It's Not Your Time
A musician's case against PorchFest — and against spending a village's scarcest days on other people's stage time
John F. Sendelbach
There is a sentence I keep coming back to whenever PorchFest comes up, and it is the whole argument compressed into four words: it's not your time.
Let me tell you where I learned it.
For several years the Mill hosted PorchFest performers, and one year in particular taught me everything I needed to know about how these events actually work when you are on the receiving end of them. The Mill is an enclosed interior space — a building full of working tenants, shops and studios and offices, people who pay rent there to make a living during business hours. That year the organizers set a band up roughly fifty feet from my office door, indoors, in that hard, echoing, enclosed space, and then ran two acts back to back.
The first was electronica of some bizarre kind — loud, incomprehensible, not really music at all so much as sound, filling a space it had no business filling at that volume. The second was a hardcore heavy-metal band, overplayed and far too loud for any indoor room, let alone a commercial building with paying tenants trying to work. The effect was immediate and total. The entire first floor of the Mill cleared out. Not thinned — cleared. For something like two hours the building was empty of the public, and the merchants stepped out into the hallway and stood there looking at each other, rolling their eyes, silently asking the same question: who thought this was a good idea, and why is it happening to us?
At one point I walked outside to see the act playing on the deck. There were about three people watching a six-piece band. Three. That is not a triumph of community music; it is an embarrassment, and it is a waste of the musicians' own afternoon as much as anyone's.
And here is the part that crystallized it for me. The performers did not seem to care that they had emptied the building. Why would they? In their minds this was their time — their chance to play out, their moment, their gig. They showed up, they plugged in, they took the room.
But it was not their time. It was the merchants' time. It was the time of the people who pay rent in that building, who count on those hours to earn a living, and who did not ask to have their workplace turned into somebody else's under-attended concert.
The inversion at the heart of it
That is the moral problem underneath PorchFest, and it is worth stating plainly because the feel-good framing is designed to keep you from noticing it: the event quietly inverts whose day it is.
A commercial district's business hours belong, in any working sense, to the businesses. That is what rent buys — the right to use a space to make a living during the time the public is out. PorchFest takes those hours and that space and hands them to performers, who understandably experience it as their moment in the sun. The performer gets to feel like an artist having their day. The organizer gets to feel like a community builder. The press gets a warm story. And the merchant — the one person in the arrangement who is actually paying, in rent and staffing and lost sales, for the ground everyone else is standing on — gets an empty floor and a headache, and is cast as a grump if they say so.
Nobody in that chain asked the merchant. The performer treats the building as a free venue. The organizer treats the merchant's day as raw material for an event. And when the music is bad and loud in an enclosed space, it does not merely fail to help — it actively drives away the exact foot traffic the tenants depend on. The people who were supposed to be your customers that day are the people fleeing the sound.
Their own final sponsorship poster puts it without meaning to: be part of the day the village becomes a stage. That is precisely the trouble. For the people who pay rent here, that day was supposed to be a marketplace — and a village cannot be a stage and a marketplace at the same time. The stage is the use that gets to happen; the marketplace is the one that gets displaced.
The event calls itself community-built and community-serving. But the merchants are the community — the part of it that keeps the lights on year-round — and they were never asked. A small group spending other people's livelihoods and calling it community is not community. It is imposition with a nicer name.
I say this as a musician
Here is why I am entitled to be blunt about it: I am a musician myself. I don't play out publicly — it's not my thing — but I could hold down two hours of solo acoustic without much trouble if I wanted to. The barrier for me is not ability. It is conscience.
I will not do PorchFest, and the reason is exactly the reason this essay exists: I am not going to enable harm to other businesses just so that I can get up and play my guitar. That is the trade the event asks every performer to make, whether or not they see it, and most don't see it because the harm lands on someone else. If I want to play, the honorable thing is to go get my own gig — book a room, earn an audience, take the risk on my own account. What I don't get to do is conscript a building full of merchants who want nothing to do with it, use their rent-paid space as my stage, and empty their floor for two hours so I can have my afternoon.
If you are that serious about your music, go get your own gig. That is the whole of it. A real player earns a room. You do not get to help yourself to one that other people are paying for.
