The Yale College Council has narrowed down the list of possible Spring Fling acts to six bands — Alien Ant Farm, Guster, Live, Rusted Root, O.A.R. and Sugar Ray.
The six choices will be posted on the YCC Web site today, along with the options for new YCC representatives. Students can rank their top choices, and the YCC will bid on the bands accordingly.
The YCC officers and Spring Fling chairmen Brad Kahn ’04 and John Harabedian ’04 have worked with Mike Jeremiah, Yale’s agent from Metropolitan Entertainment, to narrow the list down to bands that are available in April and within budget.
“We basically took the really long list of bands that people asked for and went through it and looked for bands that were playing in the Northeast and fit our price range,” YCC President Vidhya Prabhakaran ’03 said.
Yale President Richard Levin has budgeted $45,000 for the act, Prabhakaran said. Outside fund-raising efforts have been unsuccessful, but Prabhakaran said the YCC Sponsors Committee will continue to seek sponsors for a fall concert, which cannot occur without outside funding.
Alhough these bands are not as well-known as the Counting Crows, who gave a concert last fall, Kahn said students should be excited nonetheless.
“I don’t know how people are going to react to seeing the initial list, coming off the Counting Crows concert, but we really think we have some good options with the money we have,” Kahn said. “Some of those names are pretty good names, and we should be pretty psyched about it.”
The YCC plans to bid on the first-choice band from the survey, and if they are unavailable, bid on the second choice, and so on, Prabhakaran said.
“It’s going to be one of those six unless they all become unavailable,” Prabhakaran said. “We won’t announce who we put the bid on and who won the vote until after they’ve accepted the bid or signed the contract, depending on which one’s faster, because that way they can’t raise the price on us suddenly.”
All of the bands fall in the rock and alternative genre.
Aaron Soffin ’04 said he will go to Spring Fling no matter what, but would have preferred to see Weezer.
“I have a friend on YCC, and I’d heard that they were going after Weezer,” Soffin said. “I thought Weezer would have been an excellent smaller band to follow up the more expensive acts — we obviously couldn’t pay for somebody that big. I don’t think the entire campus would really like one of those bands.”
Rusted Root played at Spring Fling in 1999. Other past Spring Fling acts include Ben Harper, Wyclef Jean and the Indigo Girls.
“YCC is extremely excited about these six bands,” Prabhakaran said. “We know it’s going to be a great Spring Fling.”