Flower15: A festival by Flowerbooking
The lineup will benefit more than just your ears
The people behind Flower15
Something strange is happening at Metro this week. Three bands that have broken up—The Promise Ring, Smoking Popes, and Sweep The Leg Johnny—will play, as will the going-strong Jimmy Eat World, which normally plays much bigger venues. Post-rock titan Tortoise will share a bill with pummeling metal act Isis. The explanation? Flower15, a six-day celebration put together by local booking agency Flowerbooking. The impressive lineup—Ted Leo, Local H, American Analog Set, Underoath, and many more—isn’t about self-congratulations: Proceeds will benefit Possibilities In Life: Art For Youth (P.L.A.Y.), a charity that Flower helped start by raising $20,000 at its 10th-anniversary celebration. This year, Flower hopes to top $50,000, almost half of which has already been raised through online auctions. Before Flower15, The A.V. Club talked to founder Susanne Dawursk, her business partner Tim Edwards, and their fellow booking agent Mahmood Shaikh about their jobs, the downside of P.L.A.Y.’s growth, and their rival gangs.
The A.V. Club: First off, explain what Flowerbooking does.
Susanne Dawursk: Flowerbooking is a booking agency, and the definition of a booking agency is that we negotiate and secure performance contracts with venues on behalf of artists that we represent. And then, as an adjunct to that, we help them with travel and arrangements.
AVC: Is it like being a doctor, always on call?
Tim Edwards: There are late-night calls.
AVC: When you see other booking agents around town, is it awkward? Do you flash rival gang signs?
TE: I think it depends on how awkward the other agent is.
Mahmood Shaikh: Yeah, you know, there are quite a few agencies in Chicago at varying levels, and for the most part, I’d say that we’re on pretty good terms, and even friends.
TE: I don’t think there’s a lot of scratching and clawing. There’s enough stuff out there, and I can’t think of too many concrete examples, particularly Chicago-based, where two agencies were gunning for a band. Sometimes people get a jump and find a band that other people have overlooked. In fact, I can think of exactly zero that we’ve lost in the last five years.
AVC: It’s been five years since you organized this kind of event. Flower10 benefited P.L.A.Y., but the charitable aspect seems more prominent this time.
MS: I think we’re a lot more vocal about it; the charity’s more established. It pretty much started with the funds raised at Flower10, and I think that everyone at Flower is more aware of what needs to be done to make people aware that it’s a charity now.
SD: We stayed in touch with everyone that works with the charity throughout the years, and even three years into it, they were still using the money that we’d raised for their programming, and now they’re at a point where they need more. There are kids now that aren’t getting clinical or art services that they need in order to start getting through traumas. So it’s definitely been a very cool and meaningful process for us to be able to say, “Oh my God, we’ve made it another five years, and these are all the wonderful things that happened to us,” and simultaneously watching P.L.A.Y. really take off. It’s a cause for celebration, but it’s also cause for alarm that they’re taking off. They still have this massive list of kids that need help.
AVC: There are a few reunions on the bill this year. How did you swing those?
SD: We threatened them. [Laughs.]
TE: I think, for the most part, we just asked.
MS: The Promise Ring, we had asked them if they’d be interested for the event. The Popes, that just kind of coincided…
TE: Yeah, they were talking about getting together and were sort of in the beginning stages, and we thought this would be a really good fit. We represented Duvall, but we never represented the Smoking Popes. So there was a question of how this all fits in with the Flower thing, but they wanted to be involved with the event and do a one-time reunion, and we certainly wanted to find a space for them, because it’s a cool thing. And Sweep…
MS: I guess they had been talking about playing again, and one of the guys is moving to Peru, and so they wanted to do one last thing.
AVC: This seems like it came together pretty easily, but for your actual jobs, you have to deal with some of the less warm-and-fuzzy parts of the music industry.
TE: We’re a little bit immune. We have a little bit of a safe place here in Chicago from the grossest industry machinations, although they’re still certainly there. The hype machine has concentrations, and it’s here, but it isn’t probably quite as much as in New York or L.A. Rather than having 20 people whispering in your ear, we maybe only have two or three, which helps us look at things a little more objectively. As the years go by, you learn more things, and some of them are good things that make you happy about working this business, and some of them maybe make you less happy.