Why the merchant can't afford the day: the calendar
None of this would matter so much if the days were cheap. They are not. This is where the moral problem meets a hard economic one.
Shelburne Falls is a seasonal town. That is not a mood, it is an accounting fact. A village retailer here does not earn evenly across the year; the whole year turns on a short list of high-value days — the good Saturdays and Sundays when the weather holds and the visitors come, the tax-free weekend, the handful of dates that actually pay the rent. Miss one and you do not make it up in November, because there is no November to make it up in. The entire margin is concentrated into a few dozen days.
That concentration is the vulnerability, and it is why control over how those days get spent is really control over whether a business survives. Most businesses worry about scarce land or scarce inventory. A village retailer's scarcest asset is none of those things — it is calendar. Only so many Saturdays, only so many foliage weekends, only so many warm tourist afternoons before the season closes. Call it the merchant's calendar capital: the small, fixed, un-refillable stock of paying days that the whole year is built on. And in Shelburne Falls the power to spend that capital has drifted to a small, organized, well-meaning group of people — event committees, boosters, organizers — most of whom have never made a rent payment or run a payroll on State Street. They program the district's single scarcest asset, and they carry none of the loss when the programming goes wrong. Concentrated benefit, dispersed cost: the organizers get the good time and the press, the merchants get the day.
The law of the register: booze or food
After enough of these events I arrived at a rule that has never once failed me: if you don't sell booze or food, you're screwed.
It is a mechanism, not a mood. A downtown event — a porch festival, a wine walk, an artwalk, a road race, a film shoot — is built around consumption that happens on the spot. The product is bought and used in the same hour, on the street, as part of the event. So the on-the-spot businesses clean up. The liquor stores have their best day of the season; the restaurants ring three-thousand-dollar takeout orders when a film crew is in town. I don't resent a dime of it — good for them.
But if what you sell is durable — a painting, a book, a piece of furniture, a made thing someone takes home and lives with — you are running straight against the grain of the day. Your product needs a person to stop, focus, and decide; the event delivers a person who is strolling, socializing, half-listening to a band, and moving on. You are not a participant. You are set dressing. Your lit window makes the street look alive, which is what the event needs from you, and which you provide for free — right up until the sound gets bad enough that even the set dressing empties out.
Every retailer who has worked a floor knows the be-back — the customer who picks the thing up, loves it, says "I'll be back for it," and is never seen again. The old-timers call it the be-back bus: always coming, never arrives. On an ordinary day it's a minor heartbreak that occasionally does come through. What a social event does is fill your store with be-backs by design, selecting right at the door for the person who will not buy — the stroller, not the shopper; the socializer, not the decider. So the crowd the organizers point to as proof of success — look how many people! — is, from behind the counter, a room performing the motions of interest with none of the intent. They browse warmly, promise sincerely, and leave. You spent a day of calendar capital to host the parade.
What it costs, in real dollars: the hundred-dollar door
Let me make it concrete, because organizers deal in vibes and I want to deal in numbers.
Moonlight Magic was the one downtown event I actually got behind, because it was singular — one night, genuinely special, a real occasion — and I supported it for that reason. And it still cost me money. On a Moonlight Magic night I would burn roughly a hundred dollars of heating oil, not because it was cold but because the crowd streamed in and out all evening and left the door standing open behind them, and I spent the night fighting a losing battle to close it. Next morning, dry tank. Tally it honestly: a hundred dollars of fuel out the open door, a full day of my time, a register that barely moved, and the specific indignity of having paid to heat the sidewalk so other people's stroll would feel cozy.
That was the event I liked. Now extrapolate to the ones with no curation and no sound control, and you understand why a merchant's enthusiasm for "another great event downtown" runs thin.
Frequency kills the thing it sells
There is a quieter damage the organizers do to their own product. One special night a year is an occasion — people plan around it, drive in, spend. But you cannot manufacture "special" on a schedule. Run six or seven artwalks a year and you do not create six or seven occasions; you spread the same thin crowd across the calendar until each date underperforms and none of them feels like anything — and you bill each of those thin nights against the merchants' calendar capital, which does not replenish. Activity gets mistaken for vitality; a full calendar gets mistaken for a healthy district. The register knows the difference even when the press release doesn't.
