The audience sat on red and yellow painted wooden box chairs or shag carpeting as Cathy Illman sang bittersweet songs on her guitar.
The psychology junior was just one of the acts in the first Bailey Music Festival on Saturday at the Bailey Center, 300 Bailey St.
The concert, which included 10 performances, was sponsored by East Lansing Recreation & Arts.
Studio art junior Josh Kermiet, who helped coordinate the event, said the idea for the daylong music festival was his.
“The idea was to throw together local talent that doesn’t get much exposure,” he said.
The Bailey Center, he said, had at one time been a place for people to come and enjoy live bands. The center stopped the performances because of a crowd incident.
Now, East Lansing Recreation & Arts has been holding once-a-month concerts at the center. Kermiet asked the group if it would be interested in holding a daylong event.
He said he hopes the festival will expose people to different local musicians.
“It is kind of an underground Michigan scene,” he said.
Leslie Donaldson, a 1995 MSU graduate, said she and Kermiet hope the festival takes off.
“It has been kind of exhausting,” she said. “But in a year or in years to come, we hope to make it a weeklong thing, maybe have it outside.”
Donaldson said the venue is open for MSU students who don’t drink, or high school students who can’t get into the bar.
“It is really an all-ages venue; that is what we are missing in this town,” Kermiet said.
Ian Sugierski, a history junior and drummer for The Black Lungs, said he was enjoying the fact that the festival wasn’t catering to one genre.
“A lot of the music scenes around here cater to just one kind of sound, one band, and do not get a lot of the bands around here that are just struggling to get themselves shown,” he said.
The Black Lungs, Sugierski said, play classic rock ’n’ roll with modern twists.
“This place really suits us because we really don’t like to classify ourselves,” he said. “We’d like to have everything be just rock ’n’ roll.”
Computer science senior Steven Brookenthal and physics senior Mike Litos said they were there to support their friends’ bands and to enjoy the music.
“It is a great place for shows,” Litos said. “So far I have just seen Cathy, but I think she is pretty great at what she does.”
Illman said she will definitely return to perform at the festival again.
“I like it because it is cheap to get in, you can pretty much have anyone play you want and it is a nice auditorium,” she said.
