How a fan created a successful singer/songwriter concert series

The Other Paper, 3/8/07 -How attorney Alec Wightman created the town’s best-kept musical secret: "Columbus’s best-kept musical secret began 12 years ago on a whim. A fan of [Tom] Russell’s for years, Wightman received a mailing from the singer in 1995 asking his supporters to notify him about performance venues in their cities. It sat on Wightman’s desk for months.

Then, for reasons that still elude him, the attorney picked up the phone. He told Russell’s people that he would try to find the singer a venue and even help sell tickets.

'It was totally spur-of-the-moment,' Wightman said. 'I had never done anything like it.'

There were snags at first—'All the bars I contacted laughed at me,' Wightman said—but, with Russell’s encouragement, he finally resolved to rent out Columbus Music Hall and make the event happen all by himself.

'In eight days, I sold 99 tickets—all friends, clients and co-workers,' he said. 'Nobody but me knew who Tom was.' ...

'There aren’t a lot of these venues left for people on my level,' Russell said of the intimate, 100-seat performance spaces on which professional singer-songwriters have traditionally survived.'A lot of promoters just don’t want to deal with that size room because the profits aren’t there. So it pushes a lot of acts back down into the bars—and that’s pretty rough country.'”

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