Hot Gig Alert (8/3): Sad Summer gets back to its roots in Worcester. (Interview in Post w/co-founder Josh Terry!)
Five years in, Sad Summer Festival has become a standard for any former Warped kid and elder emo. It’s embraced the ethos of Warped with bringing together bands from many different genres, and has only gotten bigger every year. Starting back in 2019, this year’s festival run brings back some OG’s from the first year, with Mayday Parade and The Maine in the coheadlining slots. Sad Summer classics The Wonder Years, return guests Hot Milk, first-timers Knuckle Puck, Real Friends, and We The Kings will all be along for the ride; when it comes to the Worcester date!As well, and as always, the festival brings out a curated handful of bands to open up the day, and Worcester will be treated to performances by Diva Bleach and Daisy Grenade!
If you haven’t attended this festival tour before, you’re in for a treat! The tour purposely only goes down on one stage so that there aren’t any conflicts when it comes to catching your favorite bands! The tour makes its return to The Palladium Outdoors for this date, and the view lines are perfect! There are Instagram-worthy backdrops and installations throughout the grounds, typically some signature cocktails and, of course, some very delicious food truck offerings! As well as Warped-esque merch tents for all bands, there will also be some representatives from organizations like HeadCount and Punk Rock Saves Lives. The bands also tend to walk around during the day, giving fans the chance to snap a selfie and meet some of their favorites on the tour! How could you go wrong when it comes to picking this festival to be one of your big summer shows this season?
The tour is just two shows in, and while Worcester’s date is a few weeks away, I spoke with one of the three co-founders of the tour, Josh Terry, long-time Mayday manager, as well as being a manager for practically twenty years now. We talked about the early formation of the festival tour, the bands that have been on it over the years, the grassroots effect of the festival, and even dream bands they would love to make an appearance at the festival! All remaining dates can be found below, as well as my chat with Josh Terry!
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New England Sounds: I know this year’s tour is less than a month. You have multiple people on this tour, some of whom are even having multiple children. Was the work-life balance something you considered while figuring out the routing of the tour? Considering there are other components other than the bands, their families, and their mental health, was that something taken into consideration?
Josh Terry: When we started this tour, we were all in different places. Like Tim (Kirch) and myself, we were two founders, and neither of us had children, and Mike (Marquis), our partner, did. At that point, we were doing this tour as a way for Mayday and The Maine to have a big summer moment. Some of the guys had children, some of them didn’t. I think when you look at six years ago when we started doing this, we were all in different places than we are currently. Currently, it’s like Derek from Mayday Parade has three children. Cabby has a kid. Brooks has two kids. Most of the guys in The Maine have children, and all the founding partners now have children. So this has been a little bit different of a year in the sense that I normally would be at rehearsal day and the start of the tour. Instead, I’m flying out today to Anaheim because I couldn’t be gone for four days. So, I think we all balance it a little differently. Because we are kind of this small ragtag unit, it’s six people operating the festival, thirteen are on the road, and then we have over a hundred people touring the festival. It is a big component of our professional life. And so I think we all have to think about operating a festival that exists for just one month out of the year. But it literally takes us twelve months to do every year. How do we balance that between I’m a manager, Tim’s a manager, and Mike’s an agent? We all have our “day jobs,” and this is our secondary job. And we all have families.
So it is a struggle at times to do it. But it’s also something where we have all operated in music for two decades at this point. So we’re used to it being kind of fly by the seat of your pants, go, go, go. So it’s a component of how we operate as people, and I think our families understand that, too. You know, Warped Tour used to be two, two and a half months of a ton of shows. We do seventeen shows over three and a half weeks. It’s very digestible for us as operators. And I think it’s pretty digestible for the bands, who don’t have to commit themselves to two and a half months of touring and not having their families with them.
NES: At the first incarnation of Sad Summer Fest, I interviewed John and Jared of The Maine. I know they talked a lot about how the idea of this kind of started immediately at the end of the last Warped Tour. I know you handle Mayday Parade; you have for a long time. But they were both huge Warped Tour veterans. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about those initial conversations that started forming at the end of Warped Tour?
