West Berry Block Party will fill TCU-area venues Saturday

In January, Ted Wick was standing on the fifth-floor balcony of his GrandMarc at Westberry Place apartment when it hit him.

"I was watching the sun set," says the 21-year-old TCU junior, "and I thought 'Wouldn't it be cool if we got the Aardvark, the Moon and the Cellar to have a South by Southwest-type festival, on just one day this year or next year?'"

At 2 p.m. Saturday, barely four months after that first stray thought, Wick and his team of collaborators will launch the West Berry Block Party, an all-day music festival spread among five venues just steps from the corner of West Berry Street and South University Drive in Fort Worth.

It's an ambitious undertaking, with more than 50 bands (including Green River Ordinance, Telegraph Canyon and Spoonfed Tribe) and DJs confirmed, and it fills a need in Fort Worth. Apart from the usual suspects -- Main St. Fort Worth Arts Festival or Mayfest, for example -- there has been nothing of this independently produced scale since Spune Productions' third installment of the Wall of Sound festival four years ago.

Although the Block Party will take place during the Main St. festival, Wick swears that the timing was merely coincidental. In fact, 2012 was the original target date. By then, Wick will be a senior, and he thought staging a one-day music festival would be a nice senior-year grace note.

Instead, according to Wick, his roommate, Collective Dreams drummer Travis Hildenbrand, was the catalyst. "[He] said, 'Let's just do it this year.'"

With help from fellow TCU students Bryan Lee, Kevin Benson and Riley Knight, Wick soon found himself in the thick of planning.

Wick, who grew up in Toronto before moving to Houston in his teens, wasn't entirely unfamiliar with booking bands. He began promoting concerts at 17, before he was legally allowed in bars.

"Bands, venues, sponsors -- everyone has been very responsive," Wick says of the Block Party. "The pieces of the puzzle were there and we just needed to put them together."

Besides celebrating Fort Worth music and drawing attention to a corner of the city that appears on the cusp of resurgence, the Block Party is doubling as a tsunami-relief concert, with some proceeds from ticket sales going to Direct Relief International.

Singer-songwriter Taylor Craig Mills, one of the locals tapped to perform, says he was struck by the organizers' vision and desire to expose people to Fort Worth talent.

"That kind of idealism, promotion of local music and the chance for us all to come together for something bigger than ourselves is exactly the kind of thing that reminds this so-called 'sleepy Panther City' what we're made of," Mills says.

It remains to be seen whether Fort Worth can sustain something like the Block Party. Staging the event during the hurly-burly of downtown's Main St. festival could be a double-edged sword. If the organizers reap the benefits of curious overflow crowds, there's also the chance that the more established arts festival could draw potential attendees away from West Berry.

What's more, aside from a few proven, corporately sponsored instances, like Wolfdance or Jazz by the Boulevard, Wick and company are venturing into entirely new territory. The organizers will have to pay very close attention to what works (and what doesn't) if they want to achieve even a fraction of their considerable goals.

For now, though, Wick is eagerly looking to the future and convinced that the Block Party is something that can flourish.

"We want this to become something bigger than it is this year," Wick says. "A lot of our peers go off to music festivals. Why the hell can't we do that here?"