By day Eric Boucher is a typical DC office drone but by night he is a music impresario. The audiophile’s passion manifested itself first in the music site BigYawn.net (a site I occasionally contribute music reviews to) and now is the force behind the District’s Awake Music Festival (DAM Fest). The event features more than 40 bands on four stages over three days (not counting the pre and post parties). As this is DC, there is a charitable side as well. Instrument and monetary donations will be present at every venue, benefiting CHIME, a local organization dedicating to supporting music in area schools. DCist caught Boucher during a rare, spare moment and talked with him about the upcoming event.

So, Eric, why DAM Fest? Why now?

Well, the idea came to me after the Six Points Festival, in the spring. It was basically a local festival— had a couple shows a night. All local venues, all local bands and people were just trashing it. And I kept thinking of how uneventful it was, to me. It was on the heels of reading about the Noise Pop Festival and looking at the Montreal Pop festival, stuff like that, I thought “You know, we can do better than this. We can have something that people in this city actually want to come to.” The ideas just came from there, thinking : I know people in DC and I’ve booked shows before and I‘ve made some connections with people all around the country. We can build our own, we can put something together that’s… cool.

My whole thing was, a lot of tours skip over D.C. People hit New York, then they hit Chicago, then L.A and they hit the cities in between but we get skipped, sometimes. Sometimes people go to Baltimore, sometimes people don’t come down here at all. That just doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s so much history here from Duke Ellington to go-go music to Minor Threat, Fugazi and the whole hardcore scene to right now with bands like Q and not U, there’s a lot of history here and it’s silly not to have D.C. as a big stop on the national circuit. So I want to try and draw some exposure to the city so people think “On the way to CMJ, we’re going to hit this DAM Festival every year, because that’s what’s going on.” So that’s why I thought “Why not, why not take a stab at it and see what happens?”