Seventy acts, and nobody to watch them
There is one more piece of self-inflicted damage, and it may be the most telling, because the organizers keep publishing the proof of it themselves.
The porchfest format runs multiple stages at once, all day. That is the accepted protocol, and in the big events it came from — Ithaca, Somerville — it works, because it is built to divide an enormous crowd. When thousands of people are out strolling, you can run dozens of simultaneous stages and every act still plays to a decent audience, because the crowd is deep enough to split. You picked a slot and a porch, you accepted that other acts were playing at the same time, and you still got people past you, because there were people to spare.
Shelburne Falls runs that same protocol on a village-sized turnout — and not with the three or four stages you might picture, but with dozens. This year's own schedule tells it plainly: roughly seventy acts spread across more than forty porches, and at the one o'clock peak, fifteen of them booked into the very same hour. Fifteen stages going at once. The format built to divide a huge audience instead shatters a tiny one. Take the few hundred people who actually turn out, split them across fifteen concurrent stages and forty-odd porches, and you have mathematically guaranteed the result: almost every performer plays to a nearly empty lawn. It is not the weather and it is not bad luck. It is arithmetic. You cannot spread a small crowd across that many simultaneous stages and have anyone draw a crowd. The protocol was borrowed whole from festivals ten times the size, and nobody adjusted it for the size of the audience that actually shows up. That the organizers cannot see this is beyond me.
And here is the proof, in their own hands. Look at the photographs they post to promote the event, year after year — the flattering ones, the ones they chose to represent it. Almost none of them show a crowd. Five people, ten at the most, standing in front of a full band. When even the marketing cannot produce a single crowded frame, that is not a critic hunting for a slow moment; it is the event documenting its own emptiness in the very images meant to sell it. The three people I watched a six-piece band play to at the Mill were not an unlucky exception. They are the designed outcome of simultaneity without a crowd — and the promotional archive proves it repeats.
It is the same disease as the overstuffed calendar, running along the other axis. Too many events dilute the crowd across the season; too many simultaneous stages dilute it across the map. Either way the audience is spread until it thins to nothing — and either way the performers, the people the whole thing is supposedly for, are the ones left playing to an empty lawn.
The coroplast tells on them
If you want the whole contradiction in a single object, look at the signs.
An event that sells itself as local, community, sustainable, celebrate our town announces its arrival with a fresh crop of cheap coroplast yard signs punched onto wire stakes and jabbed into the verges and medians up and down the village. They are manufactured to be used for a single afternoon — and the organizers' own donation appeal lists "signage" among the things your contribution "directly powers," which tells you the single-use plastic is a funded line item, not an accident. It is the environmental equivalent of driving an SUV to a climate rally. You cannot preach localism and sustainability out of one side of your mouth while purpose-buying a field of disposable polypropylene out of the other and expect the merchants watching you do it to keep a straight face.
And notice that the signage exposes exactly the priority I have been describing. The organizers will not spend the effort to notify a working tenant directly that their day is about to be taken — but they will blanket the town in throwaway plastic to herd strollers toward the porches. Direct notice to the people who bear the cost: too much trouble, and no line item. Coroplast on every corner to promote the party: budgeted, funded, and worth soliciting donations for. The priorities are not hidden; they are printed on the fundraising page.
Local — from as far as Boston
The other word on the flyer is local, and their own fundraising page tells on that one too. Alongside the sponsor tiers sits a section headed "Other Ways to Give," asking the community to provide traveling performers with a place to stay the night, meals and snacks before and after their sets, and ice cream to cool off during the day — because, the organizers explain, some artists have come "as far as Boston" to play. An event marketed as a celebration of local creativity is importing acts from two hours off and asking Shelburne Falls residents to house and feed them. I don't begrudge a Boston musician a bed or a meal. But notice who is asked to subsidize whom: the community is solicited to underwrite the room and board of out-of-town performers on the very day those performers' sound is emptying the shops of the local merchants who pay rent here year-round. The out-of-towner gets lodging, dinner, and ice cream; the local shopkeeper gets an open door bleeding heat and a floor full of be-backs.
