POP founder, POP boss: Interview with Dan Seligman

The first thing Dan Seligman tells me once we’ve introduced ourselves is that he’s producing five shows for the Arcade Fire right now. This is impressive and potentially nerve making so at this point I make my first mention of Danagement, to ask if he’s now Danaging Arcade Fire. This is in reference to his management site, and he gives me a queer eye and a half surprised smirk as he says no, and I suspect that I am right in thinking there’s a story/joke in the danagement.net. Which is good, I’m really glad there’s a joke. The website says things like “We help people by being different. And we help people be different” and if that’s not tongue in cheek band manager speak then Mr.Seligman and I might not be able to be friends. Fortunately I think we’re ok. Anyway, the interview proceeds as planned. We share a Labatt 50 in a somewhat scheezy old man bar because I’m all class, and then we tucker in.

The first question in my interview is obvious, and he’s touching on it in our getting to know you chatter before I even start up my little recorder thing- how did Pop Montreal get started, both financially and conceptually?

It was touring with his brothers band, Stars, and then managing the Dears, that Dan Seligman made all kinds of crucial connections with bands, venues, managers, etc, and learned the music business from the ground up. The “ground” being that place where people hand out flyers and go see shows. According to Seligman AND Rusell Simmons in his co-authored autobiography “Life and Def”, this outside the building, ground up stuff is important. FYI young media moguls. Heads up.

So anyway, the mental map of international fests and bands was brewing in the man’s brain when he ended up on a train with Peter Rowan of Eric’s Trip, Julie Doiron and the Halifax Pop Explosion. Together they got the idea started- the two spoke about starting a fest like the one in Halifax, maybe they’d do it out in the country, eventually they talked about bringing the love right into Montreal. The growth of the fest from kernel to the thing we saw shake up much of our city this year was largely, it seems, a process of thinking of people they’d like to work with, and then going after them. Noelle Sorbara got back from China and Dan knew her from school, knew she was smart and had business sense and that she would be good to work with. So he asked her. From there they started work proposing relationships to sponsors. McAuslan and Greenland were the organizations that largely gave Pop it’s start, with media sponsors from the weeklies and free advertising from Exclaim!

I ask him what he learned from this year’s Pop Montreal, and apparently this is a good question. It’s always good to extract some lesson from your undertakings, I think, something specific for when the whole body of lived knowledge from in the moment gets blurry with the passing of time. And it’s better yet to do so on the web, where people can come at it and learn from it for themselves. That’s according to me, not Dan Seligman, but actually his answer to the question does cast the web in a nice way. He says he learned this year that it was hard to get the mainstream media’s attention if what you had were musicians from all around the world with interesting sounds and stories, living legends, in fact, but what you didn’t have was big catch-their-attention names like Franz Ferdinand. He makes some pretty disparaging remarks about the mainstream press, actually. The weeks right before the festival were spent laying out stories as simply and directly as possible, so that their shows could get attention. (I think actually, they may have gotten some advice in the way of press releases from the same person who helped me- Andi State, who also, in the corporate body of the agency she represents here, Encore Entertainment, sponsored Film Pop. She’s a helpful and savvy gal about town.)

From the sound of it, Pop fought for their coverage in a new way this year, and it increased his appreciation for the independent press. It really can be a democratizing thing, Seligman says. Bloggers went to all kinds of shows, not just the Toronto-trendy bands; told stories; knew what they were talking about in terms of musical reference and context in the way only deep geeks can and/or were able to unfold wordy long and ramblin reviews with opinions expressed on their own terms, without thought for editor or word count. Again- this is me expanding on Dan Seligman’s words. But I think I caught his gist. He does say he read a number of the blogs and enjoyed them, and it was certainly a conscious and cool move to let folks like us from blogs and websites have press passes so we could be there, covering shows.

It seems like POP at it’s core has an open palm, interested to work with interesting people, welcoming to folks who clamor to be aboard. When I ask a pack of curious questions about the listening sessions where bands do or don’t get accepted to the festival- out of the thousands who apply- his answer is “Do you want to come?” Yes. Yes I do. Thanks.

Apparently the listening sessions are pretty open invite. They run for 3 or 4 days a week over a month, beer is provided, and every member of the jury has “Neato” power which is like Veto power only the opposite. Sort of like how mitzvah’s are the opposite of sins, and I think it’s a genuinely dear move to invent the optimistic opposite to what is lacking in your language.

I like a lot of Pop’s moves. I like how, though they were sort of blind sided by Osheaga, and affected a bit by how very close the new “indie” festival is in time to Pop Montreal – a dangerous thing both for booking bands and for being the second ones digging into fans pocket books- Pop, at least publicly, played the mature kid. Got themselves involved in Osheaga with a Pop Montreal showcase and worked it out as best they could. Sustained good relationships in a way that seems to have kept any potential damage from affecting the artists. When I ask if Osheaga affected Pop, Dan Seligman makes a well balanced answer about finding out while in Barcelona, and how it was a bit of a shock that they didn’t tell them or talk to them about it, that they had to hear through rumour mill when Greenland and Gillette were the part of what helped create Pop in year 1.

Dan Seligman is polite about it, but doesn’t think what Osheaga ended up doing is at all the same, doesn’t think it left people with the same glow, doesn’t think the programming was genius- says there were a few obvious choices and a few bad ones which made for an odd balance, and it’s questionable whether they’ll find it cost effective to do their version of an independent music fest again. Seligman says he’s quite certain Osheaga lost a chunk of money, because that’s how these things go. For a corporation like Gillette, that probably won’t sell well to the higher ups in the long term. Seligman is clear- the people who put that festival on, and who run Greenland and the Gillette Entertainment Group, do what they do because they love music, and he has no doubt about that. But at the end of the day, they report to somebody above them who has different motivations, different perspectives, and (my words now) that’s what shapes their range of possible choices. For the kind of thing Pop Montreal wants to be, both for bands and for the city, this would be a limitation.

