KZUU will be hosting the first Main Street Music Festival from 2–8 p.m. on Saturday.
KZUU general manager Dayton Zimlinghaus said the festival’s main purpose is to bring customers downtown to help businesses dealing with the effects of construction.
“Typically, some music concerts will have one venue and a bunch of artists at one venue,” Zimlinghaus said. “We’ve decided to branch out and use as many different venues as possible so there’s more people in different places downtown.”
KZUU is a student-run radio station at WSU that focuses on playing non-commercial music. There will be five different venues hosting live music: Pups and Cups, Rico’s Public House, the Gathering Place, Bruised Books and Hotel McCoy, he said.
“At Rico’s they have an artist that’s going until like 9 or 10. We didn’t book them, they are just already playing that, so technically music will be going on past our event timeline,” Zimlinghaus said. “We’re also going to be DJing at Etis Bravo from 9 [p.m.] – 12 [a.m.]. We didn’t have an artist come perform then but we are going to step in and do something for them.”
KZUU has held concerts in the past but never to this scale, and downtown Pullman has never had a music festival, Zimlinghaus said. Rebecca Lewis, Sarah Margaret, Leslie Jo Sena and Katie Ludwig are among the artists who will be performing. A full list of artists and their performance schedules can be found on the KZUU website.
Outside of organizing the event, KZUU will be helping by manning booths outside of Pups and Cups and Rico’s, Zimlinghaus said. Two DJs will be manning each booth to give people information about the event and the station.
“We’re also going to be selling these mystery CD bags for $5 at both of those booths,” he said. “Beyond our two booths, we’re going to have six media passes this year. Our DJs will be taking artists’ photos and videos and conducting artist interviews in the press lounge downtown, so that’s great practice for what we do.”
Outside of the music festival, the Pullman Civic Trust will be hosting an end-of-construction party on the same day, Zimlinghaus said. This will help bring people down for the festival but he also hopes people attending the festival will go to the party as well.
Zimlinghaus said he hopes people who know about the festival tell their friends so they can get a large crowd. Pullman does not have much of a music scene so he hopes turning this into a yearly event may help create one.
“I think doing this annual music festival in downtown Pullman is a tradition I would really love to see the station carry on,” he said. “This is a trial run, obviously I’ve never done this before and no one I’m doing this with has done this before and so we are learning for the first time and are trying to build systems and networks for the people who take over this station next year so they can do it again.”
