Patten Gym was transported to 1960s Haight-Ashbury on Saturday night as several jam bands played to more than 2,500 dreadlock-haired, tie-dye-wearing hippies during the second annual PhilFest.
The concert and other events of the weekend gave people the opportunity to celebrate music, Frisbee and environmental awareness in memory of Phil Semmer, a Northwestern student who died in a car accident in August 2000.
“We decided to find a way to honor Phil,” said Leif Moravy, a friend of Semmer’s and one of the concert’s organizers. “We thought the best way to do it was to bring together some of his passions.”
Music lovers from all over the area donated $5 each to hear nearly 12 hours of music from bands like headliners Sound Tribe Sector Nine, The Slip and Robert Walter’s 20th Congress.
Moravy said donations from the weekend totaled about $4,000 and will go to the Philip Austin Semmer Memorial Fund. The fund will finance a student internship at the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental think-tank in Colorado where Semmer wanted to work.
A&O Productions and Students for Ecological and Environmental Development co-sponsored the event.
“It just worked out really well for both groups,” Moravy said. “It’s great when you get more than one student group involved because it just opens up more of the campus.”
A&O just began collaborating with PhilFest this year, but SEED’s involvement began last year when the group worked with Semmer’s friends to turn its annual Earthfest concert into PhilFest.
Genevieve Maricle, SEED co-president, said working with Semmer’s friends helped make PhilFest into a much larger event than Earthfest.
“We were working with people who were really passionate about it,” said Maricle, a Weinberg senior.
SEED and other environmental groups set up booths promoting green issues.
“There’s a ton of people here and we’ve had this information out all day and people have been coming by and looking at it,” Maricle said. “They’re enjoying the music, but they’re getting information too, and becoming more environmentally aware.”
The addition of A&O provided the extra funding and experience necessary to make the second PhilFest much bigger than the first.
“Leif is director of production for A&O and was a great friend of Phil’s, so that just naturally brought the two together,” said Neil Shah, A&O’s senator.
Shah, a Weinberg senior, said the organizers wanted to make PhilFest big this year because Semmer would have graduated from the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in June. This also is Moravy’s last year at Northwestern – he graduated from McCormick last year and completed a Music degree at the end of Winter Quarter.
Maricle said more NU students came than last year, but much of the large audience was made up of people from outside Evanston who follow the bands in the lineup.
Jim Brady, 36, of Chicago said he follows many of the bands, especially The Slip and the Fareed Haque Group, and heard about the event on the Internet.
“Fareed was cool – that was the highlight for me,” Brady said.
A&O kicked off the festivities with a DJ concert featuring BT, Kid Koala and DJ Logic/Project Logic on Friday night. An Ultimate Frisbee tournament on Sunday rounded out the weekend and many of Moravy’s high school friends comprised “Eagle and the Corkers,” one of three teams willing to brave the cold to participate.
“Eagle and the Corkers is the hardest-partying, most disorganized Ultimate team I’ve ever had the unbelievable pleasure of playing with,” said Jack Fahden, a friend of Semmer’s.
Fahden, of Waysata, Minn., also attended Saturday’s music festival.
“That was definitely the best concert in Chicago and therefore the world,” Fahden said.