It started with two dollars. In 2007, former Gainesville musician Mike O’Malley and his band, Officer Flossie, played a gig in town and earned a whopping two bucks — quite literally, “whopping,” as for that money, one can buy a Whopper hamburger and nothing else. O’Malley decided to do something about it. He started Society Promotions, a group with the simple goal of putting on concerts and paying the musicians well.
When O’Malley met Jacob Larson, Society Promotions became something more. Larson, a pastor at Vineyard of Gainesville, had attended a conference in New York where he watched presentations about how to better serve and engage with one’s community. Using that information, he urged O’Malley to promote not just music but also art and local business. Soon, their talks included sustainability and social justice.
After O’Malley moved away, Larson met Josh Wilson, a local painter, musician and youth minister.
“He looked cool,” Larson recalled. “Youth ministers usually look pretty nerdy.” Wilson joined, he said, because, “The idea of culture shaping was appealing to me.”
Larson and Wilson became the leaders of Society Promotions.
Wilson had recently moved to Gainesville from Miami and had never lived in a small town before.
“The idea of being able to reach a larger segment of the population — that you’re not just a piece of rice in a rice bowl — was something different,” he said. “It was really intriguing to me.”
Larson and Wilson began working on what they call “the trifecta,” which means working with a venue, an artist and a cause. In this way, they combined their love of local music, art and charity into events that could foster relationships among all three while helping local businesses.
Since then, Society Promotions has held or participated in more than 30 events, including a fundraiser for victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and an appearance at Gainesville Fashion week to benefit the Eden Project, a group that helps women escape prostitution in China. Both events raised hundreds of dollars, but for Larson and Wilson, the work goes beyond money.
“It’s just as important to create a connection between artist and patron,” Wilson said. “I think we are more about the relationships that we help create because even in raising money for charity, it’s not like we raise these huge amounts. But, we have brought this cause to the attention of people, and hopefully they have a relationship with it that goes beyond that one show or the five-dollar bill they put in the bucket.”
Larson calls it “the healthiest version of networking.”
“It’s not leveraging people for their positions or power. It’s realizing that together we can create something where the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts,” he said. “A win for us is if there has been an opportunity for people to become invested in a cause. But then, some people come for the cause, and now they’re exposed to musicians they’ve never heard of. On top of that, maybe they come to a venue they’ve never been to.”
Recently, Society Promotions has focused on “cover nights” at the Bull, a downtown Gainesville bar where Wilson is art curator and Larson manages. For cover nights, Larson and Wilson pick a famous artist and contact a diverse group of local musicians to play covers of the artist’s songs. So far, they’ve devoted nights to Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Queen, Motown and Prince. They also host an annual cover night for Christmas music, which is set for December 11, 2014.
Local musician Ricky Kendall is a stalwart performer at these events as well as an unofficial member of the Society Promotions board of directors.
“The reason I like what they’re doing — there’s no agenda except to make the best event they can possibly make,” Kendall said. “They just want to have a good artistic platform.”
Kendall continued, “My favorite times are when I’ve been able to see musicians I don’t know. Also, I get to play these really cool covers. I would’ve never done any of the things I’ve done at Society Promotions if they weren’t around. I wouldn’t have stretched myself like that.”
It is a nonprofit group, though it keeps some money for operational costs. According to Larson, “If you include what we’ve spent out of our own pockets on the organization, we’re in the red.”
As Larson said, “There’s a non-guilt driven expectation of myself to invest. This is the natural outpouring of me being a healthy inquisitive person that wants to help other people to love their city and help remove injustice where it is.”
Wilson’s motivations are similar.
“I have a strong sense that there ought to be justice and beauty in the world,” he said. “Using creativity to see that come to life, I mean, that just turns me on. I think that’s why I’m an artist.
“I think that’s why I was created.”