DIY Booking in Central PA

Location: Altoona, PA – three hours outside Philadelphia

Genres Booked: All

Website: www.anemergencyscene.com

Booking Contact: Ryan Wapner

Email: wapner1@verizon.net

There’s no doormen, sound techs or security. Depending on the venue, sometimes there isn’t even a stage.

AnEmergencyScene is just guitars, amps, musicians, kids and the floor they all stand on. This is ordinary for shows that happen in towns like Altoona, PA, the perfect tour stop between Pittsburgh and Philly and a few hours northwest of D.C.

But Ryan Wapner, who started the booking company with his first show booking Punchline in May 2005, is no ordinary promoter. He’s the kind you’ll find setting up, tearing down, running the door and running sound – not the one who just shows up at the end to settle the show.

Touring bands have been stopping for a while in Wapner’s hometown, made famous by the railroad industry and little else. But the shows he went to as a kid were disorganized and carried a bad reputation. “Kids would just do a bunch of drugs in the parking lot and drink and sell beer to other kids out of coolers,” Wapner says. “I was just like ‘How is this happening right now?’ This was on a main street. It was baffling.”

So he started booking shows at a church where he had once attended youth group.  Since then, about a half dozen venues have come and gone, but if Wapner gets a good pitch from an agent or a touring band, he’ll make it happen. “I would book everything, as long as there’s the right space to put it,” he says. “I even got an offer to book Uncle Kracker one time.”

Even if it’s a one or two band tour, Wapner has the resources to fill out the bill with local or regional bands from as far as Philly, who drive three hours up the turnpike. AnEmergencyScene has also garnered a pretty reliable audience, with kids driving into town within about an hour radius. The most faithful will also help with “guerilla-style” promotion, Wapner says, handing out flyers in school or on the local campus to compliment his incessant Tweeting and Tumblr-ing.

With bands like Brand New and Fall Out Boy playing in the area before they were selling out arenas, and Wapner himself having booked everything from All Time Low and The Maine to Good Old War and Kevin Devine, all it takes is a phone call and a tour stop to keep the speckled history of Central PA’s music scene alive.

“Why not stop the day before a tour starts and make an extra hundred bucks and play to some different kids?”

photo by Kyle Giarth