Over at the Origivation message board there is a thread discussing the selections for the Lollapalooza local slot. The bands that made the cut are Stiffed, Arms of Orion, Riding Bikes, and Swell to Grate. Y-100’s Jim McGuinn weighed in on the selection process and how they narrowed the finalists down to just 4 bands.
You ever listen to 500 bands in 3 days?
We just did. And it was fun, and torturous.
And we whittled it down to about 75 bands that we liked a lot. All those bands will be added to the ‘rotation’ of things we play at TNMC and Y-Not and stuff like that. It is great to get all this energy and music come thru the door in just 7 days that we ran the contest. Getting from 75 to 4 was tough. Everyone had an opinion, and we used everyone we could get to listen – jox, staff, interns. These 4 were the consensues, even if I can’t spell it. Yeah, no one here had ever heard of three of these bands till this weekend. Isn’t that cool, tho? We didn’t pick the bands we all knew, cause we opened it up to people like interns to help. It’s not that we sought that, it’s how it happened. As to having the contest lean ‘punk,’ I think that since everyone from the Ramones to the Donnas have played Lolla, I don’t think it’s a non-punk event at all. Frankly, a LOT of the rock bands we got felt like Alice in Chains derivative to us. Yes, we like the ‘screamo’ sound here at Y100 (look out for the new Thurdsay record that is coming soon – we think it’ll be huge), but that’s not why we chose these bands – we just liked em all. Is that wrong? I’m sure we missed something, we did the best we could – I know that I am spending at least 30 hours on this project, as is Dan.
As to Y100 being ‘lame’ and all that, well, we didn’t NEED to do this promotion. We’ve done it about 4 times over the years – the ‘big break to open for someone’ promotion. We go out and get this opportunity, we spend our entire weekends listening to a lot of really not so great bands, and then pick these and start playing them. Can’t some of you guys be happy that SOMEONE is getting some help?
The funniest thing is that we do this, and the next day all we get is emails and calls ripping us and calling us idiots. To us, it just seems like a lot of bands just can’t seem to deal with the fact that someone else might have won. Do you guys want us to keep fighting to get opportunities for bands in the music scene or not? All we ask is that you try to support us – and we’ll do what we can to help you. We just want to break a band… we’ve played so many local bands, and still the last rock band to break out of philly is the hooters. Guys – we gotta change that. But I don’t think we can change that unless we support each other – support things like Origivation, support Tommy’s show on YSP, support the Alt Weeklies coverage of local music, etc.
We hope one of these bands kicks our asses. We hope that we get the ‘average’ public to request one of these bands. We hope we can help more bands to record deals. We are psyched that this finals will feature one band that turned in a great demo but has never played a show, and another that we’d never heard of but has over 23,000 mp3 listens. And we thank the people here who have taken our picks and checked them out – hope to see you at the free show on Sat (and thx to EFC for opening up the TLA for us for free!) – I know I’m excited to see all these bands.
Yours in the rock –
Jim McGuinn
Y100
Haha thanks for being ours “in the rock” Jim. Thanks.