Guster brings 'Eco-Village' to campus

Have you thought about going green? The Guster concert on April 24 will not only provide music at the University of Richmond's Robins Center, but will also feature an Eco-Village that will educate students on environmental sustainability on campus.

Guster's Campus Consciousness Tour is half rock concert, half environmental awareness campaign. In 2004, Guster's guitarist and vocalist, Adam Gardner, and his wife, Lauren Sullivan, created an environmental organization called Reverb, which works with members of the music industry to promote environmental sustainability.

Amy Newsock, a member of Richmond's Campus Activities Board, said she was excited about Guster's Eco- Village, which will be set up outside of the Robins Center on Friday, until Guster performs. There will be tents in the Eco-Village that will feature Reverb, Silk Soy Milk, the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance and the University of Richmond RENEW/Sierra Club, Reverb representative Amy Makowiecki said.

Silk Soy Milk will have samples of chocolate soy milk in its tent. Whoever drinks the most chocolate soy milk will get to meet Guster after the concert.

The tent will also include a "Guster Eco Video Game" and the person with the highest score at the end of the concert will receive a year's supply of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, Makowiecki said.

RENEW/Sierra Club will feature a bike that powers a blender, which will allow students who ride it to create their own fruit smoothies, Makowiecki said.

Students who bring recyclables to the RENEW/Sierra Club tent and place them in the appropriate bins will receive a raffle ticket for a chance to win a specialized bike provided by Reverb, RENEW/Sierra Club co-president Megan Sebasky said. Makowiecki said the bike would be raffled off at the end of the tour.

Reverb will have a tent supporting its Carbon Offset Program, Makowiecki said. At this tent, students can make a $3 donation to support lean energy projects like wind farms. Students who make this donation will receive a "Kiss Me I'm Carbon Neutral" sticker, an exclusive

Guster song download, a Guster bumper sticker and will be entered into a drawing to win a guitar signed by Guster, which will be selected at the end of the tour.

"It'll be cool to see organizations that Reverb brings and Richmond organizations come together [in the Eco-Village]," Newsock said. The concert is only two days after Earth Day, so the timing is great, Newsock said.

Guster will be around all afternoon on the day of the concert, Sebasky said. "We will most likely have Guster play bocci ball on the Westhampton Green for any students to join in," she said.

Members of CAB said they were excited that Guster could perform at all this year. April 24 was the only date that the school would allow CAB to schedule a concert in the Robins Center, CAB member Jimmy Rague said.

"You're lucky if you can find someone that comes on that one day," CAB member Colby Sheffer said. "Guster was a relief to say the least, because we were waiting for a long time to see if they could fit us into their tour."

Rague said: "A lot of the acts that we were looking at originally [such as Girl Talk] couldn't perform on that date or they were too much for our budget. And Guster was available and in our price range. [Our budget] is significantly lower than other schools of our caliber."

CAB receives about $80,000 to fund its programs for the entire year, CAB president Josh Huffines said. This budget is about 60 percent less than most schools that are the same size as Richmond, he said. The Guster concert cost about $45,000, Huffines said.

Newsock said that a lot of students had been disappointed that Richmond usually didn't have big concerts.

"I feel bad for students because we all have friends at these bigger schools like Emory [and they] get bands like O.A.R.," she said. "People ask [for bands like that] and get frustrated with us because we can't do it and it's just out of CAB's control."

Sheffer said, "Kids want Kanye [West], and it's like, 'Do you have $200,000 lying around?' because we don't."

Besides paying the band's agent to have it at the concert, CAB also pays for the cost of the concert's setup in the Robins Center, Sheffer said.

"We really, really try," she said. "It's just that students have a tough time understanding how hard it is to put on a concert."

CAB spends a lot of money on advertising as well, Rague said. To run a newspaper article for a week costs more than $500, he said.

"As of now we haven't sold many tickets," Rague said. "But we hope most people will buy tickets on the day of the concert. We expect to have about 1,000 people."

This will be Newsock's fourth time seeing Guster in concert and she raves about them. "It will be the cherry on top of the year," she said.

Contact reporter Ryan Clark at ryan.clark@richmond.edu