One-woman show

The event had to succeed, and in Southside Park on June 18, 2016, the weather could not have been better: mid-70 degrees, sunny. Producer Danielle Vincent had rounded up 42 local bands to play two days’ worth of jams for the second year of First Festival. The first year, she had sold 1,500 tickets.

But on that Saturday, Vincent drove a golf cart around the three stages, and she wept.

“I have this joke that if I were to ever start a record label or something, it would be called Weeping Golf Cart,” Vincent said. “People would get in the passenger seat and would be like, ’It’s OK.’ I would just be like”—she imitated ugly-crying with an “oh-oh-oh-oh.” “Luckily, there weren’t very many people around to see me.”

That year, First Festival sold only 500 tickets. The letdown has served as a lesson to the Sacramento music scene. Online commenters told Vincent that the event was too expensive, not diverse enough, not well-publicized. They concluded that Sacramento wasn’t ready to pay $60 for a full-weekend pass to see only local bands without national followings. Vincent’s public embarrassment unearthed hard questions: Is an all-local music festival possible here? Does Sacramento even care about its homegrown musicians?

Vincent took it all in. But before she faced the criticism, she slept in the park the night of Sunday, June 19, on top of the tables and bar stools that vendors couldn’t retrieve until Monday. Then, she picked herself up from the grass, the dirt, the failure—like Scarlett O’Hara at the end of Gone with the Wind—and committed to do better this year.

Now, the third First Festival is scheduled May 6-7, and Vincent says it’s the last shot she’s giving it. Sacramento had better show up or else.

On a recent gloomy spring day, Vincent traced the length of her sizable to-do list with her periwinkle nail polish. She carried an abnormally long notebook with a cat sticker on the cover to accommodate her hurried jottings of tasks. Wearing a blonde updo, she confessed that one of her role models is Britney Spears.

The pop icon’s messy public breakdowns have taught Vincent a crucial lesson: “It’s OK to have certain stumbling blocks in life, and we can come out the other side clean and clear,” she said.

Like the diva in question, Vincent wasn’t always this put together. She struggled to show up to community college. Then, a proverbial to-do list saved her when she decided to take just two classes and finish them.

“The more little goals I set like that, the more I started to believe I could actually do anything.”

She credits her ability to finish small goals with another life change: opening a boutique for three years called The Firefly Exchange to encourage Sacramentans to shop local—much like her current mission to get them to listen local. To promote her store, she and a friend, Ashley Rastad, came up with an idea for a festival with vendor booths that happened to spotlight local bands.

First Festival was born.

“I wish I could say that it came out of this intense passion for the Sacramento music scene,” she said. “But it really turned into that. … When you start to meet artists and musicians who put their passion on display, then you realize a major event like that—it’s not something local bands have access to.”

In 2015, the year of the first First Festival, 18 bands played, including favorites like A Mile Till Dawn and Drop Dead Red. Vincent and her husband invested a solid chunk of their life savings into the event and managed to break even.

“It really made me feel empowered that Sacramento really wanted something like this and that there was only one way to go—and that was up,” she said.

Tickets for the one-day festival cost a mere $15 ahead of time and $20 at the gate. Attendees gushed about how good of a deal it was for the number of bands they saw.

“That was a lesson I had to learn,” she said. “Just because you get feedback that the price is low doesn’t mean it’s a good choice to raise it.”

Spoiler alert: It was not a good choice to raise ticket prices. Vincent and her husband spent around $40,000 on the 2016 event and lost about $20,000 in the end.

“It just bombed,” she admitted. “Bands played to empty stages.”

At the end of the weekend, Vincent had to tell the workers dismantling the stages that she wouldn’t be able to pay them that night, and she said she was terrified to do it.

“It was like the heaviest lead ball in my stomach—just disbelief, disappointment, confusion, frustration, fear.”

She worked out a payment plan with the stage rental company and other vendors. (So far, she’s paid back about half of the total owed on the event, and the same stage company is working at this year’s festival.)

Vincent’s academic pursuits steeled her spirits. She was finishing up her undergraduate degree in philosophy at Sacramento State and winning awards for her research. Shortly after First Festival, the turnaround student was invited to speak at Pacific University in Portland, Ore.

Meanwhile, she held onto her conviction that First Festival could pull ahead. Many musicians have stuck by her side. Seth Borges of alt-rock band Surviving the Era has played all the years, including this one.

“She’s got a lot of drive and a lot of faith that Sacramento can be bigger for music than what it is,” he said.

This year, Vincent armed herself with an ironclad to-do list, everything down to painting the foam cutouts for the three stages to look like an octopus, a seagull, a lighthouse. They swallowed up her living room. Thirty-nine local bands are slated to play, including the nationally recognized act Oleander.

To make the event visually enticing, she’s put Laura Marie Anthony, founder of the organization Artists of Sacramento, in charge of exhibiting more than 40 local artists. Anthony signed on with Vincent because she felt they were kindred spirits.

“We both really care about follow-through,” Anthony said. “Danielle is an attractive blond woman—young woman—who has a very kind voice, but when she asserts herself as much as anyone else would, sometimes that is a surprise to people. She really inspires me being a woman in kind of a male-dominated industry.”

Their shared goals come down to showing what Sacramento’s got. In a landscape of outdoor festivals that book nonlocal acts, such as Concerts in the Park and TBD Fest—which has been named in a lawsuit for nonpayment of vendors and musicians—First Festival is a “rare bird,” Anthony says.

“We are showing how strong Sacramento is as a creative community and how much talent we have,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing that gives me goosebumps just talking about it.”

To make sure the endangered species survives, Vincent has absorbed those tough lessons from last year. Ticket prices are back down and more hip-hop acts fill out the lineup. And now, she has a hype squad. Several billboards are plastered around town and a street team has been hanging posters. The crew includes musicians who are pumped to get the word out about one of their first outdoor festivals.

When hip-hop artist Kennedy Wrose gave his niece a tour of Sac State, he dusted the campus with First Festival posters and postcards. He’s noticed that the other musicians are backing up Vincent’s vision, too.

“I just see a lot more artists, more than I’ve seen for any concert or anything I’ve done, really just get engaged in wanting to like—’OK, how can we make this event dope and how can we make this cool and how can we make this one of the greatest festivals Sacramento sees this year,’” he said.

The future of First Festival hangs in the balance. If it does well, Vincent will continue organizing the annual shindig on top of pursuing her master’s in philosophy at UC Davis. If not, she’ll let it fade away. Regardless, she thinks the drama has helped Sacramento to take a look at itself and ask: How do we as a city want to support local music? Will we?

“In the end, if Sacramento doesn’t want First Festival, I’m willing to accept that,” she said. “And this will be the year that says it.”

The work is almost done. Countless to-do bullets have been crossed off. Only Sacramento can answer what happens next.