Last year, $30,000 was given out for the purpose bringing popular music artists to campus. The concert organizers were a group of friends who met on a ISU dorm floor three years ago.

The Freeman Spring Concert, an annual event that kicks off SpringFest week, has only been a staple of ISU entertainment since last year.

What began as a well-intentioned barbecue has blossomed into an all-day concert with nationally recognized bands.

“It was our freshman year and most of Freeman was supposed to live out in Towers,” said Andrew Wake, junior in sociology and concert founder. “Since they condemned Towers, they moved us to Freeman in old RCA and kicked all the girls out. Our dorm was known as a bunch of troublemakers and we had quite a bit of bad press. Vandalism, write-ups – the cops were up there quite often, so we wanted to make a positive image from our dorm.”

Wake and his floormates decided to have a barbecue the Sunday of Veishea in an attempt to clean up their image.

The barbecue, with free food from Hickory Park, 1404 S. Duff Ave., became an overwhelming success.

“We booked food for 320 people and served all of that, and then we had five or six hundred in line that didn’t get anything,” said Jason Duncan, junior in industrial engineering and concert founder.

As soon as the group of friends got a taste of success, their minds wandered onto something even bigger for the following year. Thomas Shaw, junior in mechanical engineering and concert founder, said the event got them thinking about bigger, more popular ideas.

“From there it kind of whetted our appetites for throwing events; it taught us the ropes. So the next fall we started talking about bands. We realized with a battle of bands, people come from the bands they know, then they leave and no one cares,” Shaw said. “With Veishea, there was money to be had, so we pursued it and got a nationally touring act.”

The act was the popular group Motion City Soundtrack, whose performance, along with Los Angeles-based band Melee, gathered 1,500 students in the small Forker Hall parking lot. The success of the event had them planning for someone as big this year.

“We were talking about [the next concert] when we were picking up trash from the last event,” Duncan said.

To carry out such an event not only took a great deal of planning, but money as well. The first year, more than $20,000 was gathered from student organizations such as Inter-Residence Hall Association and ISU Afterdark to help bring in nationally touring bands.

Although they feel they have built credibility with last year’s concert, the group has issues dealing with those doling out such large sums of money.

“The biggest problem is – we’re not supposed [to] send out offers until we get money, and people want to know who we’re going to get before they give us money,” Shaw said. “You have to kind of bait the booking agents to give you prices and you have to be good at how you talk to them without actually giving them offers.”

Ryan McNair, senior in management information systems and concert founder, said the people they’ve been getting money from this year have been fairly lenient, donating to the cause before they know what bands they’re getting.

“We’ve been really lucky. The last two years we’ve had one-time things that have popped up that have been able to fund us. Last year our budget was around $20,000, and this year it’s around $30,000,” McNair said.

He said they don’t have expectations of getting any money, viewing it as a fresh start each year. If they can’t get enough money for a concert in the future, he said a different event will be held in its place.

Although the group hopes to get the most bang for the buck, the clock is another aspect they must be mindful of.

“I think this year we could’ve done more with time than money. There are so many bands just right around us that it’s like ‘Man, if we just had a month sooner,'” said Shaw, who mentioned their pursuit of popular acts such as Yellowcard, Dashboard Confessional and Cheap Trick.

Another important part of the free concert for the group is carrying on the legacy.

This year the group invited three students from Freeman Hall to help be a part of bringing the concert together. They plan to bring in one or two people from Freeman to replace each of the founders for next year, allowing the event to continue on after they graduate.

McNair said they hope the core group of people that spearhead the event or ideas are from Freeman, yet still draw support from the whole university.

“One of the things we try to focus on is getting student feedback. Our initial idea was a comedian in Stephens [Auditorium], to do something different from a concert,” he said. “We try to get feedback from residence hall students to see what they want, and they pretty much said they didn’t think Stephens is big enough for the crowd we expect and really didn’t know about a comedian because it’s a lot of money for one person.”

The group then went back to the drawing board and decided to continue with bands this year. McNair said the concert gives a full day of entertainment and is closer to residence hall students.

Even if the group doesn’t know what the future holds for the concert, they want the concert to be an event important to students for years to come.

“We’re based on what students want. If they want a magician, we’ll bring out a magician,” Wake said.