Let’s Start the Show

When a couple of college kids put on a show at UW, they set the stage to make Seattle a hip-hop hotbed.

By Matthew Halverson

WITH THE BILL for SHOW’s first event filled out, Whiton booked the HUB Ballroom, which could hold 1,500, for January 15, 2000. And while he negotiated the booking fee with Mos Def’s agent, SHOW members handled the promotion. They spent that winter papering bus stops and utility poles throughout the U District with posters for the event printed up by the student activities office. When they ran out Chesneau sneaked into the engineering offices after hours to print more. They convinced the owners of barbershops and record stores—where hip-hop fans hung out and argued over their favorite rappers’ skills—to sell their tickets. Matsui previewed the show with an article in the Daily. And by the time Mos made it to town, the concert was a sellout.

Even though it was UW’s production, SHOW banked more than a thousand dollars that night. Part of the proceeds came from the sale of concessions Costco had donated for the event, and they made the rest by letting in more students after the show started, charging them the full admission price and then pocketing the cash. “There was definitely some do-it-yourself ethos there, a drive to do whatever it took to get it done, whether or not you were technically following the rules,” says original SHOW member Jason Norcross. “But that’s kind of what hip-hop is anyway. So we saw it as a good thing. We were like, ‘Who cares what the system says? We’re going to do it. We’re going to get it done.’”

The event earned SHOW credibility not just locally but outside of Seattle as well. Brent Sayers and the rest of Minneapolis’s Rhymesayers management team had been watching the city since Jonathan Moore had opened their eyes to it, so when they decided to send one of their groups, the Arsonists, out West that spring, they called the newly minted promoters.

A Mars Hill Church pastor opened the nonprofit Paradox specifically to circumvent the Teen Dance Ordinance.

Just months into their relationship with UW, SHOW’s members had already begun to discuss the merits of putting up their own money for future events. They would sit at their favorite pizza joint in the U District after class, eating slices and grousing about how much work they’d put into the Mos Def show, only to watch the school take most of the profits. They were natural marketers, and they’d seen what it took to produce a show. The only problem? They were still committed to producing all-ages shows, and finding an affordable venue that would host one was virtually impossible. By now they were well-versed on the restrictions of the Teen Dance Ordinance; Chesneau and one of the newer members, Melissa Darby, had attended town hall–style meetings with representatives of then Mayor Paul Schell to discuss how it limited their options. And then one day they looked out the window and saw the Paradox Theater.

The Paradox, which to that point had primarily been a punk club, was significantly smaller than the HUB. But that was okay because Matsui and Chesneau felt comfortable trying it out for their first off-campus show. More important, though, it could host all-ages events: A Mars Hill Church pastor who knew that the Teen Dance Ordinance didn’t apply to buildings owned by nonprofits had opened the venue the year before specifically to circumvent the law. Chesneau walked over one day, talked to the talent buyer, and booked a date in the first week of May for the Arsonists.

They printed up more flyers and posters and papered the U District again. And they started networking on campus. “I had no fears of approaching anyone who looked like they were a part of the culture and trying to get to know them, to let them know what was happening and what we were trying to do,” Chesneau says. They were recruiting a community that could bear witness to the growth of hip-hop in their hometown.

“Sam and Marc got it,” says Jason Cook, the Arsonists’ tour manager at the time and a VP of Rhymesayers today. “They weren’t promoters just doing it for the money. They were doing it because they cared about the music.” Not only that, they made touring artists feel like family. That weekend in May, Matsui and Chesneau took the group to see Bruce Lee’s grave at the Lakeview Cemetery because one of the members was a fan, and Chesneau booked a dental appointment for another member who needed an emergency root canal. As for the show, it was another sellout. It didn’t prove they could hit a home run with every production, but their success was helping to dispel the myth that Seattle was just “that city that made grunge.”

BETWEEN JANUARY 2000 and the end of 2003, SHOW produced more than 50 hip-hop events in Seattle. On a good night the crew could net a couple thousand dollars, which they’d stuff in a Ziploc bag and stash in Matsui’s couch cushions until they were ready to put on the next show. On bad nights Matsui would have to go to the cash machine and withdraw money from his own account to cover what they owed the group. But most nights were a wash. “There were a lot of shows that were just done out of love,” Norcross says. “At one point we had talked about being a real nonprofit. Breaking even wasn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as it left us in the position where we still had money for the next one.”

Matsui and Chesneau have a hard time agreeing on which event was their best. Matsui says it was their first Brainstorm MC Battle in February 2001, a tournament that pitted local amateur rappers against each other in one-on-one freestyle competitions. Each MC was allowed 30 seconds to rhyme off the cuff about his opponent, and a panel of judges decided who would advance. The battle sold out the I Spy, but just like at the Mos Def show, they kept selling tickets until kids were standing on seats and in the aisles. “People were standing on each other’s shoulders,” Matsui says.

For Chesneau, it was the next battle, the following February. The success of the first Brainstorm had increased demand for tickets, so SHOW went back to UW’s HUB Ballroom, where it all began. Word had spread through message boards and prospective battlers came from across the country. “I’ll never forget how I felt,” Chesneau says. “I was sitting there in the lobby, and I felt so accomplished. Part of it was that people were saying, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in Seattle.’ And that event kind of put us on par with national events. It felt like we were a part of the national scene.”