Have you ever wondered what it would be like to thrash out the details of the rock n' roll dream show you were planning on having at your palatial estate with vast acreage ? Any urge to call Perry Farrell and ask him how he made it through that many Lollapalooza events while waxing poetic about the finer points of stadium rock vs. small venue punk rock?No?
How about the logistics of thousands of people baking in the hot sun with too much alcohol, lack of porta potty access, bad food, and the occasional violent downpour to cake them in mud?
Still not sold?
I can't blame you.
The art of the festival is something few master, but we spoke this past week to someone who is doing it right: Anders Thueson, who is heading up the Festival Tor Humanity, which takes place this upcoming Memorial Day Weekend, May 27th-30th, at Mountain Creek in Vernon, New Jersey.
Hi Anders, thanks for talking to us today.
No problem.
So let's start off with some talk about the Festival For Humanity. All I had to do is see the Misfits on the bill and I was sold.
Well good, that's why we put them there. We were hoping for that.
Well you also have quite a line up in addition to them. How did you approach these all these bands to appear, was it using the charity or the festival angle?
We used both. I mean, we certainly can't support the charities without a big crowd. And to get the big crowd, we needed the good bands, so we really kind of reached out to all the agencies and got our list of availabilities and then looked at the artists and what they represent with their music. We pretty much looked for artists like Third Eye Blind and Soul Asylum and Good Charlotte especially who have a track record with depression and mental health. We have quite a variety and the theme is suicide prevention, health, and nutrition, so that gives us a LOT of parameters. PETA came forward and actually asked us to be there which was actually great and Oxfam did the same thing. Oxfam is known for their work for poverty and hunger and PETA is obviously for animals, but they also are advocates of a vegetarian lifestyle so it was a good fit on that level for us.
