Nashville's indie showcase

More and more local communities are developing mini-SXSW's. Here's Nashville's.

Next Big Nashville: "Q&A with NBN creator and producer Jason Moon Wilkins: Q: What is the purpose of the event? A: 'The inaugural NBN was conceived and executed in three and a half weeks in 2006 as a way to celebrate what was a banner year for Nashville's rock/pop/indie community. It was originally meant to be just a one-night party, but it quickly grew into a three-day festival that drew nearly three thousand people. Obviously, this year has expanded exponentially, which is a reflection of how dynamic Nashville's music scene is at the moment. The basic reasoning behind it was that it seemed like we needed an event like this and the artists, the industry and the city as a whole have overwhelmingly agreed with that assessment. It's a truly exciting time to be a part of the music community in Nashville and to be living in such a vibrant and growing city. More than anything else, I wanted to build an event that echoed that excitement. Nashville is evolving and expanding beyond its former image into something more cosmopolitan and eclectic but still decidedly southern and I wanted to create a musical reflection of that.'

Is this a showcase/industry event or a public festival?
A: "It's both. It's an easy 'one stop shop' for any out-of-town or in-town industry professional interested in what is happening in Nashville's music scene at the moment. It's also a chance to showcase the growing community of industry professionals who work outside the Music Row mainstream but whose work helps tie Nashville to the international arena. And it's an opportunity for Nashville music fans to see their favorite acts play together in a festive and communal atmosphere and hopefully to be introduced to their new favorite band along the way.""

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. "

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 ..."

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."

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."

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."

Athens GA still a big music town

Macon.com | 06/19/2007 | Years after R.E.M., Athens music scene still hot: "In a town of roughly 100,000 people, Athens - home of the University of Georgia and just south of the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains - has an estimated 500-plus music groups. At that ratio, metro Atlanta would have about 20,000 rock bands and New York City would have more than 40,000....

'In Georgia, probably most of the artistic and eccentric and creative and interesting people gravitate to UGA,' said Fred Schneider of The B-52s, whose group returned to its roots in Athens last month to record their first album in 15 years. 'It's an easy place to live, prices are reasonable and there's a lot to do and see.'"

When your music scene is miles from anywhere

Here in Colorado bands complain about how hard it can be to tour since it's usually a day's drive to get to venues in other states.

But it is a minor problem compared to what Alaskan musicians have to deal with.

Willamette Week Online | Music | A Great Place To Leave • Alaska to Portland may be the great music migration. | Sunday June 24th, 2007: "For musicians in most states, relocating to a bigger city may be a good career move, but it's hardly vital—after all, a band can always tour. But if you're a band from Anchorage, Alaska's largest city, the nearest major American city is 2,350 miles away—about the same distance from Portland to Detroit! And Alaska's music scene isn't just isolated: A serious shortage of venues and the absence of label scouts mean one of the largest Alaskan music communities isn't in Alaska at all. It's here in Portland.

In the past year and a half, there have been at least 10 transplanted Alaskan bands based in PDX (though three broke up in 2006). There are also several Alaskan solo artists, a couple of predominantly AK bands (the late Konami Defense System was half Alaskan, as is Day of Lions), and a handful of bands with members from the 49th state, including the Joggers. Even here in the City of Transplanted Roses, that's a lot of musicians from one state—especially a state that has only about 100,000 more people in it than Portland itself.

For many Alaskans, Seattle comes off as an impersonal monolith, and between the landscape and the cultural differences, California might as well be another planet. But the greenery, temperate climate and laid-back populace of Portland seem just right. Since 1996 (when 36 Crazyfists moved to PDX after a fruitless year in Seattle), Portland has become the primary destination for young Alaskan musicians. This history provides a ready-made (if modest) fan base for new expat bands, and an existing social network, too."

Where to put some music venues

I've started to do a bit of research for a project I am working on. And I just discovered this. It's a good place to find info on what Denver urban areas are being redeveloped.

DenverInfill.com: Downtown Denver and Its Urban Infill and Redevelopment Projects

Why have a festival

For all of those musicians who have wondered if SXSW, MOBfest, and similar festivals are good career moves, here's an opinion.

Chicagoist: MOBfest ... BLAHfest.: "Their mission statement, according to the MOBfest website, is: 'We are a three-day music business seminar focused on building a buzz, aiding in awareness, and peaking the interest of the music business community ... Networking, schmoozing and simply attending the panels can be a great way to make new contacts, secure current connections and start new relationships.'

