Those looking to jam out this weekend were met with an unfortunate surprise as they approached the Schine Box Office.

The 3,000 tickets available for Juice Jam this past Sunday sold out at about 4:30 Thursday afternoon after being on sale for only three and a half days, said Sherlen Archibald, co-chairman of the Juice Jam organizing committee and University Union Concerts.

Although tickets were free to Syracuse University students, many waited too long to go to the box office and ended up out of luck.

‘I work here and come here every day, and I didn’t buy a ticket because I thought, ‘Hey, it’s going to be in a parking lot,” said Shannon Lee, a junior communications and rhetorical studies major and a building manager with the Student Centers and Programming Services, which operates right next door to the box office. ‘Now I’m screwed. It’s awesome.’

Tickets went very quickly for the event, where students lined up halfway outside of Schine at about 2 p.m. Thursday, when only 300 tickets remained, said Azania Smith, an employee at the Schine Box Office and a senior public relations and policy studies major.

‘It was nonstop,’ Smith said. ‘I never got to not sell a ticket.’

Many students were upset when they were turned away, Smith said, saying that their student fee had helped pay for the event and that meant they should have access.

Several students shut out of Juice Jam were angered by the large amounts of free space in the parking lot, even while headliners like Method Man were playing.

‘We should have been let in for the fact that it’s free, there’s space and we’re SU students,’ said Jayson Moseley, a junior finance major who listened to Method Man while standing on the lip of Lawrinson’s stone patio, which overlooks the parking lot where the concert took place. ‘We are paying $30,000 a year.’

Others felt the lack of tickets compromised the spirit of the event.

‘Syracuse tries to do fun stuff like this, but then everyone can’t get in,’ said Ashley Connors, a junior international relations and policy major, as she stood outside the fence overlooking the concert, 10 feet away from being inside. ‘It should be about listening to the music.’

But there was no chance to increase the amount of tickets available because there would be an increase in cost for additional police and security officers and further funding for refreshments for students.

‘By increasing the capacity, we would have had to increase the security, and we just didn’t have the budget,’ said Adam Gorode, co-chairman of the Juice Jam festival and co-executive director of UU concerts. ‘It was unfortunate.’

Security was tight at the event, with five to six guards from Chestnut Street Security at the entrance of the parking lot and pairs of officers posted along the fences put up around the lot.

‘Early in the beginning, we had a lot of students asking how to get tickets, but we haven’t had a lot trying to get in,’ said Tom Wallace, security guard with Chestnut Security during the event.

Things remained calm throughout the event as people who couldn’t get in listened along at Lawrinson Hall and the houses surrounding the parking lot.

Gorode said the level of security had to be high because SU had not hosted a large outdoor event like this before and officials were nervous about what would happen. Because everything went smoothly, future festivals such as Juice Jam should be allowed to have more students with less security.

‘We wanted to see how many people we could let in, and it is easier to undershoot than overshoot,’ Gorode said. ‘We’re hoping that now everything went smoothly and there were no security problems, we will be able to increase capacity next year.’

Organizers of the event will meet later on this week, Gorode said, to discuss how Juice Jam went and what they may want to do in the future to avoid having to block students from attending. Possibilities include moving it to South Campus or increasing the amount of people allowed at the Lawrinson venue.

‘It’s kind of too soon to tell, but it’s definitely something we’ll discuss,’ said Ellen King, director of Student Events. ‘We’ll need to come together, review everything and make a decision.’

Published on September 6, 2004 at 12:00 pm