Pitchfork thrives in bigger festivals' shadows
Music | Promoter's in the music business -- but don't tell him that
On a bookshelf just inside the door of At Pluto, the concert promotion company Mike Reed runs in a cramped North Side office, two titles are prominently displayed. One is the autobiography of Bill Graham, the notoriously mercurial promoter who ran the Fillmores East and West and who helped make the Monterey Pop Festival a defining moment during the Summer of Love. The other is a collection of writings by the man who preached that we should love even those who hate us, Mahatma Gandhi.
According to his friends, there are elements of both men's temperaments in Reed, but what Graham and Gandhi actually shared was a can-do attitude capable of moving mountains. Reed, the soft-spoken and self-effacing 33-year-old visionary behind the Pitchfork Music Festival, downplays the significance of displaying those books; "Some friends gave them to me," he says. But he definitely shares their subjects' optimistic and unyielding approach to any challenge.
According to his friends, there are elements of both men's temperaments in Reed, but what Graham and Gandhi actually shared was a can-do attitude capable of moving mountains. Reed, the soft-spoken and self-effacing 33-year-old visionary behind the Pitchfork Music Festival, downplays the significance of displaying those books; "Some friends gave them to me," he says. But he definitely shares their subjects' optimistic and unyielding approach to any challenge.
"I'm the one who doesn't like to be told 'no,' " the Evanston-born former football player and avant-garde jazz drummer says. "Nobody can tell me, 'That can't happen.' I know I can do it."
"I'm the one who doesn't like to be told 'no,' " the Evanston-born former football player and avant-garde jazz drummer says. "Nobody can tell me, 'That can't happen.' I know I can do it."
Indeed, over the last three years, the Pitchfork festival -- which will draw 13,000 adventurous music fans to Union Park Friday night and 17,000 each day Saturday and July 15 -- has become one of the most successful independent music fests in the country, as well as the rare concert that is more than just a concert, creating a real sense of community among musicians, fans and residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.
What's even more impressive is how Pitchfork does this with a budget industry sources say is one-tenth what's spent to promote festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella and Bonnaroo -- and that Pitchfork charges only $50 for a three-day pass, compared to $195 for Lolla.
"When people ask how we can offer all of this for so little money, my response is that they should ask, 'Why do other festivals charge so much?' " Reed says. "They're about making money, and the aesthetics aren't really part of it."
In 2004, Reed was best known on the Chicago music scene for his rhythmic contributions to numerous jazz and improvised music projects. (His own recordings include the 2006 album "In the Context Of," a collection of duets with Jeff Parker of Tortoise, among others, and the recent "Loose Assembly: Last Years Ghost.") In between gigs, he manned the tap at the Charleston Bar, and he worked for a company involved in marketing and promotions at many of the city's big street fairs.
"Basically, I was turning 30 and I had no money and I really needed a job," Reed says. Since he was the only one among a group of idealistic friends who had any experience putting together events, he wound up as the key organizer of the Interchange Music Festival. Spread out over several days in August 2004 and hosted at local clubs such as the Hideout and the Empty Bottle, that fest drew together Chicago artists devoted to the non-partisan goal of voter registration.
"The first sign of trying to make [concert promotion] some way of making a living was when we did the Interchange Festival," Reed says. "Even though that was obviously a benefit for a cause, just the power of seeing these people coming out for the music and realizing that we had put it together as just a bunch of friends doing it on our own reinforced that -- since the people running a lot of these street festivals were basically chuckleheads -- if they could do it, we could do it.
"That's how it started, with us asking, 'What if there was a cool street festival -- one that had an aesthetic and which took its cue from a community, instead of just from trying to sell beer?' Two weeks after Interchange, I decided to do a [bigger] festival and get Pitchfork to curate it."
Though Pitchforkmedia.com was already the most popular indie-rock publication on the Net -- it now claims to attract 1.5 million readers a month -- Reed wasn't too familiar with the site; he just knew it would help to have a media presence attached to his festival, and that he needed a bigger name than "the Mike Reed Fest." He also knew he needed a corporate structure, so he partnered with Jon Singer and Mike Simons, who run a travel and events company called Skyline Chicago, and who had the capital to cover expenses such as insurance, sound and staging.
Reed, Pitchfork and Skyline worked together to make the first Intonation Music Festival an unexpected commercial and artistic success, drawing about 15,000 fans a day to Union Park in July 2005 for cutting-edge acts such as the Go Team!, the Hold Steady and the Decemberists, to name three that have since risen from underground buzz to mainstream acclaim.
The Monday morning after the first Intonation fest, the promoters fielded calls from massive corporations eager to buy them out -- including Hollywood's William Morris Talent Agency, which owns a stake in Lollapalooza -- and they started fighting among themselves about how to grow and proceed in the future. Several months of legal wrangling resulted in Simons and Singer retaining the Intonation name -- they ran the second Intonation Festival in Union Park last year, but opted out of promoting another fest this summer -- while Reed split off to form a new company for his festival, based on in a 50/50 partnership with Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber.
"What Mike does sort of blows my mind," says Schreiber, who recently relocated to Brooklyn, though Pitchfork's office and staff remain in Chicago. "He does pretty much all of the organizational stuff. When you get to the concert and look around, virtually everything you see -- from how the stages are set up to the booking of the bands to the vendors -- he's done virtually all of that. We feel really assured, working with Reed, that everything is going to run really smoothly."
Renamed the Pitchfork Music Festival, the next fest that Reed promoted in Union Park came close to selling out on two days last July, and it featured acts such as Art Brut, Ted Leo and Spoon. This year, the fest has expanded to three acts on Friday night and more than 18 per day on Saturday and Sunday, and all three days sold out two weeks before the event. (For the full act-by-act preview of this year's performers, see my column in this Friday's Weekend section of the Sun-Times.)
"We could definitely get more people in [to the park], but we want this to be a pleasant experience for everybody," Reed says. "We're doing 17,000 a day now, and we're spending almost no money on marketing. If I wanted to get as big as Lollapalooza, I'd have to play a different game, and I don't want to play that game. I don't know that we want that type of audience, either, where it's just a ramshackle type of thing."
Pitchfork hosts a modest chill-out area with a few picnic benches backstage, but there are no VIP areas for watching the music; the musicians stand beside the fans. The two main stages run consecutively instead of concurrently, dramatically improving the sound; food and drink from local vendors costs a third of what promoters charge at Lolla or outdoor venues such as the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre, and there are no corporate sponsorships or intrusive ads anywhere in the main music venue.
True, Lolla draws three times as many people (60,000 a day) with much more famous acts. But remember: Today's buzz band is tomorrow's superstar headliner. Of this year's Lolla lineup, seven acts performed on the Pitchfork or Intonation stages in 2005 and 2006.
Unlike Lollapalooza, Pitchfork tries not to book bands that are performing at other festivals in the U.S. this summer or that have appeared on one of its earlier bills, making the fest seem more unique. And Pitchfork generally shuns nepotism: Several Lolla acts are managed by the same people promoting the festival, while Reed has steadfastly refused to put his own band on the Pitchfork lineup, though many of his friends think he's crazy to pass up such an obvious opportunity.
"As nice and as benevolent as I might appear to be, I like to make money, too," Reed says, laughing. But he is obviously proud of having created a thriving festival with a growing reputation as an event for real music lovers.
jimdero@jimdero.com