Q&A: Messiah College Concert Executives Jeff Rioux & Margeaux Monsour

I’ve long been impressed by the musical talent that Messiah College brings to campus. It's crazy how quickly the school has built a ridiculous amount of popular music credibility on a campus of less than 3,000 students.

Not too many indie acts have gotten more love from critics than The National and Feist, and both played at Messiah during the 2007-08 school year. The Decemberists came recently too. So did the Counting Crows. Oh, and some guy named Bob Dylan. The College’s Student Activities Board (SAB) organized all of those shows and also oversees a weekly concert series known as B-Sides that features emerging artists.

The SAB is staffed almost entirely by students and is overseen by Jeff Rioux, a 1994 Messiah graduate. When Rioux was in school, the SAB booked strictly Christian concerts and showed Disney movies in the student union. Now it has become one of the premier concert venues in the area. On the even of last weekend's Ingrid Michaelson concert at Messiah, I sat down with Rioux and B-Sides Student Executive Margeaux Monsour to ask them about their work.

JK: It seems like Messiah does a really great job of bringing in interesting and high-level talent. I went to Penn State which is obviously much bigger and you could certainly go toe to toe with anything that they bring in. How have you been able to establish the reputation that you have?
Jeff Rioux: The reputation builds, we haven’t done anything to intentionally market a reputation, but when we booked Sam Beam from Iron and Wine, we had previously had M. Ward and because they are friends, Sam Beam talked to M. Ward and Ward was like, “I had a great time there; they treat you well.” That’s why he accepted the offer. There is a bit of a relationship with certain booking agents. We become known. High Road Touring has Aimee Mann and Wilco and Ollabelle, and a lot of artists we’ve brought so we do well with that roster. The same with Ground Control Touring which has Bright Eyes and Connor (Oberst; Coming Nov. 7) and the Deceberists and several others. There is a sense that when you do things well, artists report that back and booking agents know, “Okay, this is a good place.”

JK: Can you tell me a little bit the B-Sides series and its goals?
Margeaux Monsour: This is Larsen Student Union (gesturing around the building) and B-Sides is an event that Larsen Student Union hosts. Every single Wednesday we put on a concert that is open to students and to the public and we try to make it an educational experience. It’s a concert but not only a concert. We put a lot of thought into who is brought in so that we are teaching students about new music, culture or something about another race.
JR: Generally with all of our concerts, not just our B-Sides series — all of our activities including our films, actually — we constantly look at the philosophy of why we do it. We are an educational institution, so we want to expose our students to the best that popular culture has to offer. Its the same as our art gallery trying to bring in great artists and expose our students 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional works of art that are great. Or the same way that or theater program tries to put on plays that are great and that our students should be exposed to. So it’s more than just entertainment. Of course, entertainment is part of what we do, but we are concerned and interested in the artistic elements of things and a lot of analysis and thought goes into those things.

JK: I know next to nothing about booking. How far in advance do you book these concerts both for bigger concerts and for B-Sides?
JR: It’s only ever one semester in advance; it’s the summer booking for the fall and the fall booking for the spring. The artists that we are working with just don’t book that far out. If you were booking jazz artists, they’ll book a year out. Classical artists or world music artists, they tend to book farther out. But the artists that we are booking tend to only book about four months before they go out.
MM: For the most part, B-Sides works the same way.

JK: How much do you benefit from your proximity to major cities like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, etc.?
JR: I think we are fortunate to be where we are. Think about Harrisburg and the highways that come through here. They connect Pittsburgh, Philly, Baltimore, DC, New York, Boston — if you want to go from any of those cities to another one, you have to drive near Harrisburg. That’s pretty fortunate. A lot of what we are able to do because of location. If we were in Portland Maine, the only reason to go to Portland Maine is to go to Portland Maine. You’re not going anywhere else. It would be difficult to book in a place like that. The other thing we end up doing, because B-Sides is so often, we get to know New York, Philly, Baltimore and D.C. artists very well. Any of those artists can do a one-off when they aren’t on tour. They can just come in for the day and go home. We’ve done that certainly for our B-Sides series, and our B-Sides series has almost become a bit of a Philly and New York band showcase at times, which is a good thing. With our concert series, Ben Kweller or Regina Spektor or Ingird Michaelson, all of those are just one-off dates where they are driving down and driving back.

