Thursday, July 26, 2007

Is this a good scene?

Here is a review of an underground music festival in Baltimore. I'm not really sure if it is meant to be a good review or not. You decide.

Pitchfork Feature: Live: Whartscape Music Festival: "But enthusiasm is one of the only real unifying factors at Whartscape: Performers ranged from the folk and lo-fi beats of Lizz King (who hopped around on a sprained ankle as big as an orange) to the shoegaze synth-punk of Videohippos (who played in front of three projection screens) to West Coast spazz legends xbxrx to, well, a band like Santa Dads, who wallowed in a 20-minute prog-folk number with a whole faux-liturgy to go along with it; it was like a nursery school doing a rock opera. Dig a stroke deeper though, and the connections are clear: Baltimore's foreboding landscape and rotted-out, no-bubble depression is just the place for a bunch of wayward kids in neon avoiding the bodice of career, pulling shifts at Whole Foods between their self-directed studies in the occult. The filmmaker Jimmy Joe Roche, who screened videos on Friday night, told the Baltimore blog Butter Team, 'The wizards of Baltimore and Wham City deal powerful magic, we'll need it soon, the dawn of this post-postmodern age is upon us.'

There's no sense of cool, there's no spiritual sobriety. There are a lot of very bright colors. There are machines modified to blare industrial light at changes in synthesizer frequency. "

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

The economics of a folk festival

Folk festivals spin off profit for both artists and venues -- Vancouver Sun, 7/13/07: "Though Canadian folk festivals are grassroots affairs where lots of patrons reflect the ideals of the 1960s, they nevertheless generate big dollars.

The Edmonton Folk Festival, largest in Western Canada, attracts 85,000 people for a box office of $1.4 million. It has sold out all its tickets in 11 of the last 13 years. The smaller Winnipeg Folk Festival draws 60,000, but 40 per cent of the audience comes from the United States, resulting in an economic spinoff to the area of about $20 million.

The three-day Vancouver Folk Music Festival, which begins today, attracts people from all over B.C. and the U.S. (Americans make up 30 per cent of the audience), and even some from Europe and Australia. Smaller than events in Edmonton, Winnipeg and Calgary, last year's Vancouver festival operated on a budget of $1.2 million, attracted 30,000 people and took in $551,000 at the box office.
Dancing at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival
Dancing at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival
Peter Battistoni/Vancouver Sun

One lucrative side business at folk festivals is on-site CD sales. Festival patrons prefer buying recordings directly from the artist or the artist's label on-site because more of their money goes to the music's creator. These sales won't show up on SoundScan or Billboard, but they nevertheless add up. At last summer's 17 western Canadian folk festivals -- which include events in Vancouver, Victoria, Salmon Arm, Duncan, Comox, Mission and Harrison Hot Springs -- CD sales amounted to $754,594.

At the 2001 Edmonton festival, the Waifs from Australia sold 1,000 CDs in a single weekend, a figure matched by Xavier Rudd one year at the Calgary Folk Festival.

CD sales at last year's Vancouver Folk Festival totalled about 15,000. A top artist can sell as many as 700 CDs in a single weekend at the Vancouver festival....

VANCOUVER FOLK FESTIVAL

Attendance: 30,000

Box office: $551,000

CALGARY FOLK FESTIVAL

Attendance: 48,000

Box office: just under $1 million

EDMONTON FOLK FESTIVAL

Attendance: 85,000

Box office: $1.4 million

Winnipeg Folk Festival

Attendance: 60,000

Box office: $1.3 million

All-ages venues doing well in Seattle

This article reviews a number of all age-venues in Seattle.

Entertainment | All-ages venues popping up all over | Seattle Times, 7/20/07: "The number of youth-friendly shows in Seattle has steadily increased since the demise of Seattle's restrictive Teen Dance Ordinance in 2002. The rules governing such shows became less severe with the current All-Ages Dance Ordinance, and a plethora of new venues are reinvigorating the scene.

While it is dominated by indie-rock and punk, kids can also get live doses of metal, hip-hop, ska, alternative, rap, jazz and open-mic nights.

There's also a thriving underground, do-it-yourself movement, including popular house venues like Camp Nowhere in the U District. Even bars that are normally off-limits for under-agers — like Chop Suey and Neumos — are hosting some all-ages shows. Nectar Lounge plans to start an all-ages lineup beginning in late August."

Live music in a small Texas town

A small town in Texas Hill Country, about 30 miles from San Antonio, is seeing an expansion of venues, which might make it a significant stop for Texas music lovers.

'Cowboy Capital' could be a new Branson -- San Antonio Express-News, July 22, 2007: "... the self-proclaimed 'Cowboy Capital of the World,' long known for live country music in rustic venues and a picker's paradise for its come-one-come-all jam-session attitude, is busting out all over....

