This was the fourth year for Ventura Music Week, my second year helping. Even though last year was so much work, I was still surprised at how exhausting it is to pull this event off.

Of course each year the goal is to surpass the previous one, and I believe we did that. We generated more interest in our music scene, further marketing this city as a music destination. Of course you’ll always have Monday Morning Quarterbacks. To them I say, “Shut up unless you want to help make it better.”

Again, this VMW team is on a volunteer basis. Some of the team members are on a payroll for their perspective jobs such as Economic Development crew, Peter Brown and Lilly Rudolph, from the City of Ventura; Kevin Clerici and Meredith Hart from the DVO (Downtown Ventura Organization), David Comden from the VC Reporter; but Kat Merrick, Sam Benner and myself don’t work for companies that cover their time spent on this.

Kat Merrick owns Totally Local VC and is also hired by different companies to help on their event planning; Sam Benner has moved away from marketing and has started working in real estate; and while I work for the City of Ventura, what I do to help is completely separate. I take personal time off for meetings, and I use my vacation time during Ventura Music Week. Many of the salaried helpers went above and beyond their day jobs helping to pull off events and showing up to lend a hand.

Again we had around 6-7 people attending meetings and making decisions on the direction we wanted to go. We really did want to start earlier on the planning stages, but somehow we managed to work on rushed deadlines which added stress to the equation.

That being said, last year there were clearly only a few people working their asses off, this year, more of us were. I’m so grateful to Kevin Clerici and Meredith Hart of the DVO (Downtown Ventura Organization), for their support. Yes, they have a vested interest in seeing their section of town (DOWNTOWN), thrive, but they took control of the budget and financial aspects, rallied their workers on physical help, and ran so many errands contributing to the success of the week.

As a committee we also put on a handful of events including the launch party, a movie screening, a visual arts presentation of rock photographers and a wrap party.  Some were more successful than others, but again, “movie night” was one of the highlights for the week with a screening of the Academy Award winning documentary, “20 Feet From Stardom.”

All participating venues are responsible for their own entertainment. We just ask that they try not to hire bands/artists who are already scheduled during the week so we have lots of diversity.

Again this year we scheduled VMW so that the anchor event for the second weekend would be Roadshow Revival (RSR). We lost however Rock Picnic. No one could blame Brian Parra for throwing in the towel on this one, but I was sad none-the-less as this had been the anchor even for the first weekend. Taking its place were two solid events, the SRO Benefit (which just happened to fall during VMW), and the Global Guitar Greats Tour held at the W Gallery.

But as great as RSR is, we really don’t want this event to fall during graduations and Father’s Day. People have other things to take care of!  We’re hoping next year that RSR can be moved to an earlier weekend, or we’ll find another hot event to take its place.

Even before our first official meeting, there was some heartbreak for me personally as I worked with a national touring act who has members who live here in Ventura. I went back and forth with one of the members of the band and their management trying to work on having this band launch the week with a show at the Ventura Theater. It would have been AWESOME!! But even after we met their monetary demands, management passed.  I tried not to take it personally, but I truly believe, if anything business should be personal, and this left me heartbroken.

So with some air deflated early on, we still managed to increase participation up to 50 venues from 30 last year.

While Sam sets up the website, I once again took on the responsibility of entering in all the content.  That’s FIFTY venues, with their specific information, and then their entertainment line up.  Some changed, some came in at the last moment.  I’ll be honest, I spent over 80 hours on the website and Facebook setting up information, 40 before VMW even started, and 40 while it was going on.  I was up by 6 in the morning, I had to enter changes during the day, create downloadable PDFs of the schedule and update with some photos late at night.

We only had two people going out to as many venues as we could, checking in with social media, then posting photos to add to the excitement.  Even with only two people, social media was abuzz with all the events.  The wrap party at Discovery was super fun with some of Ventura’s top guitarists jamming including Tommy Marsh, Erik Lemaire, Guy Martin, Alastair Greene and Mark Masson.

It took several weeks for my head to stop spinning.  I had taken personal vacation time, but returning to work the next day felt more like vacation as I could slow down and focus on one task at a time.

It’s been over month and I’ve started asking for feedback from the venues on what they thought, and whether they thought it was worth their time.  None of the responses have surprised me.  Some can’t think out of the box and only think in terms of how it benefits them personally, but most do look at the bigger picture and know that this effort benefits our town and as a result, it trickles down to them with more people coming to Ventura to hear music.  But the responses I loved the best, were those who had ideas of how to better this event next year.

We’re gathering theses ideas, there will be changes, and we may lose some help from some of the entities, but we will certainly gain help from other sources. Ventura’s music scene is gaining more momentum and catching attention from neighboring counties.  We are putting us on the map and this is all worthy of our time…even worthy of our blood sweat and tears.