End of the Road

I get some iteration of the question “how do you get these bands to come to Key West?” pretty often. And a lot of people think I just have connections from way back. I do not — those came over time.

The truth is, beautiful weather and scenery aside, Key West is a horrible location for bands to come play concerts. Touring is always set up for efficiency — more tour dates and less travel time equals more profit — so the industry standard is to string together the most amount of shows in the shortest amount of time, in order to sell the greatest amount of tickets, to make as much money as possible. They call this routing.

And Key West, with a tiny population of 25,000 — located a full three hours from a major city, is, in reality, as bad as you can get to fulfill those efficiency and profit potential requirements.

But over the past decade I have been lucky to build relationships — good friendships really — with the bands and performers whose agents I somehow initially managed to convince that taking the tour bus all the way to the end of the road to play for a much smaller crowd and for an entirely smaller paycheck was a risk worth taking.

And really the heart of those decisions and the basis for the subsequent relationships to take root and grow, and the reason why my (now) friends keep coming back to play is that Key West is just a really special dot on the map. It’s never getting closer than three hours from the next city, we’ve all but maxed out our population, and our venues won’t likely get any bigger.

So while we’ll never fulfill the algorithmic inputs and demands of the routing equation, we'll always have the sunshine and a pace of life that can serve as a moment of respite during a six-month tour that might otherwise break a band — and we’ll hopefully always have the community support.

Because if we can keep that up, then I’ll keep asking my buddies to come back to play, and they’ll tell their buddies, and the lineup will grow — and at least once a year, we (the Key West community and the bands taking the chance on us) can come together as one human family to let loose when the coast is clear.

And that’s my roundabout way of saying that this year’s festival, and the bands descending in on our island for a couple of days to play some beautiful music and to lift the collective spirits of our community in early December, did not come without a lot of people taking chances and making time for something really special to happen.

And you should all know that because, without the support of the community, it wouldn’t be possible.

You should also know that we’ve tried to keep this event as accessible as possible from a pricing standpoint. Any one of these bands will sell tickets to a single concert of theirs for $40-$100 and sell out a huge theater no problem. In Key West terms, I like to say that our GA ticket is about the cost of a nice two-hour sunset sail. Looking at it that way — seeing six bands of this caliber all in one day and understanding the career trajectory they are all on — it's a pretty damn good deal.

All said, to continue providing this amazing music, local support is key to the vision of this being a community-focused event — because at the end of the day we’d rather invest in the local community than promote to folks flying in for the weekend. The COAST Is Clear Festival should, at the heart of it all, be a time and place when we all get together to collectively enjoy why we, ourselves, call the end of the road home.

So I  look forward to seeing a lot of you over the next couple of months, first at the free show we’re putting on at the new Parade Grounds at Fort East Martello with my good buddy G. Love in less than a month. And then again — same place — the following month, on December 4th for COAST Is Clear.

Finally, I want to send out a special thanks to Key West Art and Historical Society — especially Michael Gieda who has quietly, but boldly, done so much work to help make this possible. His shared vision and support for the event is beyond what I could have imagined when we started this project together late last spring.

Thanks as well to Rayland Baxter and Langhorne Slim and Justin Osborne (SUSTO) and G. Love for continuing to come back to play and for letting me know which other bands and artists I should add to the lineup.

And finally, thanks to all of you — local supporters and non — who have bought tickets en masse and who continue to support small, local, independent community events and the arts.

We’ll see you all soon.

For more information on the free concert & the festival, please visit: www.coastisclearfest.com.