Ybor City is about to embark on its fifth year of using Big Pre-Fest in little Ybor to showcase Tampa Bay’s punk rock connection to Gainesville, a town which has been hosting one of the world’s best punk music festivals — The Fest — for a decade and a half. Close to 100 bands are set to play the two-date party in Ybor.
Fest founder Tony Weinbender says that he loves Ybor City. It’s the perfect community to showcase, according to him, and Weinbender wants you to be able to do it all (Pre-Fest 5, Fest 16) for free.
All you have to do is volunteer.
Volunteering, via anything, is a good practice in general. It makes you feel like you are part of a community, and it connects you with people who often become lifelong friends. In the case of Pre-Fest and Fest — where one shift can last anywhere from five to eight hours — it gives you a chance to take a love for live music to another level. It gets you behind the scenes, and it gives you an opportunity to put a community’s personal stamp on an event you care about. Sometimes it even turns into jobs with PR companies, record labels and the like. Like anything else in life, you get back what you put in.
Volunteering at Pre-Fest also gets you free passes. Here’s how it works.
- Work one Pre-Fest shift and get a pass for Wednesday and Thursday in Ybor City.
- Work two Pre-Fest shifts and the folks at Fest will throw in a three-day pass to party all weekend in Gainesville — no strings attached.
- All volunteers also get a special shirt designed by Eric Jazvac of Gainesville’s famed Wunderland tattoo shop. These are only for volunteers according to the Fest and “DO NOT SAY VOLUNTEER on them so you can wear them the rest of your life without feeling like a big dork.”
Truth be told, Pre-Fest needs volunteers so that bands can see what a great community we’ve built here, and there’s no way the party can keep happening without help.
Interested parties can see different kinds of volunteer jobs here and should definitely be at a mandatory meeting at the Hilton Garden Inn (1700 E 9th Ave.) in Ybor City on Tuesday, October 24 at 7 p.m. More information is available here.
What are you waiting for?
This article appears in Oct 12-19, 2017.