SEAC's new formula delivers success in Quadstock XXI

For the third year in a row, the weather gods blessed Seattle University's Student Events and Activities Council with a perfect day for Quadstock XXI. With an overcast but not rainy sky, more than 1,000 students stormed the Union Green and the Quad for the university's annual music festival Saturday.

In previous years, the SEAC-organized event built its main stage line-up around an understandable if imbalanced formula: one solid headliner and a bevy of lesser-known local acts. For this year's festival, Quadstock chair Adam Toth says SEAC sought to rethink the way the Quadstock main stage functioned by providing audience members with a more solid and well-rounded musical lineup.

"Quadstock is a festival, you know," said Toth, senior creative writing major. "So we wanted it to be less like a concert at the Showbox, where you often get a really great headliner with a bunch of unknown openers playing before them, and more like a festival like Sasquatch, where it's just good bands all the time."

And in that sense, Quadstock XXI was a huge success. But beyond the main stage and its solid lineup of crowd-pleasing musical acts, the whole day went off aplomb, drawing one of the highest attendances in the festival's history; SEAC estimates almost 1,500 Seattle U community members attended the event—300 more people than Quadstock XX pulled in.

The event took place over the course of 10 hours, starting at noon on the Union Green with headliner Tokyo Police Club finishing their performance at 10 p.m.

In typical Seattle U student fashion, attendance on the green—which hosted eight different musical performances and an array of club-sponsored activities this year—started small and built gradually, with students trickling in and out periodically between bouts of drinking at the notorious, annually held "Passport Parties."

SEAC sought to rethink the way the Quadstock main stage functioned by providing audience members with a more solid and well-rounded musical lineup.

"Quadstock is a festival, you know," said Toth, senior creative writing major. "So we wanted it to be less like a concert at the Showbox, where you often get a really great headliner with a bunch of bad bands playing before them, and more like a festival like Sasquatch, where it's just good bands all the time."

And in that sense, Quadstock XXI was a huge success. But beyond the main stage and its solid lineup of crowd-pleasing musical acts, the whole day went off impressively, drawing one of the highest attendances in the festival's history; SEAC estimates almost 1,500 Seattle U community members attended the event—300 more people than last year's.

The event took place over the course of 10 hours, starting at noon on the Union Green and finishing with Tokyo Police Club's encore at 10 p.m.

In typical Seattle U student fashion, attendance on the green—which hosted eight different musical performances and an array of club-sponsored activities—started small and built gradually, with students trickling in and out periodically between bouts of drinking at the notorious, annually held "Passport Parties."

In order for students to get into the Passport Parties, they purchase T-shirts that act as their ticket into the parties. This year's were especially classy: they were neon yellow with the words "STOCKQUAD" written on the front and the phrase "I'm not as think as you drunk I am" emblazoned on the back.

This year, SEAC combated Passport Partiers attending Quadstock in a diplomatic way; rather than kicking them out or denying them entry, they asked security to deny entry to anyone wearing a StockQuad shirt. This resulted in a tacky mob of visibly intoxicated students sporting inside-out yellow shirts while they stumbled around the Quad.

Despite the Passport Parties' best efforts, this year's crowd was for the most part well-behaved and sober enough to appreciate all of the main stage's musical offerings, and most people in attendance seemed to be having a very good time.

"I had a blast," said John Bush, Seattle U alum and last year's Quadstock chair. "I talked to all the people working the event this year and saw what a great job they were doing, and I'm just really glad this year's staff continued to make the event into this staple that can be enjoyed by so many people and really bring the university together."

If there was a problem with this year's Quad lineup, it was the arrangement of the acts. Local electro-rock outfit Beehive started off the Quad performances with a mediocre set consisting of an absolutely awful cover of The Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and a set of songs that fell sound-wise somewhere between early Nine Inch Nails and classic radio rock.

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis followed Beehive's opening performance perhaps the most energetic hip-hop set Quadstock has ever seen, but his sick beats and hyperactive stage presence made for a really awkward segue into local folkestra darlings Hey Marseilles. The band—fronted by Seattle U admissions officer Matthew Bishop—powered through crowd favorites throughout their tight and enjoyable set, but they were unable to capture the previous act's energy with their much more downtempo folk-pop.

And Hey Marseilles' slow-down of the day's festivities made Deacon's set completely blindsiding. His 300-plus BPM hyperpop got bodies moving in a way totally uncommon to the too-hip-to-care aesthetic that frequently defines Capitol Hill.

Deacon started his convincing the crowd to count down from 10, rocket blast-off style, substituting the numbers four through 2 with references to Disney's "The Lion King." At one point he forced audience members to engage in a "sassy" dance-off; at another he parted the crowd in two to create a relay racing course where contestants ran from point A to point B and back after chugging cans of Orange Crush.