June 2009

SCI keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth posted this clip of his band rehearsing for their upcoming appearance at the Rothbury Festival… String Cheese Incident – Outside & Inside

After registering more than 100,000 voters last year, HeadCount plans to build upon their success with the launch of the “What’s Your Issue?” campaign encouraging music fans to become informed, active citizens.

Those who head over to the revamped HeadCount.org or visit the HeadCount table at a concert can answer a short issues survey about the issues that matter to them and be entered win free VIP tickets to Outside Lands Music Festival, held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park August 28-30, 2009, plus two round-trip airfares on Southwest Airlines to anywhere in the U.S., get access to free downloads and receive an update every six weeks on the issue that matters most to them. Let’s not gloss over that last point – you don’t have to worry about HeadCount updates flooding your inbox.

The organization’s revamped website has just been updated to include a wide range of resources that facilitate civic participation including issue pages, their blog, a listing of volunteer opportunities and a legislative action area where you can email your Congressional representatives. We recently asked HeadCount founders Marc Brownstein and Andy Bernstein about “What’s Your Issue?” and here’s what they had to say…

Hidden Track: The last election was over and you guys were extremely successful registering voters, can you tell us about the process of figuring out where you went from there with HeadCount?

Marc Brownstein: We’ve always known where we were going to go from there. The mission has always been a two-part mission. One of the parts is to utilize the power of music to organize the community at large in terms of voter registration. And then to take it one step further, part of our mission was going to be – ultimately- to become the civic engagement branch of the jamband community, the people who train the volunteers of the future.

So we built the foundation around voter registration and electing the officials is the very, very important first step. One of the things that I like to say is it’s not who is gonna be there running your government necessarily – that’s the most important thing – but once they get there how they are going to run it. That’s what HeadCount is going to be about in the future. It’s about issues and finding out what the issues of the kids in the jamband community are and how they can engage with the politicians in Washington to be running our country in the direction that our community wants to go in.

READ ON for more from Marc Brownstein and Andy Bernstein…

Green Day will be performing each night this week – with the exception of Monday – on NBC’s Later with Carson Daly to promote their new album, 21st Century Breakdown.The

Back in April we told you about Red Sox prospect Lars Anderson’s appreciation of the Grateful Dead and at the time we wondered whether he was into Phish as well.