Planning
January-March 2003
January-March 2003
The new year began, and we started to focus once more on the plaque installation and when and where we could make it happen. We knew from our conversations with Jonathan and JT in Reno that the band would likely be starting their tour in early May, so we pulled out our calendars and counted forwards and backwards. We guessed the tour would start around May 15, which meant the band would probably be rehearsing in April, so the date for the plaque installation would likely be towards the end of April. It was January 5 and we had 16 weeks to pull the whole thing together. Would we ever make it and get everything done??
By this point, we had gotten a bunch of email from fans who were interested in coming to San Francisco for the event so we sent out a "save the date" email to those fans as well as to the ones who had attended our previous two conventions. We didn't actually have a date at this point, but we needed to get the ball rolling and giving people an idea of when this might take place would let them get it on their calendars and begin to budget for traveling from points near and far. We also started tracking down the former band members to give them a general idea about what we were doing and when it might be. We knew from the start that if any of us tried to contact Steve Perry we wouldn't get anywhere, so we passed that job on to Dennis Erokan and went after the rest of the guys on our own. We'd all met Gregg Rolie and Steve Smith over the past few years from attending shows, and Aynsley Dunbar had donated an item to raffle off for our 2002 convention, so they all knew who we were. This made letting them know what was planned much easier and we got to hear their responses first hand.
One of our biggest concerns about the event was, would it be better to have a concert happening at the same time, and if so, how would we pull THAT off. We'd also been concerned that our earliest conversations indicated that everything would need to happen in ONE day. The logistics of that were a bit overwhelming to us, and we tried to relax while people other than us were working out the details. Not an easy task for a group of control freaks!
After several weeks of back and forth between the organizing committee and JT on behalf of the band, the date of April 25 was confirmed. Better yet, the band was working on putting together a benefit concert for that weekend!! A BIG sigh of relief for us, but it was now early February and we were looking at 11 weeks to get everything lined up. We made a list of all the things that needed to be done -- get the plaque designed, get all the permits in order for the city, and most importantly find sponsors to help pay for these expenses! This on top of getting all of the logistics for the fan convention in order too, and throw in the memorabilia for the Hard Rock Café on the side! The to do list was 3 pages long by the time we'd added everything, and that was just for things that needed to be finished by the beginning of March! We all took a look at that list and knew -- our lives would not be our own until this was done. Nearly every free moment was going to have to be put into working towards our goal. It's a good thing we all really like each other and work well together as we were practically going to be living together for three months!
With a task list that large, everyone had to take on a set of assignments. Darla was charged with dealing with the band (including past members,) Cheryl would continue working with the California Music Awards and the San Francisco bureaucracy, Leslie would take care of a lot of the leg work involved in finding hotels and buses, Mary Ann would work on sponsorship, and I would manage the budget and fan interest. All other tasks would be juggled among us as time and ability allowed, and there were many tasks and very little time!
One of the ideas that we had for the fan convention was to put together a program for the attendees -- something similar to the concert programs that were once available at any concert. We lucked out in this regard when fellow Journey fan Rob Rennert offered his talents to create artwork for us and design our program. We immediately took him up on his offer and gave him our thoughts and let him run wild with it. We also used some of the artwork he designed and plugged it in to the website that Darla and I were working on.
We began having monthly meetings with Dennis Erokan to go over all the aspects of the induction ceremony -- from contacting sponsors to how the event program would go to how contacting previous band members was going. After meeting with Dennis we'd continue planning all the other details, so 4 and 5-hour meetings were not uncommon. They would become more frequent the closer we got to April 25.
Meanwhile, we needed to come up with a design for the plaque. We got an idea of what the band wanted and shot off a quick rendition of what we thought it might look like. Ideas started passing back and forth and we coordinated with band management and Don Rich, the artist commissioned to craft the plaque. Cheryl and I took a quick visit to Don's studio in Oakland one Friday morning and got a rough idea how the plaque would be made. (This was followed by a very productive brainstorming lunch at Jack London Square! Sure beats working!)
