With Veishea quickly approaching, and the semester soon coming to a close, it is once again time for the Freeman Spring Concert, although given the current addition of snow it still doesn’t seem quite like spring.

This Saturday marks the third annual Freeman Spring concert, and is certainly set to please the masses as it brings out names like A Static Lullaby and Less than Jake, but none of this could be possible without the help of all the sponsors of the event.

“In past years sponsors have been limited to ACAB (This is your April), IRHA, GSB, ISU AfterDark and 105.1 Channel Q,” said Jason Duncan, head of Corporate Relations and Sponsorship committee and senior in industrial engineering. “This year the Freeman Spring Concert (FSC) took a more active approach to sponsorship and corporate relations and as a result, added four additional corporate sponsors and several student organizations,” he said.

Given that the annual event is still young in its development, the committee has had numerous challenges to overcome in order to increase the popularity of the event from the two previous years.

“Each year that we plan this event [it] presents us with unique challenges that we have to overcome along the way. Really, every concert that we’ve thrown has been unique in its own way,” said Jared Wilson, vice president of the committee and junior in agronomy. “The first year we planned it we didn’t have a lot of experience in planning a concert, so it was a real challenge selling our idea to people across the campus. The second year we had the concert we had to convince people that we could duplicate the success of the first year. This year has also given our group challenges that we’ve had to overcome,” he said.

Wilson said planning is basically a year-long event, and many hours and hard work are invested into making the concert a success.

“Planning for the concert is something that pretty much starts the day after the previous concert. One of the first things that we do is sit down and evaluate the goods and the bads of the concert, and come up with ideas to make next year’s concert better,” Wilson said. “Most of the planning for the concert comes from a group of about seven to 10 people, each with their own tasks to prepare for the event. This year, our group met almost every week during the fall and spring terms, with meetings that usually take around an hour, but seem to increase the closer we get to the concert.

“Day of show tasks are carried out by a large group of volunteers – usually about 70 people – from all over campus. Jobs typically include set-up, security, taking care of the bands and tear-down, with a few other people in there to do other random tasks. By the time the concert has taken place, there has literally been hundreds of man hours invested.”

Of course the largest challenge the committee faces each year is which acts to bring to campus. This year’s committee utilized tools such as Facebook and MySpace in order to both research the popularity of the acts, as well as the student response to what acts were being looked at and whether they could afford to bring those acts to campus. One act that was researched, but did not quite make the cut this year was GWAR.

This year’s acts span a wide variety of sounds, from the blues driven Jokerband from Story City, the classic rock/punk rock of Vains of Jenna, all the way to the rock sound of A Static Lullaby.

This years headliners, A Static Lullaby and Less Than Jake have both earned their stripes in the music scene.

Less Than Jake emerged on the scene in 1992 as a ska-influenced punk rock trio, and has since added members, and released nearly ten albums. Most recently, the band played a series of six shows in Florida, in which, each time they chose one of their albums and played it in full for the crowd, including b-sides and rare songs.

A Static Lullaby, while newer on the music scene, is no stranger to fame. The band formed in 2001 in California born from a high school jam session that inspired each of the members to quit their already existing bands. Since then the band has had three full-length albums, in addition to their EP released in 2002.