In December 2010, the third annual Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival played on consecutive nights at Double Door, Congress Theatre, and Lincoln Hall. The man behind the music? Mike Raspatello, a music business jack-of-all-trades. In this interview excerpt with Jack M Silverstein, Raspatello details the process that gave Chicago it’s third year of summer music during the winter months and his preparations for the 2011 CBB, coming up this winter.

I was just a guy at an ad agency who loved music and always hoped to somehow dabble at some point in my life. I was working with a friend and their band, doing some marketing and management work for them, just kind of helping out a friend because I was really into their band.

We started to get some bigger ideas. They were involved with a charity that was throwing some bigger shows out in the suburbs. I was helping develop these shows. Right around that time, my friend at the ad agency introduced me to his roommate Lucas King, a guy who’d been promoting events for years. He was the talent buyer at the Congress Theatre at that point. He invited me to propose an idea to him.

I had already been thinking about putting together some kind of bigger roots music-inspired event. I’d been a fan of the Old Town School of Folk’s Folk and Roots Festival every summer, and always wondered why when wintertime came around, there was a lack of rootsy, festival-type events. I didn’t wonder too hard – I understood it was because it was winter, and those events work better outside.

I drew up this idea for the Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival. It’d been something I was thinking about. I owned the name. I trademarked it. We started looking at talent. He walked me through a budget. Being a numbers guy, everything made more sense to me once I saw it in a spreadsheet. He helped walk me through the steps of getting this booked.

That first year, a lot of hand-holding. He was teaching me every step of the way. I was trying to make this summer music festival event ‘feel’ happen in a little 4500 person historic venue, the Congress Theatre, that has one stage. I wanted to bring another stage in there for the lobby pavilion, and do a stage up in the balcony.

I didn’t know at that point that you have to match your audience to your venue. I have this pie in the sky idea of, “I’m going to balance it perfectly between traditional musicians and the up-and-comers, because I want to show the roots of the blues and bluegrass genres but also the contemporary off-shoots.” That was my hope, my vision.

We booked it accordingly. I handled the booking. The best way to learn is to do it yourself, and while Lucas walked me through the venue aspects, I reached out to David Grisman’s manager. He was a favorite of mine, and one of the most famous mandolin players in the world. Pitched them on the idea. Never hid the fact that I was just an independent guy. Pitched the Avett Brothers in the same way. I think people liked the idea that we had this historic venue, and we had the name, the Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival. We were able to, frankly, pitch to musicians that even to this day would be hard to land.

I saw really quickly that being honest about what you know and, more importantly, what you don’t know, doesn’t hurt you. They want to know that there’s someone who’s going to be putting their all into it, and that they’re going to get paid. They saw that they had the promotional outreach because we were plugging into Lucas’s reach as a promoter and into my knowledge of that roots music world.

At the end of the day, we got 3200 people to come to the festival, but we spent a lot of money. We practically broke even that first year, but it was tough. You go to a David Grisman show and it’s a nice mix between older people and younger people. You have the young Dead Head crowd and the old Dead Head crowd, and then the older, classical music crowd because it’s a mandolin-based quintet, and you get the jazz crowd. A lot of those people are used to seeing David Grisman at either Old Town School of Folk or out at DuPage College. The Congress Theatre was unfamiliar to some of these older people. They were less comfortable buying a David Grisman ticket at the Congress Theatre, and we lost a lot of his potential fans.

Because you weren’t matching the crowd to the venue…

Exactly. Exactly. We booked the Avett Brothers, who are humongous now, but at the time – you know, I was such a music dork, that in my head they were bigger than they were. I do so much reading about that scene, and I’m seeing their name come up amongst critics, and I’m seeing them booked on all these festivals. They’re a household name in certain regions, but not in Chicago at this point.

I’m sitting there in March saying, “I think they’re gonna be about ‘this big’ by December,” but if you’re wrong on where the stock of that band is growing in that six month time, you can significantly overpay for someone. The Avett Brothers got huge in Chicago – they were already huge elsewhere – but got huge in Chicago about six months after we had that first Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival. So their draw wasn’t quite as good as it could have been. In retrospect we know we weren’t matching the venue to the artist, but back then we just thought, “We don’t have big enough artists.” Even though the show was awesome and people loved it, we needed to sell a couple hundred more tickets to make it work.

The next year, I’m taking on more by myself. I’ve learned that first year, and Lucas is getting bigger and bigger in his own right, throwing more electronica shows and being very successful. I’m taking on this Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival as my baby, steering it in the second year. I’ve thrown a couple shows, and I understand the process much better.

Now, however, we both agree that we need a bigger headliner. Just a bigger name. We have the opportunity to book Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, which are a bigger name. However, we paid for them. And this ended up being an even bigger case of not matching the audience to the venue, because Bela Fleck’s fans, we realized, are an even pickier, more discerning consumer than the David Grisman fans. The David Grisman old people are kind of more Dead Heady, and the Bela Fleck old people are more Old Town School, NPRish, you know. They’re like the – where are you from again?

I grew up in Evanston.

Exactly. So you get it. They’re the ‘Space’ crowd. They’re the Evanston crowd. They’re the well-off, upper-middle class, significantly liberal, big NPR contributors. They’re our folks, you know? They’re not coming to the Congress Theatre to come see Bela Fleck. They’re waiting for the next time Bela Fleck is in one of the nicer, more acoustically-perfect, cozier venues.

So we took a bigger bath in Year Two than we did in Year One. But the buzz was great, the press was great, the reviews were amazing. We really hit a home run in taking that festival atmosphere and bringing it indoors. The only thing that wasn’t working were the economics. The festival was growing. We went from 3200 to 3500. The notoriety was bigger. We were getting tons of press. We were all over the place. It was great.

