During the fall of 2012, Kelly Benini left for Los Angeles to intern with Goldenvoice, the agency behind behemoth West Coast music festival Coachella. Though Benini, University Union’s concert director, didn’t get the chance to make the trek to Indio, Calif., she still felt inspired.

“I thought it was cool to see what they were doing,” she said. “I was inspired to create something.”

That something — hosting the first-ever student-run music festival on Syracuse University soil — has been in the works for more than half a year, said UU President Billy Ceskavich. Once UU crunched the numbers, he said the organization was confident the show would do well.

The idea of expanding Juice Jam from a single-stage show to a daylong festival format was broached at UU’s weekly board meeting, hot on the heels of last year’s sold-out Juice Jam concert featuring rapper Childish Gambino and electronic dance music DJ Calvin Harris.

Though the idea finally came to fruition in a matter of months, last year’s UU President Lindsey Colegrove said the concept of a multi-stage festival was years in the making.

“I got the chance to budget for the event,” she said. “But I’m extremely excited to see the current board exceeding expectations with Juice Jam this year.”

Ceskavich said that UU weighed price options with the logistics of a second stage. The goal was to make 2013’s iteration of Juice Jam a combination of a bigger festival, a la Coachella, without straying too far from the concert’s roots. As student interest in concert programming changed, Ceskavich said, so did Juice Jam.

“With any event, we have a reasonable responsibility to do it right,” Ceskavich said.

The logistics of having a second stage on Skytop Field wasn’t altogether impossible, but Benini said, getting all of the acts confirmed was the toughest part of booking this year’s Juice Jam festival. All of the artists on the Juice Jam lineup had to approve all of the other acts on the bill, she said.

Benini said during the booking process, members of the UU concert board would “blow up her phone” with email chains ballooning to more than 100 messages. When looking at artist availability, Benini wanted to book artists that met a constant demand for different genres in UU programming.

This year’s acts came from both the survey issued through the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and from suggestions on UU’s social media outlets, Benini said.

“We had a lot of pressure to pick acts that weren’t too small, but still fit what we wanted to accomplish,” she said. “A lot of time and planning went into it.”

From the early stages of selecting performers, Benini knew she wanted to accentuate a few different genres on the festival bill. One of the most common concert programming headaches — artist availability — played a pivotal role in the artists UU could bring to campus.

“We looked into some major bands, but availability didn’t work out,” Benini said. “But the responses to The Neighbourhood coming for Juice Jam on social media have been great.”

Most of the artists’ booking agents were on board with the student-run festival concept early on, and several were agents UU has worked with previously.

Kendrick Lamar, the Compton, Calif., rapper who netted the second most requested spot on UU’s annual Juice Jam survey, shares a booking agent with Earl Sweatshirt, the Odd Future rapper who headlined MayFest 2013. The same agent UU went through to book DJ Pauly D for Winter Carnival also works with DJ Robert DeLong. Pop starlet Ke$ha shares a booking agency with Juice Jam’s indie stage hip-hop artist Ab-Soul.

“It’s really a testament to building relationships. It’s Networking 101,” Benini said. “The agents we’ve worked with before know that we won’t just throw the artists to the wolves.”

Juice Jam is the second UU concert to get a dual-stage makeover — last year’s MayFest concert in Walnut Park was the first to get an overhaul, with both the Red Bull stage and a main stage, she said.

Ceskavich said that UU decided Juice Jam was the best option to revamp next because of its location and size. He also said that while UU works to keep programming fresh, he’s not sure the festival format would be conducive to a concert like Block Party.

“Juice Jam was the most feasible because of the openness of the venue,” he said.

The shift to a higher capacity made this year’s Juice Jam the highest selling one in its history, shattering last year’s record by a 1,000-ticket margin. The festival sold out its 9,500 tickets last Thursday.

UU bolstered precautionary measures with the added capacity, and Ceskavich said concert security is always a priority for the organization.

Ceskavich also said the fact that Juice Jam sold out and sold out quickly reaffirmed UU’s confidence in the new format. The goal of the two-stage setup is to have constant music throughout the day without overlapping set times.

“It’s just a really fantastic feeling,” he said.

Ken Consor, a former UU concert director, acknowledged that the concert format is something UU talked about during his tenure as concert director, but was never really put into action. He also said the festival format adds to a recent history of campus concerts setting trends.

“Syracuse concerts have been really progressive compared to most colleges,” said Consor, a 2013 alumnus in the Bandier Program for Music and the Entertainment Industries. “It’s a great idea; it always had the vibes of a festival. And you can definitely make a case that this is the best Juice Jam lineup since it started.”

Also progressive, Consor noted, is a conspicuous lack of criticism in the complaints department.

“Every show we did when I was here, people complained,” he said. “I haven’t seen any complaints at all for this show.”

Though this year’s Juice Jam isn’t jumping head first into the music festival pool, Benini said she thinks it is a critical first step for UU toward making the Juice Jam Music Festival bigger in the future.

“We’re taking baby steps to starting a festival on campus,” she said.

The Juice Jam Music Festival will take place on Sunday at Skytop Field on South Campus. Entrance to the festival will open at noon, and music is slated to start at 12:30 p.m.

Published on September 5, 2013 at 12:32 am

Contact Erik: ervanrhe@syr.edu | @therealvandyman