... none of the above really happens. Instead we get the usual suspects within the local scene congratulating each other, attending shows at only the largest venues, and largely ignoring the majority of the schedule. And why wouldn't they? Even we, who are neck deep in the local scene, are hard pressed to recognize more than a smattering of bands on their schedule....

In the end we are withdrawing our support for MOBfest because we honestly can't see how the whole thing is helping anyone out, except for possibly the bands being managed by the folks at the top of the MOBfest food chain, and even most of them can't seem to get signed to any sort of sustainable career .... It's not as egregious as, say, Emergenza, when it comes to taking advantage of the naivety of hopeful bands, but they have no problem spreading the belief that by associating yourself with MOBfest you still have a chance a label will walk into their show and sign them on the spot."

The Family Dog in Denver

The Family Dog was famous for bringing so many 1960s acts to Denver (many of the collectable posters from that era were for shows there) and for giving Barry Fey, Denver's most famous rock promoter, his start.

My college roommate worked at the Family Dog and I used to go there. The only two shows I can remember were the Doors and Canned Heat (the night they got busted for the Denver police).

Denver's Family Dog had roots in, like, the Summer of Love RockyMountain News, 6/8/07: "It was 40 years ago on June 7, 1967, that Fey flew to San Francisco to meet with the Family Dog folks in what would mark the genesis of The Family Dog concert venue here at 1601 W. Evans Ave.

Fey was looking for a place to feature original music when he contacted Bob Cohen with the Family Dog. Cohen liked the tape of local band Eighth Penny Matter so much that he flew from San Francisco to Denver during the Summer of Love.

'That's how the Family Dog was born,' Fey said. 'That was the most important day in Colorado music history.'

Denver's Family Dog opened with Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring Janis Joplin. Others who graced the stage were Blue Cheer, Quicksilver Messenger Service, The Grateful Dead, The Doors and Buffalo Springfield.

The club, which never made any money, in part because tickets were $3.50, eventually morphed into The Dog until it closed with the return of Joplin in June 1968. 'The week before we closed Bobby Kennedy was shot,' Fey said."

Colorado Music Scene History

Right now is probably the best time ever in the history of Denver rock. There are a ton of great local bands on the scene. And the major label success of The Fray has finally gotten the labels (what is left of them) to actively look at Denver bands to sign.

This is a look at Colorado music from about 1980 to 2000. It's not comprehesive (because no person could have been everywhere and involved with every band), but it's one man's look

The Colorado Music Scene - History

Rap-Vermont style

Yo, Vermont, What Up? These 3 Dudes, for Starters - New York Times, 6/2/07: "The rap, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL7uW4TYqbs, pokes fun at Vermont institutions and stereotypes like dairy products and snowplows.

“Green Mountain State, where we roll on skis, don’t mess with our cows or we’ll break your knees,” go the rappers, who perform under the name X10."

Melbourne losing music venues

Live venues hit rock bottom | Herald Sun, 5/31/07: "WITH the number of live venues dwindling fast, Melbourne's music industry is on the verge of a crisis.

Melbourne's live venues seem to be dropping like flies, Melbourne losing two rock rooms last week alone.

The 1880-capacity Palace will close in two weeks to make way for the $300 million redevelopment of the St Kilda triangle site.

And Fitzroy's Spanish Club, which holds about 500, will close on June 23 after a long stoush with residents, council and liquor licensing....

That means Melbourne will be without a 1800-2500 capacity standing-room live venue for the foreseeable future, with the Forum the closest candidate at 1500.

"

America's 40 Best Music Venues

Paste Magazine :: Feature :: America's 40 Best Music Venues: "Sometimes it’s the view—you’re at Denver’s Red Rocks, your eyes darting back and forth from the band to the landscape, and the music seems changed by the surrounding beauty. Sometimes it’s the history—a young band, onstage at The Fillmore, stands on the shoulders of the giants whose music helped reshape the world. Sometimes it’s the sense of discovery—you’re at L.A.’s Hotel Cafe, and you suspect the night’s opening act is headed for stardom. And sometimes, like with The Bowery Ballroom in New York, it’s simply the fact that on any given night, you know they’ve booked another great show.