Josh: Yeah, it happened kind of before Warped Tour. When in 2018, we were doing kind of the quote-on-quote last year. Mike, Tim, and I have all been friends forever. I saw with the Warped Tour ending for this genre of music that that big summer elevated play just disappeared. And Mayday and The Maine, especially, were both in a place where they were House of Blues level bands, but they weren’t quite going to the place of playing theaters or amphitheaters. We just started discussing how this culture has joined every summer for twenty-five years around the idea that these bands are going to play outside in front of different audiences and different genres. And they’re going to grow because of it. And without that, the worry was that this scene might go down. They need that way for people to discover music differently. A way for them to be seen in front of a bigger audience. This genre itself had become a kind of club-level thing, as it was in the mid-nineties.
And so, Mike had worked on Skate and Surf, Bamboozle a little bit. But none of us had really grown our own festival before. We all put our reputations on the line, but also Mayday and The Maine, because they were like, we want to do this. We want to be a part of this first one, and we really want to put our fingerprints on it. It’s a big trust and a leap of faith for everybody to say, these guys who haven’t done this before. We’re going to see if they can do it. I remember that first year, talking to everybody at Warped Tour. There were a lot of bands that were targets that we would talk to when we were at a date with their agents and their managers. I understood that, and then there were some bands that were like, “Yeah, let’s try to brew something that’s our own.”
So, the first year, I think, probably was the most stressful time of putting this on. And also the most exciting, because we really birthed something that wasn’t there before. And we could have all gone broke eventually if it failed. And it was really funny that summer we put our concept out, and right after, Live Nation put out a festival called Disrupt Festival. That had millions of dollars behind it. It paid bands really, really well. More than we could, and our festival did very well. And their festival flopped. I just think the energy behind ours was the fans obviously got into it, and the bands took ownership, making sure the festival was fun. And presented itself, it wasn’t just about another payday. And I think that kind of mantra just carried on to where, every year we’ve done this, someone has been highlighted. The first year, Mayday Parade, and The Maine, The Wonder Years, were kind of the bands that got propped up to another level by doing it. The second year, All Time Low was in a very interesting place where, right before the tour happened, they had a big radio hit. And so they went from being a big band to being massive before the tour started. And then you have that year, which was probably one of our best-selling years. And the next year, we went back to do the return of the format. It was like, okay, it’s going to be Mayday Parade, it’s going to be Neck Deep, it’s going to be Waterparks. Three bands that would be normally in completely different lineups, and fanbases, and the tour did fantastic. Then, last year, we took a leap; we went with Taking Back Sunday and took a more established band on. And I think they really added to our brand. I also think we refreshed them a little bit on this run. We went to different theatres, and after that year, we were just like, “Okay, we need to go back to what works for us.” Like this was fun, but it didn’t seem like the same flavor.
And that’s why this year is more of a return to form, straight down the middle. It’s some of the original lineup with Mayday, Wonder Years, and The Maine, but also, I think, like We The Kings, who are very much in the same vein. Knuckle Puck and Real Friends, too. We wanted to do this tour for years, and we just tried to find a year to make sense of it. But still, the option was always to present new bands and develop them. So this year, we have Diva Bleach and Daisy Grenade, and we are even bringing some bands back, like Hot Milk and The Summer Set. They all fit within this juggernaut that is this film. But it kind of just kept with the same idea of, like, let’s go and create something that allows these bands to have a bigger platform than they would have on their own. Or that they would have on a package club tour. And let’s hope that by next year, these bands will be double the size that they are. And luckily, I think many of the bands that have done this tour, like Hot Mulligan, Mom Jeans, and stuff like that, those bands are doing real numbers now. Whereas a couple of years ago, there were bands that were probably selling five hundred tickets in a lot of markets. And a lot of that is because of the art form they did, but I think because of the platform that they took advantage of with the festival and made the most of it, it’s been really awesome to see those bands either come back or see where they’re going in their own careers. And that was just initially the idea we all wanted to do. And again, it came from talking right before Warped Tour, sitting in parking lots, and trying to convince people, “Hey, this could be a good thing.” And I do remember at the end of the first year, I was so stressed. We got through the whole thing, Anaheim was the last show of the tour, and every day I thought shows were going to be canceled. Something’s going to happen, like something’s going to go wrong, and I remember when Mayday played the last song of their set, and it ended, I went into the bathroom and threw up. And I was just like, we survived. And I went around to every person on the tour, shook their hand, and said, “Thank you so much. I think we did a good thing this summer.”
