West by West Campus' Tessa Hunt

Two weeks since I last wrote. Last week I took a break from writing about the music business to actually immerse myself in it, working production for Nocturnal Fest. I worked with Tessa Hunt, a local promoter/booker I mentioned in my previous blog about Alice Bag.

Tessa's been involved with some fantastic events, but my favorite thing to tell people about her is that she co-founded a music festival when she was 19. I know, because I was there.

In 2010, she threw the biggest party I’d ever seen and called it West By West Campus. Now in its third year, WXWC brings in almost all local bands to the West Campus neighborhood to play all day and night for one day in late February. The acts perform on stages in a few co-op houses, 21st Street Co-op serving as the largest and a sort of home base. The entire thing is absolutely free and open to all.

“The first West by West Campus was planned in three weeks,” Hunt told me. “We didn’t even have a backline, so everyone had to load their own in. I still don’t know how we made it work.”

Work it did, with packed rooms cheering on all the local bands, even the smallest ones. The whole thing was put on by students, run totally DIY down to the sponsorships.

“We got $100 from the corner bodega to cover the occupancy permit. In return, we’d send people there. Just in that night, they made their entire rent for the month,” says Hunt.

Partnerships like this continued the next two years of WXWC, and although a couple companies have come in to distribute product and help out financially, no one makes the decisions except a core group of young people and co-opers. Of course, there's drawbacks to the DIY festival approach. A small festival can become easily overwhelmed, as WXWC did in its second year, 2011.

“We got too excited and started promoting really early,” explains Hunt. “Word of the festival spread too fast and too far, and people showed up who didn’t even care about the music. There were 2,000 people just trying to get into 21st Street Co-op. This year we just started talking about it a couple weeks in advance and letting the word spread more organically.”

Hunt's been booking the talent at 21st Street Co-op all three years, and works with the participating co-ops to keep all the WXWC bands small and/or local.

“I really want to book young bands, because they face so many challenges,” enthuses Hunt. “Young bands have a hard time getting booked, but you can’t get a show if you’ve never played, so it’s a Catch-22.”

I asked Hunt what she looks for in a band. She thought for a minute: “I want to book bands that aren’t just looking to get p*ssy. If you mean it, you can play it.”

Hunt's enthusiastic, ready for the challenges that DIY festivals bring, noting, “I have no problem being sober and talking to cops.” She’s worked on all scales of events, but she wants to keep WXWC small and homegrown.

“If I have to sell tickets to WXWC, I’ll kill it. When I was growing up here, there was nothing to do that didn’t involve eating or spending money. I wanted to do a free music festival for all of us. No fences, no tickets.”