Sean Carlson is a busy man, but he doesn’t seem to mind. And if your life revolved around putting on concerts, hanging out with your best friends and eating (our nearly forty minute phone conversation revolved around the
FYF founder’s search for dinner, namely “veggie soul food”), it would be hard find much cause for complaint, even if it meant also being without some of the luxuries that others consider necessary. With three events under the FYF banner happening in just this week alone (including the return of the beloved FYF Scavenger Hunt and hometown heroes Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s return), I was surprised he was able to make time to talk at all. Being busy by choice is not something that’s common amongst young people. But at this level, I understand Sean Carlson before I even meet him.
My first contact with Carlson was after I had reviewed the September incarnation of the seven-year old annual summer event. It was only my second time there, but FYF was clearly more in my consciousness than the sum of those 20 or so hours I had logged on the dusty fields. FYF was becoming (or maybe it has already been) a presence not just in L.A., but across the nation. CoS writer Winston Robbins intended on driving down from Salt Lake City to cover it with me (a car accident the day before prevented that). Carlson notes that it’s been a slow progression. “I started this when I was 18,” he says. “And it took place at a bunch of little venues in Echo Park. For free. And we’re slowly moving to this national level where people fly in for it and it’s a lot bigger than it was.”
Whatever you have heard about the event is probably some shade of the truth. Carlson is the first to admit that some mistakes hurt it, pointing out that though there will always be web-crawlers wanting to talk shit. “There were problems at this year’s festival and it’s stuff that can easily be fixed,” he says.
He has talked enough in the past few months about the festival’s issues and, when it comes up, he starts nearly every sentence with the preamble “I don’t want to get into specifics.” He might feel as if he has given plenty of opportunity for people to voice their concerns. His response to a minor web and media backlash? He took responsibility and promised to fix it. He even offered to call people personally. For someone working at a Web site where his bosses have never even heard his voice, it was this personal spin that made me send Carlson a link of my review.
It is common for writers to email P.R. people for the bands they cover, or post links on Facebook pages, but I had never really contacted an artist or festival directly. But I was sure he probably only got biased negatives after giving his email address out, and though honest, I thought my review was fair. True to his word, he replied. Thus, I began a multi-month quest to interview Sean Carlson, one that was interrupted by the Matador at 21 event, shows with Deerhunter and Wild Flag, and life itself. Even when we seemed set on doing it ahead of the LA Scavenger Hunt, there were still a number of misfires, both of us having our own difficulties keeping to set schedules amongst life’s constantly changing variables.
What fascinated me most about the people who vocalized their complaints was what people weren’t ignoring: the music, the affordability, the interactive nature, and the fact that it had become so much more than a one day event. “When you have 20,000 people, it’s a beast to control,” Carlson says. “I’m not going to make excuses. It’s obvious there were some things that went wrong, but at the end of the day, every band played and we can fix it to make it comfortable next year, if they are willing to go next year. I work on this all-year round. Our goal is to make this a comfortable festival.”
When I ask him if the fans should realize that with the band quality and the price, there should be some realistic expectations on the accommodations, he doesn’t bite, instead insisting that the crowd needs to be comfortable, especially in light of the progression and continued growth it continues to experience.
For Carlson, who claims to get to shows about three or four times a week (for both recreation and business), FYF Fest is his life. And one of the institution’s most beloved events doesn’t even involve music directly: this weekend’s LA Scavenger Hunt.
Carlson doesn’t like the word promoter. “I put on shows,” he corrects, after noting that he doesn’t like to think of what FYF does as concert promotion, which I’m sure I referred to at least a dozen times. And early in our conversation, when describing his day of watching football and passing out FYF and LA Record produced Scavenger Hunt zines, he notes that the booklets aren’t promotional tools, but seen as something to “get people psyched up.” He explains: “Because it is not a music event, you have to really explain it to someone to get them psyched up.” Indeed, though most of us understand the idea of a scavenger hunt, actually participating in one is outside the average person’s day to day experience. In short, it’s like a raffle, where they sell tickets, people can win prizes, and the money goes to charity. But the winner isn’t chosen at random. Rather, the ticket entitles you to compete in a four hour hunt within Los Angeles for 100 items. Each item is assigned point values and restricted accordingly. Most points wins. But why?
Well, besides the charity element, Carlson explains it so: “It doesn’t matter what kind of music you listen to, where you go to school, or what you do: it’s a scavenger hunt. It’s a good cause and it’s a good time.” And though words like “goal” and “success” are also off-putting to him, he continues on the hunt noting that “the purpose of the event is to bring different types of people together, whether you’re a punk kid or just an average Joe who works at his job and doesn’t care about music. It’s to have a good time with your friends.”
It’s strange to have a group that puts on shows throwing something where you are not asked to be an audience, but a participant. Everything about it actually makes sense, though, in the end. Consider the place. This is Los Angeles. If any American city can host events that try to include everyone, shouldn’t it be Los Angeles? It’s the city where Latin, African, Asian, and European descendants all occupy various aspects of their ancestors’ cultures, as well as the cultures they have created since . Or, consider the local music scene: from the Hollywood pedigree of Dead Man’s Bones, to the primal stoner rock of Warpaint, to classic rock rooted Avi Buffalo, to the thoughtful noise of No Age. This is not the music of a scene, it’s the music of the world, of everything coming together. FYF, though they are not yet able to attract as diverse a crowd as they are probably shooting for, are making an honest attempt to try to give Los Angeles the activities that people will remember and that deserve people’s valuable time and money.
