I should blog about that

I’ve been working on re-writing my rather old (2011!) bio on the about page. In one of the drafts, I mentioned that there was a chapter of my life when I promoted concerts and I basically got into it by accident. I continued, “I should blog about that at some point,” which is also a phrase I recently said to Al and Joe. I’m still having a hard time with the bio, but I can at least do the thing I said in that draft instead of keeping it in the backlog.

I grew up around Indianapolis and got into the alternative Christian music crowd through my church’s youth group. First it was my friend Dave’s band, New Generation. Then it was attending Cornerstone Festival, which became an annual tradition. Then there was the Sonshine Inn (archived link). It was a small Christian coffeehouse that had concerts on weekends, usually more for the adults (read: not punk, emo, or alternative enough for us 😀). They asked us if we wanted to start hosting Tuesday night events geared more towards the youths that we were at the time. We called it Club Z, because it was the ’90s, man!

I had no experience, but it was easy enough to get started since I knew some local bands. It was almost always donation based, because they wanted anyone to be able to come. It made the whole thing pretty easy. No contracts, just “Do you want to play? It could be for 6 people or 30.” It was a really fun time and I met some people there who became lifelong friends.

In late spring of 1999, my friend Tim was contacted about booking a Five Iron Frenzy (FIF) concert. It was really last-minute since another date had fallen through. He asked me if I was interested in taking it on. FIF is one of my favorite bands, so of course I was interested. I was nervous, though, because this was quite a step up from little coffeeshop shows. We would need to get a venue, sound system, and handle all the logistics.

I felt a lot better after talking to their manager. They weren’t requiring a guaranteed payment since it was so last-minute (I think it was two months at most) and would take a percent of the ticket sales. They really just needed a date since the rest of the route was set and they were recording the shows for the live album, Proof That the Youth Are Revolting.

With the help of several friends, we ended up pulling off a pretty successful show. It was no money-making venture, but we didn’t lose money either! It ended up being about as easy an introduction into “professional” concert promotion as I could have hoped for. It’s pretty cool that parts of that show are on that album. They also let fans sign up as “official background vocalists” and printed their names in the liner notes of that album.

After that, I realized maybe this is something we could do more seriously. We gave it a name and kept at it: Frontline Productions. I really liked the idea of bringing in bands that might not otherwise come through Indianapolis. Especially around that time, it seemed that most bands either came to nearby Chicago or Cincinnati instead of Indy. Since we had a good connection with FIF after that show, we got to book several of their Indy dates in the following years.

We kept promoting shows for several years on the side. It was often for love of the music rather than making money, otherwise it wouldn’t have continued as long as it did. We’d make money sometimes and lose other times, but thankfully it tended to balance out. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the people who volunteered lots of time and energy to make those events happen.

I think our last show was in late 2006. I need to look up the specifics. I want to work more on archiving those shows, posters, and photos in the past events section here on my site. I have added some with the tag #frontline-productions as I remember them, but there are many more.

I’ll leave you with this video of Five Iron Frenzy at Cornerstone 1999 (not a Frontline show). They came out dressed as the glam metal band Stryper and referenced their song “To Hell With the Devil.” They also played “The Final Countdown” as the lead in to the song. The audio on the album is much better, but it’s a blast seeing this again. I love these goofballs.