It’s funny: Everyone but the people paying for it thought we were making a killing. It just seemed so damn successful. Fifty vendors selling everything from food to pipes to necklaces to art. Like any shakedown street at any festival, we had nailed that vibe. After Bela Fleck, we finally figured out, “Okay, we see what’s going on. We can still fit in those traditional artists. But we need to make them part of the day, and make the headliners fit the room better.” The Congress Theatre shows were doing better when you weren’t trying to get 40-year-olds to come. We had to make sure that our headliners weren’t headliners that forced us to rely on promoting to our parents.

I had been a fan of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes since 2007 when they first came out. I tracked them tracked them tracked them, and I was (snaps fingers) this close to suggesting them for the year before.

But I was patient. I saw the groundswell coming. What really nailed it for me is that they were booked as a headliner on one of the nights of Telluride Bluegrass Festival, which is probably the most prestigious bluegrass festival in the country. If they’re a headliner on one of those days in summer of 2010 at Telluride, they’re plenty good for my festival.

We were aiming for a more traditional artist to do that other spot. “If the main headliner this time is targeted at young people, then the second headliner can be more traditional.” That didn’t end up working out, and we ended up somewhat late in the game with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, who were just like Edward Sharpe, also on a huge ascension.

After we got Edward Sharpe and Grace Potter, we filled out the bill a little more strategically than in years past. The cost of adding these additional stages – the extra security, the extra sound and lights – was about ten or fifteen extra thousand dollars. Which is significant, a 10 or 15 percent increase on the budget. And the smaller local bands were not selling enough tickets to offset that cost. If I was going to create this festival and use it to showcase these smaller acts, I needed them to understand the expense that was being taken to provide them that opportunity. If this festival was going to happen, all those little bands needed to become partners.

So we created a goal-structure. Each spot on the bill was assigned a hard-ticket goal. They were committing to go around with Girl Scout Cookies, practically, to sell a certain amount of tickets to earn that spot on the bill. What it looked like is this. (Holds up computer and points to spreadsheet.) Here’s the little stage. This spot, the guy had to sell at least 20. This guy here had to sell at least 30. And 35, 40, 45, yada yada yada, so on and so forth. As you can see, some people far surpassed their goals. And now next year, he’s probably going to want to buy this spot, the 60 spot.

They would get a commission. They’d sell a 35-dollar ticket and keep everything above 27. The artist was making three, four hundred dollars, and we were grossing $10,068 from these hard tickets that they were selling. These people’s effort was not only promoting the festival as a whole, it was finally offsetting the cost for all of the production necessary to have these other stages. These bands sold 305 tickets and we were able to make this structure work.

Because otherwise, we’d be a lot smarter if we just threw a show with Edward Sharpe, Grace, Honeyboy, and Giving Tree, called it the Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival, put some vendors in the lobby, and didn’t try to be as ambitious with it, because that ambition was losing us a shitload of money. We’re not a big company. We don’t have scaled advertising rates where we can promote cheaply all year.

The funny thing is, the difficulty was not in building the model. The difficulty was in selling it to the artists. There are a handful of artists that played in previous years – showed up, made their hundred bucks, went home, while I’m working forty hours a week and losing $10,000 out of my own pocket – that said, when faced with this level of effort and risk, “Thanks but no thanks.”

But a lot of other bands were like, “This is awesome! I have the opportunity to make 600 bucks when otherwise I could only make one hundred and have to play the show for free.” It lit a fire under certain bands, and helped weed out the people that don’t make an effort.

You had twelve other bands, six on Friday, six on Sunday, not only promoting their night at Double Door or Lincoln Hall but promoting the festival on a whole. While the festival as a whole cost around six figures out of pocket, Friday and Sunday is like a thousand. All of the expenses are in that Saturday Congress Theatre show. Friday and Sunday, you’re just paying a rental fee for a room.

It’s just a regular night at Double Door.

Correct.

But it’s attached to this –

Correct. Exactly. You had people who initially were like, “I want to go see Edward Sharpe,” and then, “Fuck it, for a little more I can see two more concerts.” Now you have additional revenue coming in on people who made kind of an impulse up-buy from the Saturday. You’re adding incremental revenue to the total coffer just by giving people any combination. You could do Friday – Saturday. You could do Saturday – Sunday. You could do all three days. At the end of the day, the numbers worked.

It was something we needed to do. If I lived in the mountains and had an outdoor venue in the middle of the country, you can make a traditional bluegrass festival work. We had to accomplish our goal in a different kind of format, and that’s what we did. So, so far so good, and now it’s time to do it again. Trying to figure out what we want for this year. And that’s that.

This is going to sound really lame and cliché, but at the very end when you see that shit all come together, when you see the mass of people getting into it – I’m not playing shit, but I am the dork who put 40 hours a week behind the scenes for months leading up to this, as a smaller part in a much bigger team in North Coast, and a bigger part in a smaller team in CBB.

When that shit happens, when that comes together and you see people getting into it – and I used to be in their shoes. I used to be the kid who lost my mind, lost myself in a concert. And I still often am. If I’m not able to replicate that for somebody by playing an instrument, I’ll help create that for somebody by playing with spreadsheets. If that’s the part I contribute best, marketing or publicity or press or media buy-in or whatever role I fill on that given day, that’s good enough for me.

Jack M Silverstein is an oral historian covering music in Chicago. For updates on the 2011 Chicago Bluegrass & Blues Festival, see  http://www.cbbfestival.com

photo by Julie Collins ~  RoseMountainPhoto.com