“I would never book a strictly indie-rock festival and I would never book all bands, obviously, that are popular. You need to make it diverse. So someone can watch The Mountain Goats, and they’ve never heard of Cold Cave, so they watch some of them and Delorean and then go watch Sleep play. You need to have that diversity, like an all-day mixtape.” You even get diversity in FYF leadership, from the lightning-thinking, youthful exuberance of Carlson and his unexpected partner, the set-in-his-ways punk purist Keith Morris, of Circle Jerks, Black Flag and currently OFF! And with OFF! garnering attention from the music writers, Carlson takes on most of the day-to-day operations. He still talks to Morris every day. Having Morris on board helped FYF get to the place it is, not just in his connections, but also in his commitment.
It is Carlson’s commitment, though, to creating more than a festival that brought a high-school dance atmosphere to the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts with Dead Man’s Bones, a children’s show (complete with ice cream) to the same venue for Roky Erickson and Okkervil River, and FYF Fan Fest at the Glass House with Fucked Up. Coming in February: Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
But probably highest on the list is creating a better FYF Fest itself. And though an easy solution would be to get some money from big sponsors and charge more, that would rob the festival of the D.I.Y. ethos that runs through the organization’s veins. He is careful about who he chooses to sponsor the event (Incase and Altamont are two of the most visible), sticking with things he actually uses or can stand behind. In the “real world,” this idealism is scoffed at, but Carlson wisely points out that “it’s easy to sell out, but you lose your integrity when you do and you lose control of the event. I could sell the event to a company but it wouldn’t be the same thing…It wouldn’t be as much fun. It would be controlled and it would be different. That’s something that I don’t want to do.”
And indeed, FYF hasn’t grown in popularity because people need outdoor summer activities in the summer. We live on the ocean, in the shadows of the mountains, next to Disneyland, in the second largest city in America. There is plenty to do on Labor Day Weekend. FYF is one of the activities of choice because of what it stands for, not in spite of it. Changing the festival into a sterile, mass-produced gargantuan like so many others would take away the charm, which includes the revolutionary concept of listening to fans’ complaints and requests when it comes to running order: “When Ariel Pink was playing at the same time as Panda Bear, people were very upset, and I was like ‘wow, a lot of people want to see both bands, that’s a bummer’, and I switched the schedule around,…it made other fans upset and I took dozens of phone calls explaining it to people, and in the end, it worked out.”
This minor victory for fans of experimental rock was one thing, but the victory that was Matador at 21 was in anther league. Now that I am writing a couple of months later, the experience is still vivid in my memory, and though Carlson insists that it was not the kind of thing he expects to be putting on often, he admits that it was “magical.” But he wouldn’t pat himself on the back for that one either, saying “it’s just fun. I don’t think about (success) that way, I mean, you can’t think about success like that. It’s day in and day out, you go to work and you do what you love. You work hard and you sweat. If you don’t sweat there are going to be problems and you’ll face repercussions.”
“You have to have goals, you have to have good people working with you, and you have to have trust,” he digresses. “And, that is something that is very hard to find in this world. But if you work hard enough, you can find it…Look around. I have an amazing group of friends. The guy sitting next to me right now, he works with me almost every single day and has been my best friend since I was fifteen. Having these people in my life makes FYF and all the events possible. And there are times when I’m putting on a show and I’m not in town, and I have the best group of people helping me run the event. That really, really means a lot to me.”
His voice shakes the slightest bit, the kind of shake that only happens when you tell the truth, and when being honest means something to you. With the charity event coming up on the weekend, the resistance to selling out your beliefs, the effort to find a way to be around the people you care about…it almost sounds too good to be true.
“You want a show to be magical,” he continues. “Why do a show that’s not special, that you’re not going to remember? I mean, how many shows have you been to and forgotten about like three days later? It was like another stop on tour for the band, just another day. Eeveryone is going through the motions…You go to a show and then you forget about it. Where it’s just…entertainment. These are the kind of shows that I don’t want…I want to do something else with my life. I want to make these shows special.”
Substitute anything that occupies your time and I’m sure you can relate. Or, actually, I guess maybe a lot of people can’t relate to that.
“When I was a kid and went to shows,” he continues. “I still remember them. I still have flyers from shows and there are certain ones that were like ‘holy shit’, five amazing bands and all of them were on fire, and it was awesome. Those kinds of shows, that’s what really meant a lot…I don’t look at myself as a promoter. I don’t ever want to look at myself as that. I put on shows for bands that I truly love and I won’t put bands on shows that I don’t love or that I don’t really believe in.”
He holds himself up to high standards, without a doubt. But it is for a reason, as he says he wants all of his activities to have meaning. The scavenger hunt will raise material goods for the Union Rescue Mission and LA Food Bank, as well as stimulating the local neighborhood economy. And though there is no music, it should be enough to enjoy a weekend with your friends, outside, working together to try to win a trip to Spain and the Primavera Sound Festival. And though Carlson doesn’t like to think in terms of success, it will be hard to deny that something has been accomplished when the next installment of FYF Fest exceeds expectations and concludes with people just talking about the music, the friends, the food, and the memories. Not if it happens, but when.
Thumbnail courtesy of LAist.
