How to become a respected concert promoter, in six months flat.
UNLV professor James Woodbridge could add that to his course offerings next semester were it not for one tiny snag: Woodbridge teaches philosophy. That hasn’t stopped him from ascending to a position of prominence within Las Vegas’ music scene, a surprising development considering he never set out to do so.
“I was just trying to help one band out last fall, and suddenly this whole thing fell into my lap,” Woodbridge, an assistant professor on track for tenure, explains. “When I put my first show together I was like, ‘That was pretty cool. I just made a show happen, around 50 people came out on a weekday, and it was really fun.’”
That first show—upstate New York pop-rock outfit Mathematicians last October at Beauty Bar—was born from Woodbridge’s interest in the group (he’d seen them perform to a sparse crowd at Art Bar in March 2007) and out of pure necessity. “I was looking around online, and Mathematicians’ MySpace page had its tour dates listed with ‘Help’ next to Las Vegas,” he recalls. “So I got in touch with them. I rounded up contact information for all the local venues and e-mailed it to them, but a couple of weeks later they said no one had gotten back to them. So I started going to the venues in person, and Bree [Blumstein] at Beauty Bar said, ‘Okay, I’ll let you put the show together here.’ And suddenly, I was doing it.”
Having successfully staged a full-fledged concert—“It takes a lot of time and attention to detail, but it’s really not that hard,” he assesses—Woodbridge began scouring MySpace tour schedules for opportunities to shoehorn in Vegas stopovers. “I started looking for that two-day gap—between Salt Lake [City] and LA, between Phoenix and LA, between San Diego and Phoenix—to poach a Vegas show date.”
Before long, Woodbridge had a pair of indie darlings—Michigan pop group Saturday Looks Good to Me and Swedish singer/songwriter Jens Lekman—booked for the same November weekend (the former at Beauty Bar, the latter at the Bunkhouse), and he’s been steadily working his accidental second job during his free time ever since.
Over the past few months, he’s brought A Place to Bury Strangers, The Chinese Stars, Spindrift, Xu Xu Fang, Travis Morrison, YACHT and The Giraffes, among others, to town. And that’s just the beginning. In April alone, Woodbridge has avant-rockers Xiu Xiu at Beauty Bar (April 9), power-popsters Georgie James at Beauty Bar (April 17) and experimental folk trio Akron/Family at the Bunkhouse (April 20).
Just because Woodbridge has succeeded in attracting top underground acts doesn’t mean he’s benefitted financially, however—which is fine with him since profit was never his goal. “It was more like, ‘I’d bet it wouldn’t cost me too much money to do this,’” Woodbridge says. “I typically go into my own pocket between $50 and $100 per show, and I’m okay with that. I’m trying to get the money to the musicians. It’s not stopping at me. I’m just a conduit.”
Woodbridge’s generosity extends to the local scene, since he routinely pairs his headliners with favorite Vegas acts such as The Skooners, The Pandas, Pan de Sal, Love Pentagon, A Crowd of Small Adventures, Las Vegas Club*, Action Cat and Mother McKenzie.
“My selfish motive for all this was, I want to see good shows, and I don’t want to see them by myself,” offers Woodbridge, who has taken the next step in his Bill Graham-in-training studies by giving his project an official-sounding name, MetaMetaProductions.
On nights when he’s not working the door at one of his own shows, the Downtown resident can often be found fliering cars and bulletining boards at nearby events.
“I still don’t think of myself as a concert promoter,” he says. “I’m basically just a guy who has some connections and wants to bring some good bands to town.”
Photo by Jacob Kepler