Jeff Maimon helped fill 4,000 seats in Matthews Arena last year for a Springfest concert lineup that sold out in less than seven hours.
Still, as he gears up for his second tour at the helm of the large concert committee for the Council for University Programs (CUP), Maimon knows from experience that he won’t be able to please everyone. “I could resurrect Jimi Hendrix from the dead and we’d still have an inbox full of angry e-mails,” the senior music industry major said last week. “Regardless of how this year turns out, it’s either going to be that people think both acts were great, both were horrible, last year was better or this year was better.”
The early returns from an online survey CUP launched in November, which is still available, found students are interested in seeing two to three acts along the lines of hip-hop, alternative or pop music, he said. Not that the results will make his process any easier.
“To some people, if you call a certain act ‘alternative,’ it’s like blasphemy, they’re a ‘garage-hardcore-pseduo-punk,’ they’re not alternative,” he said.
Maimon, along with a committee of about two-dozen students who meet each week, have used the survey as a guideline to come up with a list of artists who would be a good fit for Northeastern. They are in the process of submitting bids to several agencies, a stage Maimon said he hopes to finish by February.
“If it’s someone I know I would want to see, that doesn’t mean that I’m all for it,” he said. “My job, CUP’s job, is to put on a concert for Northeastern University – not for CUP, not for me, for Northeastern University.”
They could go through 50 names in a matter of minutes, he said, and sort through it based on the cost for the performer, availability and the level of interest. The biggest hurdle for an act: “Can we sell 4,000 tickets,” he said. Last year, the combination of Nas, Lupe Fiasco, Gym Class Heroes and RJD2 brought it over that hurdle in record-breaking time.
Maimon said the show went “very smoothly, from cleaning up, to tearing down, everything went so well and just the day of the show I was terrified because nothing had gone wrong.”
Brian Vinikoor, a middler music industry major in charge of planning activities to fill the rest of the week surrounding the concert, said the group is working on finalizing a theme that “has a common bond that everyone can relate to.” “When you’re planning a theme, the theme may sound awesome, but then you may struggle to find events to go around it,” Vinikoor said. “Something where the events are going to be high quality events each day.”
Last year the theme was “Springfest 007,” which tied in activities like a Nintendo Golden Eye Tournament in the Student Center Ballroom, a campus-wide scavenger hunt called the “Spyhunt” and screenings of the James Bond movies “Goldfinger” and “Casino Royale” in afterHOURS.
“When you say Springfest, everyone thinks about that one concert,” he said. “This year, I really want to make it the whole week that is Springfest; make each event as memorable as possible.”
Springfest is scheduled to take place in April. To get involved with its planning, students can attend the weekly meetings Thursdays at 6 p.m. in 448 CSC.
