HUGE. We’ll be really tiny fish in a giant ocean. There are 3,000 students from 500+ schools, and about a thousand vendors (bands, magicians, caterers, promotion companies, game companies that rent bouncey castles and the like, etc. – basically any service that a college event could use). We’ll be just one tiny booth among a thousand… and we’ll probably be one of the only bands there, because it’s so expensive that most bands/artists can’t do it on their own – only management companies (representing dozens of artists) generally go for it. It costs them $5k, but if they can book shows for 3-4 of their 20 acts, they’ll make their money back plus some gravy. Much less risk that way – we’re going all in, taking our own way as usual. 🙂
Anyway – lots going on this weekend for sure, and lots to be excited about. Beers, Anton, and I flew in from Colorado earlier today, hanging out in Chicago for a few hours and then arriving at Logan Airport in Beantown around dinner time. Jason, meanwhile, loaded all of our equipment through four feet of snow in Virginia and drove 10 hours up here to Massachusetts to meet us. What a trooper. All 4 of us are staying at the farm tonight, then we head in to Boston tomorrow around 4pm to load in at the Sheraton for the benefit show. After the show, Jay and Beers will head back out here to the farm, and Anton and I are staying in downtown Boston at my cousin’s place for the next 5 nights, as his place is a couple of blocks from the NACA convention, so we can just walk over every morning and walk back. Super nice. Jay will drive back down to Virginia on Saturday at some point, and Beers flies back to Colorado on Sunday. Fred (our longtime roadie / triage nurse on the road) and Brian (our college booking dude) will be meeting Anton and I to work the booth for the weekend.
Alright – time to hit the rack… more tomorrow from the show!