We'd also been asked to send out formal invitations to all the band members, past and present, to follow up on the emails and phone calls that had already gone out and to help solidify the importance of the event. So invitations needed to be drafted, ordered, and a list of names gathered since we would need to reach a few other dignitaries other than the band members.
And what about the fan convention? We needed to visit hotels and confirm space. How many people did we expect?? Since we were waiting on official word about the concert, we were limited on the amount of advance notice we could put out to fans. We knew most people would be interested in attending only if there was a concert, but we couldn't say there was going to be one until the band had finalized their plans. The best we could do was estimate our numbers based on the previous year, so we focused on accommodating 90-100 people. We'd worry what do to if we got more if and when that happened. Then we got a break, we were given permission to discuss the concert with the people who had already expressed interest in attending! We knew that word would get out about the concert once we announced it, but we didn't realize just how FAST it would get out! Less than 12 hours after we were given permission to discuss the concert, it had spread like wildfire on various message forums. We had to work quickly with the Journey team to put that fire out!
And of course, the questions began. Who's coming? When will we know who's coming? So we began monitoring the fan sites and responding to questions as best we could. We knew what everyone wanted to know -- would Steve Perry be attending -- but we also knew we weren't likely to receive an answer for weeks. So the answer stayed the same -- everyone has been invited, we can't say who will be coming. (Why is it no one asked about Mike Baird?? We spent a good couple of days confirming that he was, in fact, not dead as someone had suggested!)
By the end of February, we were all feeling a bit frazzled. We needed to get the design for the plaque approved, finalize hotel and transportation arrangements, and that darned to do list didn't seem to be getting any shorter. I think this is the point where we all freaked out a little bit. This event was GOING to happen, but we had NO idea how we were going to pull it off. There was just so much to do -- I would go to bed and toss and turn and have ideas pop into my head so often that I started taking a notebook to bed and would jot things down as they popped in my head, even if that happened to be at 2:00 a.m. and I had just jolted awake shouting "We need goodie bags!" This event became the last thing we thought of before drifting off to sleep and the first thing to pop in our minds when we woke up. We'd always said Journey was a part of our daily lives, but now they were LITERALLY a part of our daily lives; with no "off" button to give us a break. We had nearly 1200 email messages to sort through between the committee mailing list and the attendee mailing list -- and that doesn't include emails sent to each other at work or questions received privately or email contact with outside parties (band, hotels, etc.) And we still had two months to go!
March came roaring in and we kept on running. We had set a deposit deadline of March 1, but since we were still waiting for an on-sale date for the concert we scrapped it and made our "final payment" date our drop-dead sign up date - April 1. We knew people were waiting for those tickets to go on sale. What our attendees didn't know, and we did, was that JT had offered us 80 tickets to sell to our attendees. Of course, we couldn't say anything about it until the ticket prices had been solidified and an on-sale date was announced. We also realized that our "maximum occupancy" had been decided for us. We only had enough tickets for 80 people - any one who wanted to attend JPP after those tickets were sold would need to be responsible for their own seats. As it turned out, we didn't need all 80 tickets, some of our attendees preferred to purchase balcony seats and our final total attendee count was 75 attendees and guests.
We got a good bit of news early on in the month, the band had agreed to come to the Hard Rock Café and present a guitar for their collection! This was just the energy jolt we needed. Every time we began to feel run down and overwhelmed, something cool like this would come along and push us back in the right direction. Of course, like so much else, our original vision of the JPP attendees in a private room with the band donating a guitar became a much larger event. A local radio station was now involved - 107.7 "The Bone" and they wanted to have contest winners come to the Hard Rock. Adding in the band and their guests, the numbers were starting to get huge -- much more than the 100 that the room could hold! Once again small and simple got overtaken by events.
