Austin Ward remembers the first time he saw Martinez “Marty” Hillard. Ward, drummer for Lawrence band the Noise FM met Hillard when his older brother Alex Ward, the band’s lead singer, brought him to their house to meet the band.

“I thought, ‘Wow, there’s a cool guy with dreds standing here in my basement. He looks cool and he sounds cool, and he seems to think I’m pretty cool,’” Austin Ward says. “I thought, ‘I definitely want this guy around more.’”

Hillard, a 25-year-old musician and concert promoter, is a ubiquitous presence on the Lawrence music scene, and seems to have a hand in everything, or knows someone who does. Since moving to Lawrence from Topeka a year ago, Hillard has been involved in two bands, organized multiple local music shows and started the online music magazine Oh! Mr, which promotes local bands. Hillard is recording a CD with his band, Cowboy Indian Bear, to be released in 2009.

Oddly enough, Hillard said that growing up, he was never a very social person.

“I was never really one to put together parties or anything,” Hillard says. “When I celebrated my birthday, it was always with my family. I never really invited friends or anything. It was never a big deal to me.”

Hillard says his interest in organizing concerts came from his years playing music.

“A big part of organizing shows has been being part of a band for so many years at this point,” Hillard says. “I’ve been playing in bands since 1999, when I was in high school, and with that you just kind of learn as you go.”

The popularity of the local shows Hillard has organized with friends and fellow musicians during his time in Lawrence has much to do with the packaging.

“We always like to make them seem more illustrious than they might perhaps be,” Hillard says. “If people think it’s just a show and think, ‘That’s no big deal, I can see my friends play any time,’ that sort of defeats the purpose. That’s why local musicians want to get out there. They want to showcase their abilities. So we just provide that venue by making people want to come and making it seem like it’s a bigger deal.”

Many of Hillard’s resources come from his internship with local music promoter Pipeline Productions.

“We’ve been really fortunate to be able to talk to venues like The Jackpot and The Bottleneck directly,” Hillard says. “I also think they’ve had a lot of faith with our turnouts that we can put together events and organize them well.”

While advertising and excessive promotion may be one part of the equation, people are also drawn to Hillard’s shows because of his connections.

“I can tell whenever I go places with him that people already know him, and the people that don’t really want to,” Ward says. “He knows everyone, and everyone knows him.”

Hillard certainly isn’t hard to spot in a crowd. Tall, bespectacled with long dreadlocks, friends say they found Hillard a little daunting upon just meeting him.

Alex Ward first saw Hillard at a concert in which Hillard was playing with his former band, Jenn Say Kwahs.

“When I met him afterward, I was a little intimidated, because he’s a really big guy, but it turned out that he was the nicest guy in the world,” Ward says.

C.J. Calhoun, who co-founded Oh! Mr. with Hillard and plays with him in Cowboy Indian Bear, says he felt the same way when he met Hillard in Topeka six years ago at Calhoun’s very first concert.

“I thought he was a big deal,” Calhoun says. “I was really excited about how nice he was, since it was my first show and I was really young at the time.”

Calhoun describes his bandmate as very detail-oriented.

“He’s very meticulous,” Calhoun says. “He’s critical of himself, but a very hard worker, especially when it comes to promotions. He’s very social, so it’s easy for him to be out and about promoting whatever it is he happens to be doing.”

Hillard says he’s been asked a lot about his future and if he wants to pursue concert promotion as a career. For him, the choice is still unclear.

“I think mostly I just want to get the experience and see the inner workings of all the things that are related to live music and performing,” Hillard says. There are definitely certain aspects of it that I like. I’m just as enthusiastic about other people’s music as I am about my own output.”