It also confirms the law of the register in the organizers' own hand. When they list what the community can give, the currency is food — meals, snacks, ice cream. Even the generosity runs through the businesses that sell what you consume on the spot. Everyone in the picture understands, at some level, that this is a food-and-drink day. The people who sell anything else were never really in the plan.
Vacancy is the vital sign
Here my other training comes in. Alongside the storefront, I work in landscape architecture, and the field is clear about how commercial streetscapes live and die. A run of empty ground-floor frontage is not cosmetic and not temporary — it is the vital sign of a district in decline, because retail frontage is a connected organism, not a row of independent boxes. One dark storefront depresses the two beside it; foot traffic reroutes around a dead gap and stops feeding the shops just past it. Jane Jacobs described this decades ago and the Main Street literature has confirmed it since: continuity of active, occupied, street-level retail is what keeps a block alive, and vacancy is contagious.
The core of Shelburne Falls carries three or four vacancies right now. In a village this small, that is well past cosmetic and into diagnostic — the streetscape telling you something the boosters won't.
The thing nobody counts
Put it together and one failure sits at the center. When these events are defended — at the permit hearing, in the warm articles — the justification is always the same vague thing: they are good for the town, good for downtown. Yet in the organizers' own materials the businesses barely appear as anything but scenery. PorchFest's fundraising page is careful to spell out what a donation powers and what the event strengthens — musicians, signage, equipment, safety, the arts, the cultural life of the village. The merchants surface in only two roles: as the homes and shops whose porches supply the stages, and as a directory of places for visitors to check out. Content, and backdrop. Nowhere are they parties whose costs were weighed. Nobody counted what a merchant spent to stay open, what the register did, or what the paying day was worth — because the businesses were never in the accounting to begin with, except as the atmosphere for it.
And it is not for lack of capacity. The same operation runs a five-tier sponsorship program — a thousand dollars for premier logo placement on down to fifty for a name on a webpage — with firm print deadlines, a stated four-thousand-dollar goal, and a county Chamber of Commerce digital-marketing campaign behind it. They can itemize to the dollar what a sponsor's money buys. They produce careful, tiered accounting for the people who fund the event. They have simply never produced any for the merchants whose day the event spends. The ledger exists — meticulous, tiered, deadline-driven. It only ever runs one direction.
I want to be scrupulous, because overreach is how a true argument gets dismissed. I am not claiming the events caused the vacancies. E-commerce gutted small retail everywhere; rural New England has real headwinds; a hard decade did plenty on its own. What I am claiming is narrower and unassailable: they made the hardest days harder, they spent the merchants' scarcest asset without asking, and after ten years they still cannot show — because they never bothered to measure — that they helped at all. The burden of proof was always theirs. They never had to carry it, because the people who could have called the question were inside the Mill, in an emptied hallway, rolling their eyes.
What I'm actually asking
None of this is anti-music, anti-art, or anti-town. I am a public artist; I have spent thirty years making things for exactly these streets, and I am a musician who chose not to buy my stage time with other people's livelihoods. The ask is not to cancel anything. It is to stop pretending, and to put the burden back where it belongs.
Before the next group fills an enclosed building or closes a street with un-curated sound on one of our few paying days: show the ledger. Produce a real, third-party accounting of the effect on the businesses whose day you're spending — or stop implying, at the hearing and in the press, that the event is doing them a favor, and name it honestly as a community party that costs the merchants a day, which a town may choose to hold with its eyes open. Notify affected tenants and property owners directly, two weeks out, not with a sign stapled to a pole. Never again put a loud band indoors, fifty feet from a working tenant's door, and call it a gift to that tenant. And if you truly mean the words local and sustainable that you put on the flyer, put your promotion on something other than a field of disposable coroplast — reusable banners, a good digital map, a few wooden sandwich boards — and pick up every last stake the next morning. Respect scarcity: one real occasion beats seven diluted ones, and the shops keeping the lights on are the ones who pay for the difference.
Because in the end it comes down to the four words I started with. When you take a merchant's day, and their space, and their quiet, so that you can have your moment — understand what you are actually doing. It's not your time. It's theirs.
Time is the one asset a merchant never gets back. Before you spend a day of it on their behalf, you might at least have the courtesy to ask.