Terry Taylor talks about his hopes and fears regarding American Waste
This weekend, metalheads will converge on the Beaumont Club for American Waste, a two-day festival of speed guitars, drum bursts, Cookie Monster vocals, moshing and infinite black T-shirts. Terry Taylor, vice president of Hunt Industries and member of two bands scheduled to perform (Hammerlord and the Blinding Light), has high hopes for the event. He took a little time out of his insane pre-Fest schedule of paper shuffling, countless phone calls and gear accumulating to answer a few questions from us via e-mail.
The Pitch: This festival is something you’ve been imagining for years, right? What made this summer the right time to go for it?
Terry Taylor: My friend Pat Fielder and I have talked about for almost 4 years that we wanted to do a cool hardcore and metal fest thing, but it always seemed like a pipe dream. We tried last year and the year before to put something together but nothing ever worked out. We decided this was the year to do it and that is how it is going to be. We asked a bunch of the local acts that we liked if they were into it. Most of them were, then we tracked down some headliners. Coalesce is a staple in the metal/hardcore scene in Midwest, so they were the first headliner we asked. After that we blew through some potential headliners for the first day but routing wise just didn’t work out. The Testament/Unearth package just fell into our laps and it just sort of worked out that way!
As a promoter, you book single shows all the time. Putting a whole festival together is more complicated. You’ve done it before, though, right?
Yeah back home in Sioux Falls, I did at least one type of fest a year. There is so much more involved when doing this many bands — gear, space, set length, time slots, controlling guest lists for 40 bands, food for all the bands, keeping everyone happy, not shooting yourself in the face the day of the show when everything goes wrong (i.e.: bands showing up late, gear breaking, bands playing longer than they are supposed to, etc), and most importantly paying your bills! We need about 1,300 people combined for the 2 days to come for us to break even and as of right now we are not looking so good. We really want this to be a yearly event that we can build on every year but if we take a big loss this year I don’t know if we will do it next year.
More straight talk from Terry and an hour-by-hour tentative festival schedule after the jump.
