The LAWeekly is not done with the Sunset Junction Fair and for good reasons! They have published, among other things, an interesting interview of Art Brut which I saw last week as they were playing a catch-up show at the Satellite after the fair was cancelled. It still does not look good for all these bands that were supposed to play, this is what Eddie Argos declared to the Weekly regarding their canceled Sunset Junction gig:
‘The [organizers of the Sunset Junction Fair] offered us a lot of money. You can't turn something like that down, I was very excited…It's a great festival and we have a lot of fans in Echo Park.’
Argos said that the Sunset Junction offered to cover their flight as part of their payment. So the group opted to borrow money from their manager for their ‘quite expensive and non-refundable' tickets.
Unfortunately they did not get any money back, they were not paid a cancellation fee for their show, and they weren't even reimbursed for their plane tickets!
Argos continues: ‘I thought we were fucked. I was freaked out that [the organizers] bankrupted my band’.
But they got this other gig at the Satellite and were grateful to festival booker Jennifer Tefft for quickly securing them this replacement show on Saturday: ’She was very passionate about the festival…as long as we could play somewhere, we were going to go and play.’
But Argos revealed that it was ‘not comparable’ to the Sunset Junction offer, and they had to ask for donation on their website to cover their travel costs: ‘The plan is to try and get the money back,’ but since he hasn’t been able to communicate with the organizers, he added ‘I don't really expect to.’
I really feel bad for all these bands as many lived the same experience than Art Brut, as it was the case for soul singer Charles Bradley; Bradley collaborator Thomas Brenneck declared to the Weekly:
‘We didn't hear anything about [the festival's cancellation] until we read it in the newspaper,’ ‘Losing [Sunset Junction] meant losing a major financial anchor of our tour.’
They got to play at the Echo during the weekend but Brenneck said many bands hadn't gotten so lucky: ‘Had we not had this show, the situation would not have been as cool’.
Of course, like Art Brut, they didn’t get any cancellation fees, and although Brenneck had only good things to say about festival booker Jennifer Tefft and was not angry at the organizers, he said that Sunset Junction needs to clean up its act: ‘What happened [with the overdue fees] certainly doesn't seem like a way to run a business. If that's why the festival was canceled, then certainly some bands who are owed guarantees should have some recourse.’
Clean up its act? Indeed! Sunset Junction lawyer Phillip Tate declared a little bit earlier this week: ‘We're gonna go back and review our options, it's a nonprofit that operates on a shoestring budget. They've been questioning these bills since October. While the board believes that they should've had quick and easy access [to addressing outstanding issues with the city], Los Angeles doesn't work like that. If you've ever read Kafka's The Castle, it's more like that.’
None of the bands is menacing suing Sunset Junction, but people are talking, talking for example about Jennifer Tefft’s declaration to the LATimes:
‘I really feel for every single person affected by this. If I had known that [organizer Michael McKinley] didn't have a permit in place, I wouldn't have approached these bands.’
This is a person who has helped book the festival since 2001, and she did not know what was going on?
To conclude, the LAWeekly reported on Thursday that organizers of the nonprofit Sunset Junction Neighborhood Alliance don’t know if the group will survive. The organization was founded by Michael McKinley in 1979 and the fair became an annual fundraiser for the Alliance's youth projects and other nonprofit organizations. Since tax records of all nonprofit groups are public, the Weekly found out that the Alliance frequently reports only several thousand dollars on hand at the end of the year, with an average daily balance of the account of $963! Simply there is no money left once everyone has been paid:
‘Though the festival generated nearly $400,000 in 2009, the most recent year for which tax records have been filed, by the time organizers paid the musical acts, permits and other expenses, less than $500 was left for youth outreach. The year before, the festival just broke even, generating nothing for its youth-employment project at the now-closed Tsunami coffeehouse on Sunset Boulevard — or for its sports or school programs.’
It’s difficult to find out how many people have attended the fair, but it is very reasonable to say that it makes several 100,000 entries each year. At $20 the entry, it is already $2,000,000!! How can they have messed up so much the financial part?