Parties’ personal planner

Barry Hogan is known for big ideas, notably the artist-driven music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties. But he has fine-tuning on his mind on a recent afternoon as he huddles in a Wilshire district office conference room with two colleagues.

They’re wrestling with the schedule for the second day of the festival’s run this weekend on two stages at the Queen Mary in Long Beach, where the 25 acts will include Lou Reed, Modest Mouse, Peaches, the Shins and the Flaming Lips.

“Should we just bump the whole day up and start at 1:30?” suggests Juan Luis Carrera, who works on concert production with Hogan and also manages Modest Mouse.

“Yeah, then maybe you can let Flaming Lips play longer,” says Hogan.

“Sometimes bands get upset when you tell them they’re playing earlier,” points out Natalie Ryan-Williams, a production manager for the Los Angeles concert promoter Goldenvoice, Hogan’s partner on the festival. “They don’t want people missing their set.”

“But the Constantines will be over the moon if they can play 45 minutes,” Hogan counters.

The calibrating continues for nearly an hour, with minute adjustments needed to encourage crowd flow between the large outdoor stage and the smaller one inside the ship. They also have to make sure the indoor portion ends earlier than last year, and Hogan is lobbying to allow one band to finish its set in time to see the Cramps perform.

“Can you make their set 45 minutes?” he says. “I don’t want to make it an hour if it means they’re gonna miss some of the Cramps. That’s the one request that they had.... They’ve already been moved from the main stage onto there and they’re bummed out.”

All this adds up to what Hogan, who began All Tomorrow’s Parties in England in 2000, sees as the festival’s distinguishing feature.

“I think what makes this work is that it’s more of a personal thing,” the garrulous Londoner says after the meeting ends. “Some of the bigger festivals that might have suffered, I think people are shying away from that and want something that means something to them, something with more sincerity.”

ATP has learned that it needs some acts with drawing power, especially in its Southern California incarnation, which is now in its third year. But by placing the programming in the hands of a curator (past honorees include Sonic Youth and “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening), Hogan creates the climate for an artistically stimulating mix

The roster for the Queen Mary, where the capacity is 6,000 each day, is stocked with alt-rock stalwarts (Built to Spill, J Mascis, Stephen Malkmus), names from deeper in the underground (Billy Childish, Lungfish) and new faces (Sufjan Stevens, Willy Mason, Wolf Parade).

“Most festivals seem to be angling for everyone, trying to make everyone happy,” says Isaac Bruce, the leader of Modest Mouse, the curator of this weekend’s event. “All Tomorrow’s Parties has always been a lot more clearly just what the curator’s into, regardless of what sells tickets, for better or worse.”

What’s it like to be a curator?

“It’s pretty easy,” he says. “You just come up with your dream list of people you’d like to have on it.... It’s actually easier than making a mix tape, which is essentially what it is, but you don’t have to sit in front of the machine.”

A special moment at the Queen Mary event -- now officially titled All Tomorrow’s Parties Pacific 2004 -- figures to be tonight’s closing set by Lou Reed, who wrote the festival’s namesake song when he was with the Velvet Underground in the mid-’60s. He composed the haunting ballad about actress and scenemaker Edie Sedgwick at the request of Andy Warhol, and he says it was the artist’s favorite Velvets song.

Even rock’s pugnacious poet softens up a bit when asked about the honor.

“I think it’s wonderful that it’s named after one of my songs,” Reed, 62, said this week. “It’s quite nice.... It’ll be unusually nice to be playing in this one with all the young people who are there. I’ll look forward to it, especially because of its background.”

“As you can tell, I like the Velvet Underground,” says Hogan. “But the name as well signified the music of tomorrow. ‘Cause a lot of these bands, they’ve been around for quite a while and their music keeps going.... I wanted to get work for people that have got a body of work behind them, and that’s the idea of picking the curators as well.”

Hogan, 32, got into the music business by managing a friend’s band, then booking shows at clubs. His small company now promotes about 50 concerts a year in London in addition to staging ATP. The Long Beach edition will be the eighth overall, and Hogan has thoughts about expanding to the East Coast, and maybe Asia or Australia.

Meantime, he keeps looking for ways to keep it interesting.

“I tried to go out and think of something that was super- impossible to do. One of my favorite bands that have never played in England -- they hardly did any shows -- is the band Slint.... And we basically persuaded them to do an ATP in February next year.

“Now people are like, ‘Oh my God, how do you better that?’ That’s what I want every single time. I want to make it so that when we do this, people go, ‘What next?’ And keep them guessing.”