While Bandera County is one of the fastest growing in Texas, the farm and ranch community's official population is 957 ..."

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Where did rock start?

Cradle of Rock? Two Towns Stake Their Claims - New York Times, 7/10/07: "... officials and residents in Wildwood, which in recent years has put a high polish and a healthy dose of kitsch on its 1950s- and ’60s-era motels to promote tourism, are saying that their town near the southern tip of New Jersey in Cape May County is the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll.

After all, for a few summers Dick Clark held record hops in Wildwood while he was the host of “American Bandstand.” And there are plaques where the HofBrau once stood, as well as the site of the former Rainbow Club (now a nightclub called Kahuna’s), where Chubby Checker first performed “The Twist.”

But Gloucester City, another New Jersey town, about an 80-mile drive northwest of Wildwood, wants to cut in right there. And on Saturday, Mr. Richards and other Comets plan to headline a show in Gloucester City, in Camden County along the Delaware River, to commemorate an 18-month span in the early 1950s when Mr. Haley led the house band at the Twin Bar."

The piano bar as neighborhood hangout

This venue is closing, a victim of rising real estate and fewer people stopping in, but places like this are still needed.

Singing a Sad Song for Their Piano Bar - New York Times, 7/19/07:There was the story, for example, from about 10 years ago, where a glassy-eyed gentleman wandered in, steadied himself against the bar and with little ceremony unburdened himself with the force of a racehorse.

Kristine Zbornik, a professional singer and actress, was at the microphone at the time. When the gentleman’s stream advanced toward her, she raised her left foot and switched songs midway through and started belting out, “Cry Me a River.”

When news of the closing of Rose’s Turn spread last weekend among the bar’s longtime patrons, many say they felt devastated. Susan Finkelstein McElroy, 50, a regular patron who lives in North Babylon, on Long Island, received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2004. She credits song-filled nights at Rose’s Turn with helping her endure the rigors of chemotherapy.

When she read the bad news in an e-mail message on Saturday, Ms. Finkelstein McElroy wept.

For 56 years, since it opened during the Truman administration, 55 Grove Street in the West Village has been a piano bar, cabaret and comedy club for the quick-witted and full-throated. First it was Upstairs/Downstairs, then the Duplex (which remains open at another location), and finally it became Rose’s Turn."

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Travel lightly or not at all

This article criticizes Live Earth, and particularly the stars appearing in it, for by hypocritical by wasting so much energy to get to these events. It does mention what some of the venues are doing to offset the carbon emissions and trash, but overall it does not consider this event to be environmentally friendly.

There's something to be said for keeping live music local -- going to see local bands who don't tour, and using public transportation, to see them. Now we just have to get the local music press and the fans on board to give props to bands that refuse to tour.

Live Earth is promoting green to save the planet - what planet are they on? | the Daily Mail, 7/07/07: "A Daily Mail investigation has revealed that far from saving the planet, the extravaganza will generate a huge fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army.

The most conservative assessment of the flights being taken by its superstars is that they are flying an extraordinary 222,623.63 miles between them to get to the various concerts - nearly nine times the circumference of the world. The true environmental cost, as they transport their technicians, dancers and support staff, is likely to be far higher.

The total carbon footprint of the event, taking into account the artists' and spectators' travel to the concert, and the energy consumption on the day, is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com, who specialises in such calculations."

Thursday, July 05, 2007

A film about classical music in unusual venues

The End of New Music - Free Speech Zone - Music - Column - New York Times, 7/04/07: "The film ['The End of New Music] documents a 2005 tour of rock clubs and alternative spaces by Free Speech Zone, a collective founded by Mr. Greenstein, David T. Little and Missy Mazzoli. In it, these three busy, highly regarded composers, whose boisterous, attractive music is influenced by neo-Romanticism, Minimalism and rock, forcefully reject the standard conventions of concert halls and academia....

“The main thing is understanding that you can actually take control over the way that your music is heard,” Mr. Greenstein said. 'Once you see that you had that power all along, then it suddenly doesn’t become ‘you versus the system’ anymore. It’s just you behaving as an adult, going out and making decisions in the world.'"

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

San Francisco's Music Scene in the 1960s

Rolling Stone : San Francisco: The Start of the Revolution: "In San Francisco in October 1965, some Red Dog veterans, now calling themselves the Family Dog, staged an evening of bands and dancing at the Longshoremen's Hall; billed as 'A Tribute to Dr. Strange,' it featured the Charlatans, Jefferson Airplane and the Great Society. The event spontaneously fused the lenient spirit of the Acid Tests with the Red Dog's focus on dancing and proved a pivotal occasion in the psychedelic scene's history. Over the next two years, San Francisco dance ballrooms--primarily the Avalon and the Fillmore--became not merely a central metaphor for Haight-Ashbury's reinvention of community but also a fundamental enactment of it.

