For the past seven years, when it gets close to MidPoint Music Festival time, I’m guaranteed to be a skittish, emotional mess. Well before CityBeat took the reins, MidPoint was for me what the first days of summer must be like for air-conditioner repair people. It’s my “busy season.”

My anxiety comes in the form of what I now call “Blurb Patrol.” Each year, I’ve been in charge of putting together CityBeat’s comprehensive guide to the festival, with well over 100 blurbs about every band playing the festival. Though I’m assisted by freelance writers, it is still a major undertaking, listening to 150 or so bands, writing a representative 150 words on each and then finding where they’ve floated in the ever-rotating schedule.

The first several years of this process were brutal. The most memorable was the year my home computer broke, meaning I spent an entire three days in the CityBeat offices, from about noon until 4 or 5 in the morning. And being downtown late at night usually means Papa John’s for dinner. I can still taste that mushroom hoagie I lived off of for a night and a half. That weekend — and many other MidPoint prep nights — was like that scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen in going stir-crazy in a hotel room before shipping out. Except I usually keep my shirt on and keep the drinking to a minimum.

By now, we have gotten the MidPoint guide process down to a non-exact science and I don’t complain nearly as much. This year, I was hardly stressed at all. But it did take me longer than usual to write my own blurbs, usually because I’d go to some band’s MySpace site and get sucked in by their music for a half an hour.

That’s what MidPoint is all about for me – getting blown away by some band you know nothing about. This year, the caliber of acts coming in for MidPoint — both signed and unsigned — is the best it has ever been. I am really looking forward to popping my head into some MidPoint venue during the weekend and getting sucked in, unable to leave until the artists have played their final note.

I wish I could say I remember the first year of the MidPoint Music Festival vividly, but, after attending the festival each of the six previous years, they all start bleed together.

I do remember a lot about that first MPMF year, though. The festival was not yet centrally located in Over-the-Rhine, so I had to cross the river a few times, to see bands at the Madison Theater or Newport on the Levee. I remember thinking, “This would be better if everything was in one place.” The following year, the Main Street Entertainment District inherited the festival.

In that second year, Main Street was still relatively vibrant as a club district. Having lived on Main for several years, I loved the live music bars on the strip, including Neon’s and The Overflow (I’m a “live music guy,” not really a dance club fan). It seemed the perfect fit for MidPoint.

The fest’s founders Sean Rhiney and Bill Donabedian did a great job procuring venues over the years, but Main Street’s entertainment options have been in a constant flux more recently. By the end of their run, Rhiney and Donabedian were practically building venues for the festival, renting out empty rooms in the area and making them MidPoint-ready (with sound systems installed and beer ready to flow). The past couple of years, whenever I would see Rhiney, he would mention that they’d about had it with the juggling and were ready to move the festival to another neighborhood or even another city.

I’m glad that they decided to give CityBeat a shot at running MidPoint and keeping it mostly downtown. The festival is a crown-jewel event in the area and this year we’re all hoping – for the benefit of the city, the city’s music scene and the city’s music fans – to take it to the next level. We understand the founders’ frustrations — we haven’t had to build any venues, but several club owners downtown have hemmed and hawed about hosting showcases. Hopefully, the success of the fest this year will have more people eager to participate next time

And hopefully it will boost the energy level of Main Street, which seems to be gradually becoming its old self again. The festival will be spread all over downtown this year (not just the Main St. area), giving young music lovers a great reason to hit the city’s center for some good times.

As much as MidPoint has been “all about the music,” an ulterior motive has always been to help our sometimes beleaguered downtown area be the kind of entertainment destination spot it has long deserved to be.

I always felt like the MidPoint Music Festival should have been re-named the Mike Breen Festival. Not because I’m so awesome, but because it seemed like an event built just for me.

MidPoint represents my approach to finding new music. While some don’t do much searching when it comes to music — buying whatever the mainstream radio outlets and corporate labels are selling — I’ve long been a seeker. As a kid, I’d pour through every music magazine I could get my hands on – from Trouser Press and Option to Spin and Rolling Stone – in search of something enticing. Music videos, radio, late-night TV talk shows — wherever there was music I was unfamiliar with, I’d dive in. Needless to say, the vastness of music available digitally has helped feed this desire perfectly in the 21st century.

So when MidPoint first came to be, I was in heaven. Not only could I see many of the local bands and artists I’d become enamored with, but I could literally walk into any bar on the Main Street strip and have a 50/50 chance of finding something great. Not that everything at MidPoint was or is spectacular – I’ve stumbled into more than a couple of clunker shows during MidPoint’s lifespan – but that element of not knowing still made it all rather exciting, at least for this music nerd.

I was always puzzled why more people didn’t come to MidPoint every year. The festival was aggressively marketed to people in the area who never or hardly ever go out to see original bands unless it was at Riverbend or some other large venue. MidPoint needed to attract people outside of “the choir” (those frequent local music supporters who would show up regardless) and the previous organizers had a lot of success doing that.

But MidPoint seemed to hit a ceiling in the past couple of years, at least in terms of attendance. It felt like it needed something to push it further and that’s why CityBeat was interested in taking control. We’re hoping that by booking some more well-known artists — like Indie Rock god Bob Pollard or Pop duo Mates of State — some of those people who stayed away from the festival in the past would come to check out the big-shots, then – ideally — stick around and see what else the fest has to offer. And then, even more ideally, they’d continue to go out and see original live music not played on Q102.

I’ve actually had friends look through the MidPoint schedule in the past, then look me straight in the eye and say, “I don’t know if I’m going — I don’t know any of the bands playing.”

My answer was and will always be: “That’s the point.”