Taiwanese outdoor music festivals owe it all to two Americans.
In 1990 Jimi Moe and Wade Davis chose an unlikely venue to kick off a music festival. With a single generator humming amid the sugarcane fields and abandoned gun turrets of Dong Hai Mountain, musicians and fans alike reveled in soundproof bunkers dimly lit by black lights and fluorescent colors.
The first gun-turret festival, on the outskirts of Taichung in central Taiwan, provided an opportunity for Moe and Davis to perform with their band Dribdas. And for the next four years, the two would learn the basics of how to get a music festival off the ground.
"The gun turret parties were where, I believe, we honed our skills at organizing grassroots parties. Booking bands, making flyers, setting up the sound system. Never more than 100 people showed up. It was fun, unique for Taiwan, and it was outdoors," Davis says.
And outdoors they stayed until at the last of the five parties somebody stole a rented generator, leaving them out of pocket. "It was a huge financial blow. Suddenly we realized it was time to start thinking about tickets. That's when things dawned on us," Moe says.
Moe, 35, and Davis, 34, are now thought of as two of the most influential music organizers in Taiwan. Although they have yet to put together a monster event, their names are often mentioned with reverence by festival promoters around the island. Their mission to promote young musicians and their ongoing commitment to the music scene as a whole has inspired legions of fans, musicians and promoters alike.
But it took them several years to cement their reputation. Spring Scream, a festival the duo launched in 1995 in Kenting, is now the longest running outdoor music festival in the country.
Before their Spring Scream premier, Davis and Moe made a number of trips to Taipei to check out other bands and ended up befriending local and foreign musicians. The rest just fell into place.
"Once Dribdas started playing around the island, we realized that there were other bands creating original music so we decided to organize a weekend party in Kenting where we had spent lots of time and knew a local pub owner.
"We never considered that it might be the beginning of something. When we started calling these bands, other bands heard about it and jumped aboard, and then a newspaper reporter heard what we were doing and wrote an article. Suddenly it was a multi-day original music festival with about 20 bands," Davis says.
At that first festival, held across the street from the beach, only 200 to 300 people showed up, but it grew by leaps and bounds over the course of the next four years. Soon Moe and Davis realized they would have to establish a set of guidelines if the festival was going to benefit musicians and their fans.
While sponsorship is not directly discouraged by the two, they decided that sponsors would not be allowed to buy advertising space on any of the stages. Even at the first festival, MTV and Channel V filmed the bands and the subsequent footage provided a number of upstarts with valuable free publicity. Television regulations, however, stipulated that footage with promotional materials was not to be aired, and Davis and Moe were more interested in promoting musicians.
According to Davis, another key factor in keeping sponsors to a minimum is Spring Scream's dependence on ticket sales. He says free music concerts do not necessarily attract real music lovers. "We have to consider the size of our audience, we do have a maximum capacity and a sponsored, free concert might attract too many folks. We're open to sponsors in small doses if what they have to offer seems to help the event as a whole."
The two also decided that by the second festival cover songs would be off limits. "Most of the bands were playing covers the first year. We'd hear three, four versions of the same Bon Jovi or Green Day songs," Moe says.
"The whole idea behind the first Spring Scream was original music," says Davis, "so there were no 'cover bands' per se, but many of the bands that played only had two or three originals and would finish their set with some underground indie covers. By the following year most of the bands were able to play all original sets."
This April, the two pulled off their 11th Spring Scream, and while organizing a single annual festival is not a full-time job, it takes up a good part of their year. For most of the festivals they have had to screen the bands' demos, maintain the Web site, arrange transportation, coordinate concessions and the bands' schedules while dealing with hundreds of other day-to-day tasks.
For three to four months preceding the festival, the two put in 16- to 20-hour days. Moe says every year the two of them end up with bad lower backs because they spend so much time in front of the computer. "It's an unrecognized work-related injury."
Even selecting which bands will play is more daunting than it might at first sound. Keep in mind that the deadline for bands to submit their demos is only a month before the festival kicks off. Moe is frank about the sheer volume of music they are expected to listen to: "With 390 bands submitting three songs each, we have to listen to around 1,100 songs. Do you know how many minutes that is? How many days of listening? It's impossible. We can't do that. Great, fast forward, 10 seconds, interesting, fast forward again, next song, 10 seconds. It's what we have to do to survive."
With so many responsibilities, it seems only natural that Moe and Davis would divide the workload, but they prefer to keep working in concert, something they have done from the very beginning.