Pop Montreal is non-profit, run largely on government grants these days, as well as on corporate sponsors like McAuslan. They exist without needing to balance out against a bottom line. As the fest approaches an increasing number of people get work. The final number this year was around 30 jobs created, and that includes producers, promoters, volunteers coordinator, etc. The festival is staffed, during fest time, by a big team of volunteers. Similar to volunteers at the Fringe festival, volunteer time is rewarded with an access pass. 4 people are employed full time, year round, by POP and that obviously includes founder and boss man Dan Seligman.

I ask him again about danagement, not to harp on it, but it’s funny and I’m curious, and I wonder if bands get into Pop Montreal automatically if they’re managed by the danager? He says no. But anyway, he doesn’t see managing bands and running a festival as a conflict- he wouldn’t manage a band unless he really loved their music anyway, and he really only manages one band right now and there are so many spots at Pop that it’s hard to image the one ever affecting the other. Also- he’s not sure, but managing bands may be more trouble then it’s worth. He’s loved it and learned a lot but.. anyway, also- that Danagement website was done in fulfillment of a grant requirement and was pretty much made as a joke. I tell him I thought so and I’m glad. He laughs and says- not everybody has a sense of humour.

The guy seems pretty sincere about loving what he’s doing, and not fully practical, which I think is a good combination for dream fest making. He comes into the dim bar on a day of pouring rain with naught but an extra hoodie, hood in soggy place, “protecting” him from the elements. He’s a bit wide eyed. Later on he tells me a story about meeting with Roky Erickson, who has only played a handful of shows in recent years- a legend with an incredible story- a story about state sponsored cruelty inflicted on the creative and the criminally insane during the late sixties and early seventies, and about the kind of person who emerges from that with a desire to make music still in tact- and he talks about understanding from the looks on Erickson’s entourage’s faces that they hadn’t expected the festival to be run by a bunch of grubby kids. Erickson didn’t seem to mind, or notice much, but the entourage of family and managers had expected something with more corporate heft, more ducks in a row, more institutional polish, oddly enough. Instead what they got was probably more of this- soft spoken young guys in hoodies. A lack of play the game pretention that I, in my limited travels, would still identify as uniquely Montreal.

Dan Seligman is a full Montreal lover now, but says he was a total Toronto kid, he’d visited here a few times as a teenager and liked it but not enough to get it, or to resist doing his damnedest to declare Toronto the best. Seligman grew up one of those city kids in Toronto’s Annex, and it is cool there, and once he moved here, he smilingly tells me, he changed his mind about his home town’s super superiority. So I ain’t mad at him. He came to Montreal to go to McGill. He studied Religious Studies. When I ask him if there will be a place for live music in a post climate change economy, he gets my whiff of irony but speaks passionately. His view on music, live performance, and festivals is informed by his study of religion. People meeting to share an experience is increasingly an important, electrifying thing, a unifying thing. We can agree the world is fucked up, and that we’d rather it was not. And it’s easy to be numbed. We download music of all kinds from all around the world, and that’s a great and empowering thing, but it also can disassociate us from the people making that music. He says- we need visceral experience. When (Pop Montreal) puts on shows they want it to be a full sensory experience- the space is part of the performance, and the right combination of sense impressions will wake you up and make you aware that you are here.

The Arcade Fire want to do their next shows in a downtown cathedral, so that’s Dan Seligman’s main task right now; convincing the church body that this is in fact ok. Places like this mostly have no history or habit of renting themselves out as show venues and so the issue needs delicate explaining. Seligman and Pop have held shows in churches before, and have also negotiated with the military to fill their halls up with the worlds of crafts and modern dance instead of war craft. They do so by explaining that music is a cultural event, and so on. And somehow they do it in a way that communicates and works. At Puces Pop there were young guys in uniform walking around their colonized armoury a bit shly, taking it all in, and it was nice to see them there, you know?

I ask whether there’s a politics to POP and he says no, there’s no explicit political mandate. But the desire to bring people together in a joyful ways in this day and age has an inherent politics to it I think, and he agrees. There’s a social politics to it all, in other words, but no party platform. Maybe the Future of Music Summit is like our politics, he says; and that makes sense. Future of Music panels provided a satisfying brain undergirding to all the show seeing madness, and created a context for lots of interesting conversations.

I ask about cascading positive affects of Pop. He looks at me like I’m tiring him out, and then gets some traction and goes on to talk about 4 different hotels booked to capacity, bars and restaurants getting a bigger and bigger influx, more and more people coming from out of town. It is exhausting when you think about it: all those people, all those shows to organize, all that equipment to rent and move around and figure out the logistics of. I think I still have latent exhaustion from being a celebrant at it, so imagine that the dude in front of me is still walking around in a daze from having, once again, spearheaded it.

Pop is exhausting, Seligman says, intentionally so. It’s lovingly over stuffed, so that if you can’t get into a buzzed up show you don’t bat an eye, you wander a few blocks north or south until you find a line and you get inside and go learn something. Dan Seligman tells me, in a tiny, quiet, rainy bar, that he wants Pop Montreal to really feel like the end of the summer, to be this crazy exhausting beautiful time that you have to recover from, a time that melts in a haze of muchness and good sounds, and that the main thing you remember is that it had a glow about it. In this he and his team were successful. And that’s a remarkable, worth-learning-from thing.

to see all our coverage on POP Montreal, click here. To read what Tessa and her team got out of the Future of Music, try this.