And I think that’s been kind of our motto every year. It’s like, our whole intention was to do a good thing this summer that helps your band. It also helps your fans have a place of community outside in the summer. And if we do that every year, it’s special, and I think if we continue to remember that, odds are that we’re going to stay in that kind of genuine place that I hope we operate from.
NES: You took the words out of my mouth in my next question. I was going to mention the same bands you did: Mom Jeans, Hot Mulligan, and Grayscale. As a manager, I’m sure you wanted to have that space for developing artists. And, like you said, all those bands are now headlining bands in their own right.
Josh: It’s huge, and it’s fun to see that. Those bands all bring something so different to our tour. And just the live performance space in general. Like Mom Jeans, I think a lot of fans discovered Mom Jeans from the All Time Low year. When they were playing in front of The Story So Far and All Time Low. I think a bigger audience was like, “This is really cool.” And I think their records and performances are really captivating. It’s really awesome to see them all on these big tours, selling all of them out. Like good for them, that is the sole purpose of this. Nobody’s getting rich off this, everybody is just trying to make sure this scene and these bands get a chance to go to bigger places, it helps everybody. It’s kind of like a rising cause.
NES: Then I wanted to ask. Since day one, I know it’s something where it’s never been paid meet and greets. It’s not something where there’s no chance to meet them unless you spend $70 on merch. I know from seeing members of The Maine walk around. I remember at Warped Tour, you would always see The Maine and Mayday both trying to sell CDs at the line, Brooks around the venue holding up a sign to sell CDs, even when they were both in headlining slots. How do you think those work ethics and grassroots efforts have helped the festival succeed?
Josh: Yeah, I think it takes away the gatekeepers to get to the bands. A lot of these bands go out right when doors open. Whether meeting kids at their merch tents or walking around, The Maine usually does something before doors. I know Mayday is going to be walking around, probably like playing demos and stuff for kids on their phones, just to hang. Because I think that’s the mentality of the bands. I wish I could say we took ownership of that, but that was definitely something that Mayday and The Maine, when we first did it the first year, brought up the fact that that’s one of the things they loved about Warped Tour. Is there was no way that kids were kept away from the bands, if they wanted to be. And yeah, we could have definitely done a meet-and-greet VIP program that had an elevated charge of $100 to meet this band or this band. The bands would probably make more money off of it, but I think because there isn’t that, more kids are coming to the shows. They’re spending their money buying merch instead of having to pay to meet bands. But they’re also leaving feeling like, this is my band. There’s no enigma of this band is too big for me. They want to spend time with me. It’s a lot of kids and fans, that grew up going to Warped Tour and all of these other festivals. Your one-on-one relationships with your fans are what give you your career. And I think for Mayday and The Maine, being a part of this at the beginning, we had a lot of their influence in the sense that both of those bands aren’t bands that have had huge radio hits. But they’re both bands that have had twenty-year careers and probably feel more relevant now than they did on their biggest records. Because their audiences are loyal, follow what you’re doing, and believe in your every word. And so giving them a chance to say thank you and talk to these fans every day, and for the fans to have a moment where they can take a selfie at the merch booth. Or in front of a designated backdrop that we have with lyrics on it from their favorite song, it’s just a continued way to build that partnership between bands and fans, to keep growing.
NES: Then I wanted to ask, regarding this next question, the return of touring, and when live music was slowly starting to be able to come back in 2021 after all these difficult times that we had just gone through as a world, maybe the biggest changes in your eyes and maybe new factors in touring that you think are for the better when it comes to the touring climate?
Josh: When the pandemic hit and everything shut down, it really rocked all of us. I think promoters, venues, managers, and bands had gotten kind of lazy. It made me think about what the best experience we could give could be. One of the things that Covid did help was making sure the venues were cleaner. Making sure there were protocols for people not to show up sick and get everyone else sick in the process in a really bad way. For fans, there’s a lot more emphasis on the food and beverage offered at the venues for these all-day things. Before this, it was like, “Yeah, we might have nachos and hot dogs.” Now, every venue we deal with has six to eight food trucks, with everything gluten-free and vegetarian options. And it’s not just popcorn, nachos, and peanuts and stuff. So, I think that aspect has been really different.
