Cash, Money, Records - Treefort Music Festival Director Eric Gilbert

About seven days before the second annual Treefort Music Festival was set to start in Boise, ID, festival director Eric Gilbert got some terrible news: his headliner, Animal Collective was sick and had to cancel. Surprisingly, Gilbert wasn't worried. For one, the news wasn't a complete surprise—a case of strep was forcing Animal Collective to slowly cancel their entire tour—and secondly, he had confirmations from almost 300 other acts.

Unlike mega festivals like Lollapalooza and Coachella, Treefort doesn't rely on a stacked list of headliners. Instead, it has a much different, and very ambitious, purpose: to introduce the isolated mountain town of Boise to the major touring market of the Pacific Northwest, and to boost the city’s interest in supporting touring bands.

Treefort's fundamental difference in philosophy makes the festival experience almost unrecognizable from attending a Big Festival: for one, no corporate sponsors means every stage and every venue remains branding free. No beer sponsor means the festival can serve local drafts from a handful of breweries, for about four dollars a glass. Instead of heavily-branded tents, shows happen in spaces like a Shriners Hall and a freezing parking lot.

Eric and I spoke the day after the four-day festival about the bigger purpose of Treefort to the city of Boise, how playing a festival can teach a local band how to use the Internet, and what it's like convincing 75-year-old Shiners to host rock shows.

Noisey: How big of a choice was it to skip corporate sponsors?
Eric: That was a very conscious effort. In the first year especially, the producer, Lori Shandro, was the one willing to put private capital on the line. It was something I was very passionate about, and it amazed me how we saw eye-to-eye about it. She preferred to lose money herself than to cheapen what we were trying to accomplish.

We partnered with Whole Foods, which I would honor as a grey area, but we’re not stubborn about that. There’s not a hardline stance; if it fits the community approach, we’re open to it.

On the back of the guide, all of the sponsors are local businesses.
Yeah, for us, it’s more about community partnerships. With all of our conversations with sponsors, we’re really honest. We’re not putting banners on stages, definitely not the main stage.

Photo by Glenn Landberg

Treefort has a functional role: it’s an introduction of Boise to the bigger national touring market.
I thought for a while that something like this could work here if done right, as a way to showcase Boise—most importantly—to talent that usually skips Boise. Last year, I remember talking to Why?’s agent, Of Montreal’s agent, and he was like, “I wrote off Boise 15 years ago.” The pitch was, you can go from New York to North Carolina in nine hours. Here, that’s to Seattle and there’s nothing in between. I know touring bands don’t want to drive from Salt Lake City to Seattle, so they want the market to work for them. That was a big part of the pitch: help me build this market for you. A big part of it locally is Radio Boise. That’s been on for two years, but before that, there was no independent radio here. There was no bastion for educating the public for these independent artists coming through town. When that happened, we now had a tool to help educate the public. You’re not skipping this market because you don’t like Boise, you’re skipping it because it didn’t work for you. It’s a matter of getting people to know these bands.

How do local bands react to the festival?
For the local scene, a show like this helps train local bands to write a bio, record something…

Set up a Twitter.
Exactly. It’s a training ground. All weekend, I saw local bands stepping up their game. They used to phone it in all the time, because being in so isolated of a market, you don’t think anyone cares.

Putting the local bands on the same stage as the national bands helps the local bands take themselves more seriously, and helps other bands take us more seriously. Bumbershoot in Seattle takes submissions, but they only take submissions from Washington, Oregon, and California bands. There’s only three states in the Northwest: Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. I was like, “You won’t even take a submission from an Idaho band?”

Walk me through what goes through your head as a festival director when a big headliner like Animal Collective cancels.
I knew they had been sick, so it wasn’t a huge surprise. I knew they strung that tour along trying to continue to make this date work, because it was the only one that wasn’t easily reschedulable. They knew for us it was going to put us in a crazy bind. I wasn’t that stressed out about it. How I felt—and the public reacted similarly— was that everyone gets that this festival isn’t about one band.

Even though they had to cancel, they already made plans for a show in Boise in a few months. That seems like a win for everyone.
Totally. Their agent is a good example; he saw some press about the festival and wrote me a longer email saying he wanted his artists to be involved. Dan Deacon, too. At the end of Dan Deacon’s DJ set, he gave this speech—to paraphrase a little, he said, “If there’s one thing you learned after this weekend: don’t move to Portland! Build your own town, make shit happen in your own town.”

What kind of prep work do you do to start a new festival?
It’s a year-long process. A lot of the prep work is the relationships with all these different clubs. Being an urban festival, it’s all somebody else’s property. Our ideal world is all our clubs are full, there’s no lines out the door, and everyone’s seeing bands they’re excited about. We have an artist committee that’s essentially a drinking club that talks about who we want at the festival. I’m technically the talent buyer, but it’s important to run those ideas off of different people in the scene.

We did more outreach too this year. We had a hardcore showcase yesterday, so I reached out to some of the bands and said, “Help me curate something that represents you.”

How did you manage to convince the Shriners to host rock shows?
I stumbled into the hall last year, and just thought, "This is amazing, why is this not being used for anything?" They seemed pretty skeptical, but last summer, we had a meeting with about eight of the Shriners and talked more. Their average age is 75, and they’re in a place where it’s like, “We’re all dying here. We’ve got to get some young people in here.” They were so excited about the video series.

Road to Treefort: Part Four

One of the best quotes from them—and not to make fun of the Shiners, but just to show how innocent they were to the whole event—someone said, “I was looking at photos from last year, and there were people transporting bodies over their heads with their hands!”

Just for a ballpark, how many wristbands did you sell?
We came within 100 of selling out this year, for the 3,000 [four-day] wristbands we had on sale. That does factor in some single day passes, so there was at least around 2,000 wristbands out.

Do you know how many tickets were sold in-state and how many were out of state?
Yeah, I know last year about 20 percent were out-of-state. I don’t have this year’s number yet. With bands, Iast year I was shooting for 70 percent out-of-state, 30 percent in-state. This year, it came closer to 60/40. About 108 local bands, 280 total.

Would you ever move the festival later in the summer?
Better weather?

Yeah, pretty much.
It’s the beginning of festival season, people are itching to do something. Summertime is super busy here. There are too many festivals everywhere. The post-SXSW thing is purposeful, especially for all the bands coming back to the West. There are only so many places someone can play in Denver or Salt Lake in one day. By having the festival, all these bands have a target to hit before going home.

You had to deal with one more situation: the local news reported someone brought a huge bag of weed on stage during Sharon Jones. It turned out to actually be a bag of bacon-wrapped dates right?
I think it’s cool how much the local TV news covers the festival, but it shows local TV news is based on sensationalism. It was one kid saying something. We talked to Sharon Jones, and we know it was a bag of dates, and [the station] has been slow to do a retraction. That’s why Anchorman is so funny: local TV news is a joke.

@patt_mutrino