Doors open to variety
January 12, 2006
If you’re a stranger to the Maintenance Shop, now is the time to show your face.
With a fresh spring lineup and new goals in mind, the Memorial Union’s M-Shop is ready to entertain all students – no matter what their musical palates may consist of. At least that’s what Steven Satterlee, the new M-Shop adviser, is hoping for.
“[We want] to focus on having a diversity of different groups coming in, to provide different opportunities for different genres of music,” says Satterlee, who formerly worked as the assistant director for the Campus Center and conference coordinator at Susquehanna University, a small, private liberal arts school in Pennsylvania.
The goal may sound simple, but offering entertainment that suits Iowa State’s campus and the community takes a considerable amount of knowledge and thought.
“There’s basically 26,000 students at Iowa State, so we hope that we offer at least one show that appeals to every one of them at some point,” Satterlee says. “But there are some shows that more community members come to than students, and we think that it’s important to offer that as well. So we actually look at different age groups and different genres of music and who we’re going to focus on.”
Eric Hutchison, M-Shop co-director and junior in elementary education, says trying to accommodate the crowd while keeping his personal tastes set aside can be tricky.
“It’s not hard – it’s just you always have to be able to consider the business aspect of it instead of the personal aspect of it,” he says. “There are so many different types of shows this semester from blues artists to bands like Feist and The Life and Times.”
Although the M-Shop has made its name by keeping its variety of musical genres wide, including not only rock and pop, but blues, jazz, bluegrass and country, Satterlee says the venue recently had the problem of sticking to a limited amount of genres.
“They didn’t have an adviser for the beginning of the semester this past year and so they did a lot of shows, but some of it can be focused solely on what those students that are choosing the shows are interested in as opposed to looking at what would different types of students be interested in.”
Allen Lundgren, M-Shop co-director and senior in marketing, says although the venue’s lineups may sometimes seem to focus solely on one kind of music, one must look at the big picture to get a feel for the acts that come through.
“I guess it kind of varies how short-term you look at it. You might look at one month and say, ‘Hey, wow, one month we had six indie rock shows,’ but the next month we’ve got four blues shows,” he says. “So on the short-term basis, it might look concentrated, but you look at a semester point of view or a year point of view, I think we always do a good job of diversifying our acts that we bring in.”
Satterlee says when he started his advising position in October, the M-Shop’s tradition of offering blues and jazz was much less apparent. He hopes to bring some of that back, and the venue has already booked four types of blues artist for the spring. He said he is also adamant about providing students with music they are not exposed to.
“I think that’s really great to see that there are different types of music instead of just alternative rock or your average Green Day band or things like that – there are a lot of different ways for artists to express themselves,” he says. “Students really like it, but they aren’t exposed to it as much as they would be if they just flipped on MTV or VH1.”
With the spring lineup not yet complete, the M-Shop is hoping to get four or five additional shows booked. Hutchison says the venue is striving for quality over quantity.
“We looked at having fewer shows, but more shows that are going to have better attendance, [rather] than having a ton of shows that are just going to have decent attendance,” he says.
Lundgren’s goal is simple.
“Bring in as many people as we can,” he says. “A favorite word of ours is ‘sellout’ – if we have a sellout show, we did our work and we know the audience had a good time and we know the artist would have a good time as well.”
Hutchison says a couple of upcoming April shows may hold some surprises.
“We’re working on, like, three just monster dates,” he says. “We know probably two out of three that will get confirmed that people are just going to be really impressed by.”