With about 6 weeks remaining to get everything finished, we realized we needed to set some dead lines and work backwards for when we needed to have things done. When did we need the T-shirts? The programs? When should the formal invitations go out? And oh my god - where are we going to get the addresses we need to mail the invitations??!! That's when it hit us, we needed to have MOST things done by the end of March. Okay, time for panic to kick in again!
It was time to get it in gear in dealing with the bureaucracy that is San Francisco. First on our list was addressing the "disability access" requirements for the event. Primary in this was an audio recording to be played at the ceremony and then placed in the public library for the visually impaired. Towards that end, Cheryl set out to contact a local radio personality who had been involved in the seven previous inductions - Paul "The Lobster" Wells. Personally, I was thrilled with the prospect of having The Lobster involved -- I'd listened to him on the radio quite a bit in my college days. And - bonus! - he had an interesting Journey-esque connection, he can be heard on the Storm track "In the Raw."
Meanwhile, Mary Ann and Leslie were out beating the bushes for us trying to find sponsors. We'd struck out with local radio stations, and hoped some other companies affiliated with the band would come through. We made contact with Gibson guitars and were also pursuing Dean Markley Strings on a tip from Dennis. Hopefully one of them would come through for us.
Back in San Francisco, it was time to file the permit request to close the street for the ceremony. This meant once the permit fee was paid that someone had to attend a public hearing in order to get approval. Cheryl had been dealing with the city, but wasn't available for the hearing, so I agreed to take the morning off work and attend the hearing. I wound up taking a whole day off since I was going to need to meet with Don Rich and deliver the final plaque specs and then see Dennis to have him sign letters to all the band members congratulating them on receiving the plaque.
The hearing was an interesting experience and went fairly quickly and our street closure was approved on the condition that we pay for four hours of a parking control officer. Woo hoo more fees! Here's hoping that a sponsor comes through soon, because we're finding more expenses that we had anticipated! After the hearing I walked over to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium to verify the order of the plaques for yet another permit that Cheryl was working on. I looked at the order of the plaques and figured that the preferred location for Journey's plaque would be next to Jefferson Airplane rather than at the other end near Metallica.
I headed home for a few hours and made some follow-up phone calls -- what was the status on the formal invitations, and where the heck were the checks for the bank account I'd opened to handle the funds from JPP???!!! Soon it was time to hit the road and see Don and Dennis, so it was back in my car for the drive across the bay. I quickly dropped of the final version of the plaque design for Don to work from then headed off to my meeting with Dennis. We were meeting at a Starbucks in Lafayette and I arrived early so I stood outside waiting for him. He pulled up in his SUV a short while later with his cell phone to his ear -- a perfectly normal routine for the Bay Area! He signaled to me that he saw me and needed to finish the call. It was worth the wait. When he got out and we sat down in Starbucks he told me he had been talking to a representative from Dean Markley Strings and that they would put up about half of the funds we needed! Woo hoo!!!!! Things were rolling now!
Having a sponsor come through was another energizing moment for us and we were able to breathe a little easier. We were still short on our total projected expenses, but we had confidence that it would come through. Where and how we didn't know, but we are all firm believers in the power of positive thinking -- it would work out. It had to.
Reality infringed on our plans in March when the war in Iraq began. Besides having general concerns about whether or not people would still want to travel in such uncertain times, a quick look at the news showed the general sentiment towards the war in San Francisco. Protestors shut down the city for a few days and the thought crossed our minds -- what if this keeps up until April? Will the city allow us to have an event if their resources are busy handling large crowds of protestors? Fortunately that fear was unfounded as the protests became smaller and scattered through out the Bay Area and any impact on our plans would be minimal. So long as people were still willing to travel.
March was winding down quickly and time for us to scramble around getting all of our deadlines met. Over the weeks, Rob had been sending the program he had been designing page by page. Leslie and I had done some of the leg work for research and a call went out to everyone for scans of their memorabilia, but all the design and creative work was done by Rob. As each page came through we were amazed. Our original idea was to have a program with a yearbook kind of theme to it, but nothing we had mocked up could even remotely compare with the incredible job Rob was doing for us!
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