The 5th edition of the two-day The Town and The City Festival is going to be taking over Lowell in a variety of locations this weekend. These range from an old school dive that has roots in the Beat Generation literary movement that took place during the ‘50s and early ‘60s, a Greek function hall that’s been reformed into a music venue and even a church, among others.
The event is a prime showcase of bands and musicians from the local scene, which include Linnea’s Garden, Minibeast, Coral Moons, Tysk Tysk Task, Colleen Green and Orbit for this year’s installment. There’s also some established acts who are going to be performing, such as Robyn Hitchcock, Fantastic Cat, Amythyst Kiah and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. For all the information on all the performers, set times and participating venues, log onto the festival’s website at thetownandthecityfestival.com.
The person behind the extravaganza is the longtime live music promoter & talent buyer Chris Porter, who happens to be a Lowell native. We had a talk ahead of the festivities about what gave him the idea to put it on, the logistics that go with booking multiple venues and what he’s looking forward to this weekend.
Rob Duguay: The Town and The City Festival is unique in that it doesn’t take place at a singular location while happening at various venues around Lowell. Being a Lowell native, what gave you the idea to start this up in your hometown?
Chris Porter: Well, a lot of things. It’s based on what I call the “venue hopping model” and arguably the most famous version of that is South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, but I actually took more inspiration from some festivals that are happening in smaller cities. For instance, I went to Reykjavik, Iceland for this long-running one there called Iceland Airwaves and another one I’ve attended multiple times is the Treefort Music Fest in Boise, Idaho. Then there’s another one in Knoxville, Tennessee called the Big Ears Festival and these are all eclectic festivals that happen in a range of indoor venues. Some have outdoor elements, but they’re mainly indoors.
It’s the kind of thing where you have a pass or a bracelet that’s going to get you into different venues that are within walking distance for the most part. In my mind and I think in a lot of other people’s minds over the past few years, Lowell has had a growing creative and arts community. The city is huge for visual art and certainly with music it’s been growing as a lot of creatives get priced out of living in the big cities, so I’ve been bullish when it comes to what’s going on in small cities around North America. While I was seeing what was happening in all of these other places, I figured why not Lowell?
In fact, to me, Lowell is more attractive because it’s near a bigger city center in Boston but when you look at a map of New England it’s sort of right smack in the middle. It’s a very accessible place to get to from various directions and there are a lot of venues, some are regular venues throughout the year and there are others that we make into venues. Downtown Lowell is very walkable and I just found it to be a very hospitable place to put on an event like this. I’ve been working in festivals since the late ‘90s, so I took some of the things I learned while working at some festivals in Seattle and some other spots and I applied them to my own hometown where I grew up, which makes it extra special. Going back to 2015, I had some conversations with a couple of city leaders and they were looking for help to do more economic development in Lowell, particularly to bring more events into the city while engaging the arts.
I came up with this idea based on the festivals I mentioned earlier and it’s been a big experiment. 2018 was our first year and it was quite a heavy lift to get going but I proved that it can be done in an interesting and fun way. After the first year, we tried it again to see any growth and if it would be worth moving forward and we did as far as attention and attendance. We’ve kept going with it, it originally started as a fall festival but for a variety of reasons we moved it to the spring and we’ve found that it’s worked out a lot better. We started doing that in 2022, which was the most successful year we had out of the first three and we saw even more growth last year so here we are amazingly in year five. I honestly didn’t know if we were going to get past one year, but it’s great that this has become an annual thing and a lot of people look forward to it.
RD: I’ve attended it the past few years and both times I went I had a blast. You just alluded to it, but you’ve been involved in talent buying, booking management, event planning and consulting services for live music in Seattle, so how did you end up across the country in that city?
CP: Both the music business and the entertainment business have a wide network and you get to meet people from all over the country and all over the world. As I mentioned, I grew up in Lowell but I ended up living in the Boston area. In the 1990s, I booked at a number of venues there, specifically Bunratty’s, The Middle East which is still around and another place called Mama Kin Music Hall that Aerosmith part owned. I got into being a talent buyer and a show promoter during those years and then I got a job offer from a business acquaintance of mine to work a festival called Bumbershoot, which has been a very long-running festival in Seattle that takes place right beneath where the Space Needle is. It was a really good opportunity, I was looking for something different from what I was doing, I started to think about moving on from Boston to another city and this ended up on my lap there.
I figured I’d try it and I had never worked on a festival before so there was kind of a leap of faith from my previous bosses and even myself being able to do it. That was back in 1997, so I went out and fell in love with Seattle right away. I fell in love with the festival world and I found it to be much more creative. Bumbershoot is a very eclectic festival, out of all the ones I worked on they were never particularly one genre so that made it a lot more interesting along with expanding my knowledge and my experience for working with numerous music genres and even arts disciplines. I fell in love with that, the creativity of it and I like working in venues, but it’s about filling a calendar, how the bar did and all that so it’s a different dynamic.
In my opinion, it’s not as creative as putting a festival together. I approach putting a festival together as an art, you can be really involved in a lot of aspects and a lot of other things that you can’t do when you’re focusing on an indoor venue. I just took to it, I booked Bumbershoot for 18 years until 2014 and then I left the company I was working for that was producing it. I then went out on my own and started working on stuff all over the country only to come full circle and start working at Bumbershoot again with a different production company, so I’m literally involved in business ventures in Seattle, San Francisco and Lowell now.
