I'm still decompressing and recuperating mentally and physically from a long weekend. Thursday and Friday during the day we setup for Blitzfest, getting ready for thing to kick-off at 4:30. I'm blown away at how smoothly things came together. This was huge. When you design something to handle between 3 and 5,000 people and 75 bands, you have to do things on such a huge scale in terms of things I'd never thought of: Police, Medical, Water, Food, Bathrooms, Volunteers, Security, Band Hospitality, Transporation, Contracts, Dealing with Credit Card Transactions in a remote area... and the list goes on. The whole things was run across a large team, and masterfully done. The common theme as I talked to people from the volunteers, sheriff's office and bands was that they couldn't believe how excellently this was pulled off. Apparently, that's not the standard for these kind of things. I helped out with random stuff on Thursday and Friday - everything from running errands, setting up tables and signs, and setting up garbage cans. This is a picture of the main stage. It was huge. It backed up to a nice hillside where people could hang out and listen to the music. In the background, you see lots of other tents setup for merchandise, concessions and other bands.


The highlight for my kids was not the bands, going back stage or the inflatable stuff. Their favorite parts were riding in the golf carts and 4-wheelers around the park. This park was huge with giant hills and divits based on being built on a landfill, lots of big craters as the park has settled.


On Friday night after setup, I had to take off and go to the Bartlett-fun-night going on at the kids school. They had games, a teacher dunk tank, and a campfire. We hung out with a bunch of our friends as the kids played. They had a bunch of inflatable stuff to play in. They also tried to use me as a fund-raiser, as you can see below:


On Saturday, I headed over to Blitzfest to help out with security. I wandered around trying to nail people who were sneaking in without wristbands, directing band and vendor traffic, MCing a couple of the stages and helping with odd jobs where needed. The show was running great except for one small factor, we weren't getting the numbers of people that we were looking for. Our projections were based on previous years of doing the festival, needing roughly 3,000 people to break even. We got around 1,300. We realized this was the case mid-day and you could visibly see the spirit of the core team sag. We started to do damage control at this point, trying to figure out where we were at and how we needed to move forward. Our prayer for the festival was not "God, make this super successful." It was, "God, we want you to be honored in everything we do here - success or failure, rain or shine." In order for that to happen, we needed to deal with the finances from a position of integrity. That meant sitting down with each of the main bands and sharing with them where they were at and what we could do. Each conversation was painful and humbling. One of the other board members, Bruce Greene, myself and Jason Raitz had these conversations over and over, and they never got easier. We worked hard to encourage each other and find joy in the moments that we could. We were exhausted emotionally, physically and spirtiually by the end of the night. Cathie and the kids showed up at the end of the night to hear the last couple closing bands. They got a chance to hang back stage and watch some of the show and meet some of the artists. Nate and his buddy Austin got to meet the bands, including this guy, Michael Tait, part of the band dcTalk.


Sunday involved taking the bands to the airport and cleaning up. Shinn and I drove Tait and his band to the airport. Tait drove shotgun with me and we had a great time talking about everything from Walmart to music. He's a good guy. It was fun hanging out with someone for a while who's music I'd been listening to for 17 years and talking him about common bands we listened to.

Here's a quick tanget on the Christian Music scene. It's not something I'm big on. There was a time when it was new and cool crossover music was happening that I listened to a lot of it. There's some good stuff out there in this genre, some of which I still listen to: Jars of Clay, Rich Mullins, Michael Card, Third Day and a few others. What happened over time was that it became a big sub-culture that became totally focused inward and people seemed to see it as a substitute for the real world of music. Millions of bands came out, nothing new, all sounding the same and it got old quick. The music at the festival wasn't just "Christian" bands. It was local bands, with the rider that they couldn't swear. Not too tough. The local bands were some of the best ones there in my opinion. Anyways... back to dcTalk. I first saw these guys 17 years ago at a Youth Group event in Washington D.C. called "DC 88". Christian music at that time was pretty tame, and rap music was starting to hit mainstream. These guys have continued to release cutting edge stuff that's been on the forefront of the christian music scene, so I have a lot of respect for them. After dealing with 20 different band managers and some of the bands themselves on Saturday, I came to the conclusion that there are a lot of tools out there, and a lot of great guys, just like the rest of the world. After telling the bands were we were at with things, some of them were understanding and helped us out, some became bigger wankers, demanding cash up front or they wouldn't even go on stage. In the end, I think God was honored by the way we dealt with everyone in terms of integrity and love.

In summary, we prayed like crazy and had done everything possible to make this successful, lots of people pouring their prayer, hearts and souls into this thing, and it still tanked financially. We're probably about $80k in the red right now and are dealing with how to resovle the defecit while living up to all of our contractual obligations, not screwing anyone over. We're working hard as a team to focus on the positive moments that took place. There are a lot of them. Here's a cool thing that happened: The generators for this event cost us about $20k. The owner of the company discounted it originally down to about $10k for us. At the end of the event, not only did he give us the generators for free, he also cut us a $3,500 check to help us defray the costs. Amazing. Another great story: I worked security with a guy named Demetrius or Meech, as he likes to go by. He's a huge dude, invited to help at this thing by his buddy, Tim. Tim had invited Meech to church a bunch of times and Meech told him in pretty uncertain terms to take the God stuff and stick it. After this event, Meech called Tim up and told him that if this was what Church was like, he'd be interested in checking it out. I'm sure that there are a million more stories that we have no clue about. We're trying to keep those in mind as we pick through some of the wreckage. Pray for this thing and for Project311 in general.