JK: With B-Sides, the frequency of it must make it a little bit difficult. How do you go about picking the artists? Do you just have to immerse yourself in the music scene of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington and seek out good stuff?
MM: This is a new experience for me because it’s my first semester doing it. When I began planning for it in the summer, I put a list of different genres of music and then I put a number by each one of them so that different tastes would be satisfied. The complaint that we get a lot about B-Sides is that there is the same kind of music brought in all the time. Whoever is doing it has to try to bring in music that all different students like. That was the beginning point. I think the next step after that was getting a grass roots community of people and asking them to send me recommendations. That’s what really set the ball rolling. I still get recommendations here and there. Myspace is really wonderful. The guy that did it last year really liked blogs. I don’t like blogs that much. Myspace is where I go from friend to friend to friend looking at different profiles. I also have a lot of conversations on campus, so that’s very helpful.

JK: Do you guys go into the season with set targets? Did you go into this season saying you wanted to get Conor Oberst, or do you just have to be flexible?
JR: You have to be flexible. It’s more like, you make a longer list of artists that you’d like to see here and then you just wait and hope that it will work out at some point. Beck has never worked out. We’ve had several offers out to Beck and it seems like every year something happens. At this point, it probably won’t work out; he’s probably too big. For the Connor date, our offer was in for Wilco for the whole summer, and finally they said, “No, we are going to record in November.” The next day I was told, “Well, Conor has two days in New York the days after this, do you want to put an offer in for him?” We did and it worked out pretty quickly. Just kind of popped up on us.

JK: You said Beck might be too big? There is a too big for you?
JR: Yes, because of our venue. We wish we could, but we can’t do Death Cab for Cutie. They are selling 4,000 seats. We have 1,600 seats. There is no reason for them to say, “Yes, we’ll take your offer of this much money, when we could be taking another offer for more.” Some bands, like say Bob Dylan — the only reason we got Bob Dylan is because he tours all the time. So in some ways, because he likes to tour, he has lowered his own price. That’s the difference between Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. When they go out they are going to make millions of dollars each show. Bob Dylan isn’t like that. He’s just going to do 200 dates a year.

JK: Is there a secret to booking on a budget?
JR: First, I’d say that our budget is pretty generous. When we started doing this we had a semester where we had the Counting Crows and Lifehouse and I think Nickel Creek was that same semester. The students were all like, “This is great! We’ve never done anything like this before.” Well, we went into debt. So we said, “If you liked that, you’ll have to raise our budget so we can keep doing it.” They were very generous and raised it. I’d say we have a good budget to work with, but there are things you can do. Somebody made a comment to me that it seems like every time we get a big band they are solo and that’s true. We aren’t getting Iron and Wine, we are getting Sam Beam, we aren’t getting Bright Eyes, we are getting Conor Oberst (pictured). They tend to be cheaper when they are solo. Sometimes you get lucky, too. We booked the Decemberists and they asked for this much money and overnight they were on everybody’s Top 10 lists. They could have asked for a whole lot more. We sold out easily and we made money on the show. That’s just lucky. Jeff Tweedy, again, you book him solo and he doesn’t know he’s going to sell out just like Wilco does, but he did. He could have asked for a whole lot more money from us than he did, but he didn’t know that. He did the second time around.

JK: Like you said earlier, you do have a huge advantage in being close to so many major roads. You don’t have the advantage of having a huge base of people close to campus that might help you fill your venues. What’s the split like between students to the public at most shows?
JR: A split that we like to see, if we sell out a show — sell 1,600 seats — is 400 students. So a quarter. We’ve seen higher. We’ve seen up to 1,000, which is rare. We are happy with 400 to 500 students. There have been other shows where we sold out and they weren’t as popular with students. Maybe we only sold 200 tickets. That’s not our goal though. We aren’t programming for the public, we are programming for the students knowing that the public will come too and that we need the public.

JK: Jeff, you mentioned how sheltered SAB activities were when you got here. This is a Christian College. Are you at all restricted in what kind of acts you can book, or is it just kind of a common sense thing?
JR: There are certainly people we wouldn’t book. I’d say there aren’t that many acts that we want to book that we can’t book. There are some. Ben Folds is someone that our students really like and we like what he is doing artistically. He’s very talented and he’s a good songwriter, but he just has a mouth, especially in between songs. If someone is using that kind of language in a song and it makes poetic sense, I never ask an artist not to sing a song; I know they are coming with that. We do hope that they won’t use that language between songs just because of our audience. They just won’t respond to it. That can kind of energize people in a bar, but our students, it can turn them off. We hope that they won’t do that, and at times we mention it. We wouldn’t even ask Ben to do that because it’s so much a part of him. He’s someone that we wouldn’t be able to book that we would like to.

