Last night, a few friends and I threw Cody Rigby a benefit concert. Cody is an amazing local songwriter who has had his own solo folk project (codyrigby.com) and now focuses on his "all-male girl rock band", Back Chat. He's an amazing guy and a lot of Provo really came together to help him out.
Here's the story: Cody was shopping for groceries in a local grocery store. He payed for his food and was walking out with his bags when he beeped on the way out. They patted him down and found a pack of gum he had forgotten to pay for. I won't say which one as to not give Macy's a bad name, oops, but they were ridiculous. They took him to court and he ended up having to pay $1000 in fines or spend 6 months in jail. I don't know about you, but that just made me want to flip something over when I heard the news. Although Macy's did reduce the fine after a bit of persuasion, $750 is still a lot of money for a pack of gum.
So Colin Hatch and I decided to throw Cody a secret show.
We planned for two weeks and got a bunch of local musicians to come out and play a free show. Lindenfield, Kathleen Frewin, Nicholas Allen, JR Boyce, Brady Parks and the IndiAnns, Apt and I were all on the list of acts that would play at the show. We decided that Back Chat could play at the end once Cody was completely in shock haha It was such an impressive list that I didn't doubt that it would all work out.
Then I decided to design a logo for the fest and Caroline and Trevor stepped up to the plate and made these amazing t shirts.
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We were all really excited about how things were going and somehow we all kept our mouths shut and kept Cody completely in the dark. The concert was advertised by viral texts and flyers and personal Facebook messages. We couldn't make posters or even a Facebook event just in case Cody noticed. So we relied on people spreading the word to their friends. I'll admit it scared me a bit.
Then Friday all there was left to do was make a giant poster and keep Cody distracted. Here's the poster I made:
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(I don't know why I accidentally put an "I" in front of Apt...)
It's HUGE. I painted over an old tarp sign that was tossed aside outside of a strip mall (which may or may not have been a misdemeanor...). I'm very stoked about how it turned out. But it made me an hour late to pick him up! So I hurried and hung that up outside of Muse and started to realize that there were problems: Colin wasn't back from Arizona yet. When I plan things, I don't handle changes too well. So I think I was stressing out a bit. I was worried that we wouldn't be able to get into Muse (He co-owns the place) and I realized that he wouldn't be able to play (he is Lindenfield and he's the bassist of Back Chat) so that was two bands down. Then I heard that Adam (Apt) was going to be in Salt Lake City that night for a show. Then I heard Nicholas Allen bailed. So I was stressing out that there would only be me and Brady because I didn't have a way to contact Kathleen or JR. But Brady was a trooper and rallied me into doing it no matter what. Besides, we had already invited everyone in Provo.
So I made Cody dinner and he kept asking me what we were doing that night and I just had to say that it was a surprise. Brady didn't know if Muse was open so he was heading over and Cody randomly said "I have a key to Muse". I didn't really drill him on how he knew that that was the hold up but I took the opportunity and ran with it. We rushed to Muse and realized that it was already open when we got there. There was an employee at the register, a sound guy already setting up, Brady was in the back helping him and Kathleen was turning in the cafe. I looked at my phone and there was a text from Colin saying "I've got this". Thank goodness!
When we got there, Cody saw the poster and laughed (He loved it so much that it's now in his room waiting to be hung up). He was smiley the whole night! And as we waited for 9:00 to roll around, more and more people showed up. Brady's friend, Ben, offered to play a set and JR showed up. Then the place started filling up! We had a good 50 people there! And I was worried that only 10 would show haha It turned out to be a really good show! The order was like this:
Kathleen
Me
Ben
Brady Parks
JR
Cody (he played a set of his folk stuff!)
then Apt showed up with Chance Lewis and performed a set
It was such a party and everything went really well :) People donated, people cheered, people stayed for the whole show, people made shout outs to Cody (including a "f*** the man!" from Kathleen haha golden moment in the show), people danced for Apt, and people bought almost all of the t shirts! It was a proud moment in my life to be thanked onstage by Cody haha
So that was my best 2012 moment so far! I seem to have written a novel about it, but it was pretty exciting :)