"Jimi and I are the CEOs, the chairmen, the secretaries, the lackeys, the gofers, the couriers. We do everything. We talk about trying to delegate the workload, but it's hard for us to let go. All decisions are mutual, but because there are just two of us, sometimes coming to a decision can take a while. When we do make the decision it always seems to be the best one," Davis says.
It is not surprising that the two have worked so well together over the years, after all they are life-long friends. They were junior high school buddies at Jakarta International School, and they both ended up in Seattle where they went to the same university. There they got into rock climbing, Davis says, and this is probably where they learned to work together and trust each other.
The last four years have seen Spring Scream's audience level off at 3,000, and seven years ago, they had to move the event from the beach to the cow pastures near the mountain.
Arthur Chen, 35, who is now in charge of recruiting foreign bands for the Hohaiyan Gongliao Rock Festival on Fu Long beach, is one of the few people who was on the ground when the first Spring Scream took place. At the time he was a producer for MTV, and he was impressed by the line-up of 10 bands.
Had it not been for the two organizers, Chen says, it would have taken much longer for outdoor music festivals to get off the ground in Taiwan. "We really appreciate the efforts of Jimi and Wade. They brought a whole new experience to Taiwan. We'd never had that before. It's an important event."
Chen, however, is quick to point out the differences between Spring Scream and the Hohaiyan festival. When the Hohaiyan festival opens this month, it will be in its third year. TCM records launched the first festival in 2003, which attracted roughly 10,000 people. Chen did not join the team until 2004, and it was then that he worked out a deal with the John Spencer Blues Explosion, much to the delight of the 230,000 people who attended the festival.
In contrast to Spring Scream, Hohaiyan is sponsor-driven, and this changes the dynamic of the audience. Sponsored outdoor weekend events like Hohaiyan tend to attract a lot of people who are simply looking for a day's diversion, so instead of getting an audience of hard-core music fans, organizers expect a number of people, families and couples for example, who show up out of curiosity.
Outdoor music festivals are mushrooming now, so much so that music fans are beginning to expect the unexpected. Taiwan held its first ever Blues fest in March. Organizers Rick Monday, a morning show host for ICRT radio station, and D. C. Rapier, the founder and president of The Blues Society on Taiwan, are familiar with the rewards and frustrations of planning such an event.
For Monday, 46, who has been working festivals in some capacity since he was 17, much of the reward comes from simply pulling it off, but he is also fond of the opportunity to make new friends with the musicians, business owners and politicians like Taichung Mayor Jason Hu who are a key part of making it all work.
Monday also says that Taiwan's music scene would be all the poorer had it not been for the efforts of Davis and Moe. "None of us could do what we're doing if it weren't for Jimi and Wade. They've proven it can be done."
The Taichung Blues Festival, like Hohaiyan, is also sponsor-driven, which suits Monday just fine as a large part of his job is to get sponsors to back the event. Monday says the organizers accomplished a number of goals. The festival provided good publicity for both ICRT and The Blues Society on Taiwan, and with Mayor Hu's help, highlighted Taichung as the cultural capital of Taiwan.
Despite all the work that Rapier and Monday put into the festival, their first effort was sabotaged by forces beyond a promoter's control: the weather. The outdoor event, featuring the Joanna Connor Band as the headliner, managed to entice 800 to 1,000 people despite bone-chilling winds that kept many music fans at home.
Yet despite the setback, the two are upbeat about the future and have already decided to schedule a second one for October. The Blues Society on Taiwan is recognized worldwide, prompting a number of musicians to ask if they can perform in Taiwan.
As music festivals continue to flourish, Davis and Moe are always looking for new ways to improve their own. The two are constantly surveying technology magazines to keep up with the latest developments and trying out innovative techniques.
Moe says three years ago they tried to put out a paperless schedule by using SMS messages which concert attendees could sign up for and then check every hour to find out who was playing on what stage. "Ideologically, a great success, realistically, a lot of effort. Fifty people did it. Failure. But it was innovative and we hadn't heard of anybody doing that before for a concert until the year after us so I feel that we were at the forefront. We did it a year before Lollapalooza did, so we pulled it off. We're proud of that."
The pair has had its ups and downs. One of the most frustrating parts of holding the festival is dealing with the media, which has mischaracterized the event by lumping it together with a number of other events, such as raves, that are held on the same weekend in April that Spring Scream kicks off. At the first couple of festivals, reporters had to pay admission and the event later got a lot of bad press. Moe acknowledges that the hardest lesson the two of them have had to learn is the importance of public relations.
In any case, the pros have long outweighed the cons. "The most rewarding part of organizing Spring Scream is watching the Taiwan music scene grow and flourish and knowing that we are an important and positive element of that growth," Davis says.