A festival is not something that just takes place over night; it could take years to put together.
The Self Help Festival all came together on March 22 in San Bernardino after two years of preparation. This was a fest that was created and headlined by the band A Day to Remember (otherwise known as ADTR to their fans).
It takes a lot to bring a festival to a city: There is the gathering of bands, sponsors, venues, as well as getting the word out to the fans. On the line up for this one-day festival was a total of 15 bands. With the supporting bands came fans that did not just come to see their favorite bands play but that also drew a larger crowed for when ADTR played. Sponsors also helped draw in a crowd by selling everything from t-shirts of their favorite bands to even one company that was selling vaporizers and pipes.
The venue that it was held at was the NOS Center in which they had an indoor stage and an outdoor stage. There was about a 20 minute break on each stage before the next band would play, but if you had two bands that you wanted to see and one was playing on the indoor and one on the outdoor then you had to literally run from one stage to the other in order to see both shows.
“We came here to see Of Mice and Men,” said Kelsey Moore, 23. “I always dreamed of seeing them play live and since I will be missing them at Warped Tour this year and they didn’t play there last year, I figured this would be my best shot of getting anywhere near Austin Carlile.”
“I saw [the band] Issues several times last year and I could never get tired of seeing them, they were the main reason why I came to this festival,” said Alex Pain, 19. “Every time they step foot on stage they give it their all.”
“ADTR is by far my favorite band and this is the first chance I have gotten to see them live, their songs are just so heartfelt and everyone seems like they can relate to them,” Simone Rigorde, 27. “Seeing Jeremy run around the crowd in a giant hamster ball had to be the highlight of my night and made me fall even more in love with him if thats even possible.”
Over all this festival was a huge success. Like with any new and upcoming fest there are things that need to be addressed and fixed, the main thing being the way they handled the tickets and will call, but that comes with time and trial and error. They found out that only having two ticket booths open was not enough, which is something that could be handled differently in the future.
For now the fans have next years fest to look forwards to because this has been announced that ADTR would love to make it an annual thing and they already have a killer line up in store for fans next year!