JK: So do you typically talk to the artists before the shows and remind them where they are performing?
JR: I typically don’t. We had to put something in the offer in our early shows when I didn’t know what to expect. I think I generally know the people we are booking now, and we’re just not booking artists who are vulgar. I mean, they might occasionally swear between songs but they aren’t going to talk about sex — well, the Counting Crows did that — but they aren’t generally going to say things that are vulgar.

JK: The Counting Crows?
JR: Well, the Counting Crows — we heard that they were really quiet on stage. We generally want to know what they are like on stage before we book them because maybe their music is a lot different than who they are as people. We heard that Adam (Duritz) didn’t say anything between songs, that he just got up on stage and performed. Well, that night he had had maybe a few drinks and basically he acted like the kind of guy who was in a rock band because he wanted to get women, and that’s not what I gathered from his music. I thought he was a little bit more intelligent than that, and maybe he is, maybe he had a bad night. That was one that I got a little bit of feedback about.

JK: With the B-Sides, you can’t possibly be that familiar with every artist you bring in. Do you have to put something in the contract about the content of the music? Do you bring it up to the artists?
MM: I’m learning as I go. As we started to book the bands, I was looking at bands that had a lot of vulgar language in their music. Sometimes I wasn’t even aware of it and Jeff pointed it out to me. I think I’m starting to do the same thing that Jeff does. I get a real sense of who people are by their music and the language in their music so I’ve just started booking bands where those kinds of conversations are necessary.
JR: The thing about B-Sides is, as you pointed out, we know them a bit less than we know other bands. You have to get a read, if they show up and their language is… colorful… you might have to say to them, “Just so you understand our audience…” That’s really how you have to put it. You don’t want to say, “These are the things you can’t say at Messiah.” We aren’t trying to do that. We just don’t want to set them up for failure. Sometimes at Messiah, if you say certain things the audience will just go cold on you. We’ll just say, “This is a public venue, these are not people who paid to be here and a lot of people will just wander through. Our student body is so diverse and some of it is rather conservative, so if vulgar language can be avoided it would be better for you.” That has been received well.

I remember we booked the Trachtenburg Family SlideShow Players and they brought an opening act that I didn’t know about. I checked out their Myspace and they were weird. The woman played a saw and in their video he was dragging her around naked in the kitchen and she had her saw. In their bio they were talking about how their goal was for everyone to experience sexual freedom, so I was like, “Whoa, this isn’t what I booked and this is just the opening act.” So I sat down with the guy from Trachtenburg ahead of time — oh, and this was for Family Weekend too — and said, “This is a Family Weekend show,” and he said, he understood and he talked to the guy and told him that you have to have your bar show and your show for everyone. No problems.

JK: Do you make a concerted effort to book student bands for B-Sides?
MM: There have been requests already for alumni to come back and play. Personally, I just rated them as I would any other band and I didn’t have interest in it because of their musical talent. It had nothing to do with them being alumni. We booked a band for December (Farewell Flight) and one of the members is a Messiah alum.
JR: I think we would be open to having student or alumni bands, but they aren’t going to get a free ride. We are going to judge them on the same criteria.

JK: Both of you have said that you hear complaints about only bringing in one kind of music. Do you just bring in the best acts you can bring in regardless of genre, or do you make an effort to spread things around? I hate the term “indie music” but that seems to be largely what you book if you know what I’m trying to say.
JR: For me, indie music means so many different genres. We do get people saying, “All you book is indie music.” Indie music is not a genre. It just means you aren’t signed to a major record label or that you are doing things low budget. For as much as that might be a fair charge, we are trying to expand. I think we did that last year. One of our more popular shows was bringing in Hoots and Hellmouth. Now is that an indie band? I mean, they are independent, but that feels more like roots or Americana to me. They are definitely a different kind of band than your average indie rock band. We are interested in those kind of shows, especially because a band like Hoots and Hellmouth gets everyone on their feet. This year, we booked Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band with the same kind of feeling.

JK: One softball for both of you. If you had an unlimited budget and had to book one headliner and one opening act regardless of venue size, who would you book?
JR: Would they definitely say yes? I want the Arcade Fire. Wait, no budget? Okay, Radiohead, if we don’t have to be realistic it would be Radiohead with the Arcade Fire Opening.
MM: I’d say Chuck Berry and Aretha Franklin.
JK: That would be a good show, but I’m not sure how many students would come out.
MM: That would be a concert for myself.