But I also think the bands, and us, as a festival, have created a really compelling lineup every year. To not just put on the same show, just wing it and have one band sell all the tickets and the rest none. The economy is in a weird place, we want to make sure everyone feels the value they got for the ticket price, is more then what they think they should spend. To do that, you create value in the festival. People look at you and go; they’re doing something that makes sense. And they’re doing what people want. I think prior to the pandemic, that mindset was a lot less. Because people were buying tickets to everything. And now, it’s harder to break through and market your festival. We even see it, too, where promoters got lazy and didn’t spend money on Facebook ads. And they wouldn’t flier at like-minded shows, they wouldn’t do ticket bundle deals, ticket options. And now, the marketers and a lot of these promoters are very savvy and creative. They’re the same type of people that five or ten years ago, were the 18-22-year-old kids that were coming to these shows and are now saying, “I think this is cool, let’s try this.” They’re working, instead of a lot of people who were just like, “This is how we do it. And we’re not going against our formula.”
So, it’s a really creative time to put on shows and put on events. And it’s always a really good way for bands to say, “I like that, I don’t like that. I think we should try this.” You know, we have a lot of conversations with managers of the bands on the festival, and sometimes even the bands themselves, where they’re like, “We want to do a pop-up in Philly. We want to do something here at the box office so people can meet us that day, and maybe there will be a ticket surge.”
So I think the more bands that think this is cool and that this is something we want to align with, the more fans are going to do the same thing. We’ve been very privileged in the fact that we’ve worked with a lot of really great human beings. And a lot of really great bands, a lot of bands that we’re all fans of and believe in. I hope we’re doing something to elevate their touring situation. I hope we’re doing something to make something still fresh and different for them. It feels like we are at times, and it’s just such a privilege to do what we want, to support bands we love and believe in.
NES: Then it’s been such a pleasure to talk to you, just a soft one to end. You’ve obviously been involved in music and management for so many years. With Sad Summer, you saw The Summer Set’s first shows back as a band after not playing together for several years. So many bands are getting back together. Maybe dream bands for you that you would love to see try to play shows or put out new music that haven’t come back?
Josh: I mean, we talk about that all the time. The Summer Set thing was just a beautiful way to have them do a reunion and come back. It really refreshed it, and it’s funny, a lot of the bands that are having twenty years tours were bands around when first started back in 2005, when Mike, Tim, and I were starting. And The Summer Set was a band that was doing 150 cap rooms in clubs. And we just loved them and couldn’t understand why they didn’t get a major label deal. Or things didn’t break through, and now, they survived, and not only did they survive, but they created art that these fans really believe in. And now, after our tour, they can go and play 700 and 1500 cap rooms, jump around, and stuff. And just acknowledging the bands that we love, there are obviously bigger bands like Pierce the Veil and A Day to Remember, and things like that would be a very different type of look for the festival. But there are also bands that we just love, and if we ever get the chance to have them do a show, whether it’s a reunion set or something like that, like A Rocket To the Moon.
Tim and I both managed A Rocket To The Moon at different times, and I hope one day they’ll be able to come out and do a couple of dates. Because I think there’s such an audience for that band. But then also, like Gym Class Heroes and Cobra Starship, many of the bands in that Fueled By era are still so important; we’d love to have them on there. The focus is kind of on the fresh, too. You want to have a mix of the nostalgia, the new, and the different. And so, I think that’s our biggest struggle. The first day of the festival every year is usually in California, so every agent and every manager comes up to that show, the New York show and that’s the question they ask every time. It’s like, “What are you looking at for next year? Who are the things that are going to be the reunions? Who are going to be the bigger bands?” And the funny part is, we will dream about that all day, but we won’t talk about it until two weeks after the festival ends. That was kind of a pact we made the first year in. There’s so much to do, and the last thing we want to do is start thinking of the next year before we finish the first year. So, I think a lot of those conversations will start happening in the last week of August this year. And I think we already have a couple of things that we think could be cool, and some of them will be able to do it, and some of them will have other options. But my hope is that we just find something fun for people. Where people go, that’s really cool. I want to see that, and that brings me either back to my youth or these are the bands that I love currently. If we keep doing that, we’re going to be okay.
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All Remaining Dates of Sad Summer Fest: