![]() Moreover, the fans weren’t huddling in their tents. to 5 a.m, through the worst rain I’ve ever seen as a festival promoter,” Keber says. “The storm kept a lot of people from coming on Thursday this year - but then Friday they just didn’t stop coming, from 7 a.m. Then a thunderstorm on day one of the festival (July 16) forced a set cancellation, and 12 straight hours of torrential rain on Friday turned the clay of Indian Lookout Country Club in Mariaville, N.Y., into a 200-acre tar pit.Īnd yet still, somehow, the numbers were looking up. But as ticket sales remained slow in a down economy, Fordin and Keber thought attendance at this year’s festival might barely reach last year’s levels. So far it had been working, with revenue, profits and attendance growing by 20% or more every year. Meatcamp Productions’ Jonathan Fordin and Brett Keber started with a $225,000 budget when they took over Camp Bisco in 2005, steadily increasing it every year to attract more people and bigger talent. Even so, Camp Bisco was “a huge undertaking, a full-time job in itself,” Brownstein says, and the band put the festival on hold for the following two years. The band hired its own production and security teams for the first Camp Bisco in 1999, which drew about 800 people for “unknown and extremely affordable bands,” Brownstein says.Īlthough the Biscuits’ albums had only sold 21,000 copies by that point, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the group’s destination events became the foundation of its business. In 1998, the Disco Biscuits held a small festival in western Pennsylvania called Melstock, and from that the idea for a multiday camp-out was born. They were coming for the interaction and the improvisation.” And we knew that model was going to be good for us because we played in that same style, we didn’t have pop songs, we weren’t the best singers back then, but that’s not what people were coming for. “We were fans of the Grateful Dead and Phish, and they had control of everything-nothing mattered to them except them and their fans no one was calling the shots except for Trey. “When you can’t seem to crack through but you know that you have something special in terms of a community, the only thing you can really do is do things on your own. “That was the first time we saw that there was a differential between the way we were being treated by the industry and the reality of what our band was,” he says. We knew within a year or two that we weren’t the noontime band anymore, that our fan base had outgrown that, but the promoters still didn’t necessarily believe it.”īrownstein says the last straw came at the 1997 All Good Festival in Brandywine, Md., when the Biscuits played at noon to a field of 1,500 people, which promptly emptied when the next band arrived. “When the Biscuits started as a young Philadelphia band in the ’90s, we were in the festival circuit, and like any young band we started playing at noon. ![]() Camp Bisco began in 1999 “out of necessity,” Brownstein says. ![]()
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