RD: That’s very cool. From attending it, what I’ve really enjoyed about The Town and The City Festival is that it brings bands and musicians from the Lowell and Boston areas together with established national and international acts. How do you go for that balance? Do you do a lot of research on local bands before you start reaching out to them?
CP: Well, I could write an entire dissertation but I’ll try to put it in a little nutshell. It’s a lot of things, but for the last couple of years I’ve had a few guys help me out with the local bands. I’m only able to spend a limited amount of time in the Lowell and Boston area during the year, which is about a quarter of the year, so from being there and doing my own research I’m able to see who’s up and coming and all that. I try to do my own research just to see who’s playing in the other venues, which bands are in the Rock & Roll Rumble and there are tons of sources. I mostly lean on folks who are in the area throughout the year to advise me in that aspect and we have a whole team, I don’t do this all myself so there’s a lot of people who make suggestions.
Bands also find us saying that they’d love to play while pitching themselves similar to how a booking agent would pitch a band to get some gigs. Now that the festival has been around for a few years, we get hundreds of submissions from bands who want to play. Between all of that, our own research, seeing who we’d like to have and who’s applying to play, we just kind of weigh in on who will fit. These are all very small venues, the biggest venue we use is a 350 cap room and everything else is quite a bit smaller. We have a limited budget, so from a production standpoint the bands have to make sense as well.
I want to bring up some bands from Boston who have either been around for a while or are up and coming and I definitely want to give the bands based in Lowell some love as well. As far as the national acts, from all of the other festivals that I’ve worked on there are agents, bands, managers and performers who I’ve gotten to know over the years so I figure out from a budget standpoint and also aesthetically who makes sense. Both Robyn Hitchcock and Rhett Miller are prime examples, I’ve booked them either as solo performers or with their bands and I know they have an audience in the New England area. It’s not a rule, but with the name being “The Town and The City Festival” and coming from Jack Kerouac’s first book, I don’t mean to have it be a Kerouac themed event but we do say that we do this in his spirit as far as discovery, exploration of things, love of life and all the things that Jack wrote about. If I know that a band or a performer has a particular affinity for Kerouac, I’ve sometimes brought them in to have as a nice little extra highlight.
It’s not a rule, but we’ll try to do some sort of “Kerouacian” programming. We always have some poets or some storytelling and literary elements every year and that’s because of that.
RD: I think it’s all great. Each venue operates differently with various overheads and different ways of conducting business, so when it comes to the logistics and working with these venues around Lowell, how do you handle that aspect of putting on this festival?
CP: You have to manage it very carefully while being very detail-oriented. You’re definitely right about every venue being a little bit different. They each have a different capacity, a different management style and they all have different goals. We work with venues that we want to work with and they want to work with us. I have worked with some venues in the past, and they’re very few, but it just wasn’t a good fit.
Fortunately, most of the venues have been great fits and they’ve been very enthusiastic about being part of the festival, which I’m very grateful for. That was the thing that pleasantly surprised me, how enthusiastic the venues were to be a part of it, so that helps. We’re always in touch with all of the venues we work with to sort out logistics and what the needs are so it’s a lot of communication. I have a database to keep all the notes ready while preparing very carefully for each show according to the venue and what we need to do for them.
RD: For this edition of the festival, what stands out this time around? Have you built upon any aspects of this year’s The Town and The City Festival that wasn’t present in previous editions? If someone is attending for the first time, what would you want them to see the most?
CP: First off, I am excited that we’re going to be including comedy for the first time. We have a well-known local comic named Mike McDonald who is going to be the headliner of it along with some other top comedians. That’s something that D-Tension, who is a musician from Lowell, curated and is going to be the host of. We’re going to be having that on April 27 at a venue we haven’t used before called Cobblestones, which is a great restaurant but they have another room available for events. They’ve been wanting to be part of the festival for a number of years and for a variety of reasons it either hasn’t made sense or we haven’t had something that would have worked for them.
I don’t want to just use a venue for the sake of using a venue. I got to have the right programming for it and it’s got to have something that’s going to draw some people in. My nightmare isn’t necessarily the finances of the festival, which is obviously something I’m concerned about. We need a certain amount of support with all the sponsoring and everything else to make this run, by my nightmare is anyone playing to only five people or even less than that. I want every single room to at least feel ok, if not packed.
I’d love to have them all packed, but I want to have them all be good at least, so I want to make sure that we have something worthwhile to present and we’ll try our best anyway. Getting back to the comedy, it’s something that we had been thinking about for a couple years and we finally had a situation where it made sense to bring in. It’s something that’s new to the festival and I want people who enjoy comedy or have any interest to go check it out. I’m also really psyched to bring back a venue that we loved to utilize during the first two years of the festival. Because of some major renovations that the building was doing, we weren’t able to work with them in recent years, and the place is a church called Christ Church United.
It’s a Unitarian church near the Lowell Auditorium. We’ve had some wonderful performances there in the past with Kristin Hersh and Darlingside, who are returning there, among others, so this year that’s where Robyn Hitchcock is going to be performing as well as Amythyst Kiah. It’s a really cool room and they’ve built up a proper stage there now so I’m psyched to have that venue back in our lineup.
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