The bands that emerged in this setting were made up largely of musicians who had come up playing in the Bay Area's folk-music venues. The folk crowd had been notoriously dismissive of rock & roll; they saw it as unserious and decadent, not at all committed to social or political concerns. But after the arrival of the Beatles in 1964 and Bob Dylan's transition to electric music in 1965, Bay Area folk musicians began to see how electric music could incorporate substantive themes and poetic language."

Huge arenas no longer is demand as music venues

7/01/07 - The Enquirer - Huge venues are vanishing: "Live Nation, which posted more than $3.5 billion in revenues last year, bills itself as 'the world's largest live music company.' It owns or operates 131 venues. Increasingly, amphitheaters sitting mainly on interstate exits and beltways outside of cities, find themselves in areas that have become prime real estate. Live Nation is selling off amphitheaters where established stars such as Buffett and Chesney may be the only guaranteed sellouts.

Just last week, Live Nation ended a management deal with the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater near Kansas City, Mo., plunging that outdoor venue's future into uncertainty.

While it divests of amphitheaters and other aspects of its business - including its Broadway Across America series that comes to the Aronoff Center for the Arts - Live Nation is beefing up its live music promotion and focusing on smaller venues. The company recently acquired the House of Blues chain of 10 clubs for $350 million.

Smaller performing venues are more attractive to artists as well as presenters, says [Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of the concert trade magazine Pollstar], because all seats are reserved. In 1994, touring groups including the Rolling Stones shifted to 'tiered pricing,' charging a premium for the best seats. But in the amphitheater world, the largest capacity is the lawn, which are the cheapest tickets.

'The artists will tend to demand that the presenters pay them a lot for that lawn capacity, whether they sell it or not,' Bongiovanni says. 'But if you only have 6,000 reserved seats, it's a safer bet. And artists generally like to play venues they can fill. No one likes to play to an empty or half-empty facility.'"

Do free concerts hurt clubs or build audiences?

This article suggests that while the free jazz concerts in Chicago increase the popularity of jazz, they hurt small club discouraging fans from going to them and by driving up prices for artists.

Chicago Tribune news, 7/01/07: Scatting from clubs to larger concert venues: "Perhaps no one did more to affect that change than Lois Weisberg, commissioner of the city's Department of Cultural Affairs under Mayor Richard M. Daley and a cultural advocate in previous administrations. By steadily expanding free concerts in Grant Park and helping to transform the old Chicago Public Library building into the bursting-with-music Chicago Cultural Center, Weisberg put the city's muscle and money behind music.

'There's no other city in the country that does so much free music,' says Weisberg, noting that the city now spends about $2 million a year on various music events, much of it jazz.

Furthermore, by joining forces with organizations such as the Chicago Jazz Partnership -- a collection of blue-chip corporate foundations that committed $1.5 million to Millennium Park's 'Made in Chicago' jazz series and other jazz events -- the city has leveraged additional resources to jazz concert-going."

More on environmentally friendly events

I'm a bit skeptical that the event industry is the second-largest contributor to carbon emissions in the world, but it's still a good thing to be environmentally friendly.

7/1/07 --Rock bands find new ways to go green: "'The event industry is the second-largest contributor to carbon emissions in the world, next to construction,' said Joseph Malki, vice president of business development for green events consultant Seven-Star Inc., which will be overseeing the environmental efforts of four of the Live Earth concerts taking place around the world July 7.

Adam Gardner, guitarist-vocalist for the Boston-spawned band Guster, became so interested in finding ways to reduce his band's carbon footprint that he and his wife, Lauren Sullivan, both Tufts University graduates, began Reverb, a nonprofit green tour-consulting organization, in 2004.

Reverb does everything from offering suggestions to providing full-service consultants who will coordinate backstage recycling and biodiesel refueling for trucks and buses, set up 'ecovillages' at venues, and more. The group has assisted the Chili Peppers, Lavigne and Jones in the past, and is working with the Fray and Mayer this summer."

Monday, July 02, 2007

Boulder Music History

Here's a good article, from 2002, about the history of music in Boulder dating from the 1960s.

Boulder Musicians Make Music and History: "For years, Boulderites have bemoaned the fact that the town, nestled against the Flatirons, never developed the music scene they expected. But the truth is, Boulder has had an impact on the national music industry ever since the Astronauts launched their career from Tulagi on the Hill in the mid-1960s, and Boulder's local recording and live music scene has been a thriving, vital cultural force despite the moaning and groaning."