Shiny, shiny pants and bleach-blond hair.

After the concert, a sometime impresario approached me (after I had been identified as a concert organizer) and said to me, "Ką Jūs čia padarėt — tai jėga." I was pretty flattered, and he explained to me that CLJS's main problem regarding turnout was with faulty marketing. I have no idea how the marketing could have been better: CLJS members postered, bought ads in Amerikos lietuvis, and even had Amerikos lietuvis run a front-page article on inCulto's leader, Jurgis Didžiulis Valencia. Cards with concert information were distributed to familiar haunts in the Lithuanian-American community: PLC, Lietuvėlė, Daddy's, Bravo, Smilga, and so on. Nearly every car (some 450) parked at the Mamontovas concert at Willowbrook even got a card under its windshield wiper. This, we in CLJS hoped, would be "enough" to lure in the new immigrants. To cover the DP diaspora community, we used our extensive email and facebook contacts to rope in our friends from summer camp and so on.

But the miscalculation was that, for the concert to succeed, CLJS needed a showing from the new immigrant community, the "third-wavers." My new acquaintance, the impresario, guessed that around 30 people—or about 10% of the audience—were new immigrants (and of them, he said, about seven were people he brought). I don't know about his numbers, but I do know that we exceeded our expectations among the "second-wavers" by about 100, and we still ended up short.

Why didn't third-wavers come? Perhaps the ads were not attractive enough. Perhaps the marketing was executed in too compressed a time—the posters were up for only a couple of weeks. Or perhaps the problem was with name recognition.

As I wrote in my previous post, inCulto are the third most expensive band in Lithuania (after Mamontovas and Skamp). They have cleaned up at Lithuanian music awards over the past two years, their video for "Boogaloo" was the first Lithuanian video on MTV, and they have played before tens of thousands of listeners at festivals in Klaipėda and the like. Yet throughout the marketing of the concert, blank stares exposing a lack of recognition became the norm. Among people I approached, at best, they would know one or two inCulto songs. The sirgaliai were a handful that I had already identified ahead of time. Even among my good friends, many fretted about going to see a concert "for one song" (take your pick of: "Boogaloo," "Suk, suk ratelį," or, in most cases, "Welcome (to Lithuania)." Sadly, inCulto seemed like a novelty act, a band with a cute video, instead of a subversive band calling for a new approach to the Lithuanian imaginary.

The name recognition suggested a severe problem: if potential concert-goers did not recognize the band, then they would have to go on the faith that CLJS would not fly out some Mickey Mouse band. That's a faith that CLJS does not have any right in demanding (sadly) from the population in Chicago. But the organization assumed that name recognition would be a problem only among second-wavers. That it was a problem among third-wavers was a shock—and it quickly became a potentially insurmountable obstacle.

And this makes me question whether the marketing for the concert was actually bad. Third-wavers, or, at least, enough of them to sell all the tickets we needed to sell to break even, didn't know inCulto well enough to come out. The ads were there. The posters were up. Knowledge of the concert was readily available, so the lack of interest must be tied into disinterest in the band. And that disinterest, if I had to guess, comes because inCulto doesn't play a sugary pop that lands on summer compilations (like Saulės smūgis). That's the first strike. Compounding the issue is that inCulto is a new band—the most generous age for the band is still just over three years. Mamontovas, on the other hand, has been performing in front of Lithuanian audiences for twenty years. Everyone has heard of Mamontovas, no matter when you left Lithuania. Unless you're a pop music junkie (like me), it's almost impossible to have heard of inCulto if you left Lithuania more than three years ago. This is why Mamontovas sells tickets, and this is why Skamp sell tickets. It's not just that they are established; they also have a history that they can call on for a fanbase.

It's a simple question of exposure. Mamontovas gets tons of exposure, in a self-perpetuating cycle, because of his previous accomplishments. There is nothing so fantastic about his new album, from which most of his concerts in the US this time drew their setlists, that explains why twice as many people turned out to pay $40 to see him than to see inCulto here in Chicago. But he's an institution, despite aesthetic irrelevance (save LT United, which is possibly a final droplet of genius quickly evaporating).

inCulto, on the other hand, are reinventing the very idea (and limits) of Lithuanian pop, in a project that is both politically intriguing and booty-shaking. While Mamontovas whines along like he has for the past decade, inCulto are getting asses on the dancefloor, doing something hardly ever seen in Lithuanian popular music—something other than Mamontovo AOR or teeny-bopper būmčik (I don't mean to be so harsh on Mamontovas, but I'm trying to point out the intense differences in the concerts).

But at the risk of sounding whiny—"why don't people come to cool concerts?"—I want to point out that this is a very serious problem. While spending time with the band, we got to talking about having a sort of music festival out here. They were excited about the idea and immediately started naming groups that would be good, but it was all groups that I had never heard of. Yes, they would be cheaper than inCulto, but if we can't even break even bringing in a band with their name recognition, how on earth could CLJS expect to bring a group like, say, Pieno lazeriai out? As a result, then, it becomes economically infeasible to bring any acts over unless they already have insane name recognition among the Lithuanian community. So, in other words, expect to see a lot of Mamontovas concerts and little else, with an occasional Cicinas show to mix things up.

Wouldn't you pay to see this man?