OnMilwaukee.com – Pablove Concert Rallies Milwaukee Music Scene
By Bobby Tanzilo
Managing Editor, OnMilwaukee.com
Last January, Turner Hall donated its space for the first Milwaukee concert to benefit the Pablove Foundation, which raises funds to battle childhood cancer.
The foundation was set up by Milwaukee native and L.A. music industry insider Jeff Castelaz and his wife Jo Ann Thrailkill in honor of their son Pablo, who died of cancer the previous year at age 6.
That show raised around $16,000 and was the event of the year in the Milwaukee music scene. Not just because everyone who was anyone in the scene was there — either on stage or in the crowd — but because it showed how much the city could get behind one of its own in a time of need.
“The first Pablove benefit in Milwaukee proved one thing: we needed to make it an annual event,” Jeff Castelaz tells me via e-mail from Paris, France, where he’s attending a trade show.
“The support we felt from the promoters Scott Ziel and Doug Johnson and Marc Solheim, all the bands and most important, the people who bought tickets was overwhelmingly positive and personal. When 900 people are focused on the same positive thing under the same roof, there’s nothing like it.”