To help find America’s best music venues, we went to the experts—you. In addition to our many contributors scattered across the country and many of the artists driving from club to club, Paste readers nominated more than 500 different venues at PasteMagazine.com—from hole-in-the-wall rock clubs to elegant theaters, legendary halls to brand new bars, quiet listening rooms to rock extravaganzas.

We weighed history, setting, sound, character, comfort, atmosphere, vibrancy, uniqueness, and their roles in helping launch careers. Among hundreds of worthy choices, these 40 venues rose above their peers. Our picks for the best music venues in America follow in this special section..."

Creating IPod Tours of Your Music Scene

Here's a site that makes available audio tours via iPods. Some people sell them, others give them away for free. I don't see a lot being done with music yet, it would be make sense. Combine a tour of local venues with music from local bands that play there frequently. Find interesting little facts about the venues that would appeal to tourists and locals who want to know more.

Denver would be a perfect location because some of our hippest venues are in colorful parts of town and have long histories as converted bars, failed past music experiments, etc. For example, the Family Dog, which existed briefly in the 1960s and featured the Doors, Janis Joplin, and the like, is now a strip club.

And Denver, famous for "On the Road," is intrinsically colorful anyway.

AudioSnacks.com: Podcast and MP3 Audio Tours for Travel, Museums, and More!

A showcase for teen art and music

5/19/07, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER'All Ages Art Night' offers teens space to make music and fashion statement: "In one corner: teen bands covering Nirvana and The Killers.

In another: a hip-hop fashion show with local youths in their modeling debut.

In between those two areas: spoken-word performances, masters of ceremonies spitting original verse and 60 community organizations that brought together hundreds of teens from all over the city.

'Seattle is really successful at creating innovative programs to work with teens, but there are not a ton of places to show what they've done,' said Jennifer Bisson, who organized the annual 'All Ages Art Night' at the Central Library and helped transform it into a performance venue Friday afternoon and night. 'There are so many negative images about teens. This is a positive thing in a public forum, which is serendipitous, because it also builds community.'

Under thousands of diamond-shaped glass panes in the Fifth Avenue lobby, roaming bands of teens wandered to tables piled high with information and talked with helpful volunteers from groups such as Readergirlz (a local writers collective for teen girls), Youth Speaks and Emerging Voices (poetry workshops for teens), Skate Like a Girl, the Girl Scouts, the events-and-program-packed Redmond Old Firehouse and the Richard Hugo House.

Programs such as this, Bisson said, give them a sense of ownership, especially with the Teen Advisory Board the library created to help bring more teens into the system."

Creating a music promotion business from the ground up

How a college student went from club booker to full-time music promoter.

Promoter helps rock scene thrive - Chico Music Guide, 5/16/07: "Devil Kat Rock Productions founder Katie Perry has always been passionate about music, but it wasn't until she moved from Redding to Chico to attend college that she found her ardor for music promotion.

'I love rock 'n' roll,' Perry said. 'I honestly think I would be entirely lost if I didn't do this.'

Perry is a music promoter who promotes, stage-manages and books various music talents, both local and national, to perform in Chico and Redding. Since starting in 2002, she has had a full calendar of shows. On top of her 40-hour-a-week day job, she pumps out another 30 to 50 hours under her alter ego Devil Kat Rock Productions....

'Having shows is like rolling the dice, I really don't know how many people are going to come,' she said. 'Some people are going to talk shit and critique - telling me how I should do things - these people are generally the ones that don't get off their asses and do something.'"

Happenings in Baltimore

This is an excerpt from a long article on an art/music collective, its performance space, and how it gave rise to much of the current indie music scene in Baltimore. It's quite a good profile of how a group of friends can have a significant impact on a community.

Feature: Wham City Doesn't Want To Take Over The World--But It Just Might Anyway | 5/16/2007 | Citypaper.com: "... Wham City was a rented industrial loft space squatting somewhere between Mount Vernon and Charles Village. (Its members have requested we don't divulge the exact location in print.) In its first incarnation, it was often filled with garbage. Smashing plates in a sink with a baseball bat was a popular activity when bored. But especially after it moved one floor upstairs in the same building, it was a crucial local space for "music shows, variety shows, TV talk shows, video productions, theatrical productions, lecture series, potluck dinners, photo shoots, fashion shows, [and] dance parties" in the words of Wham City member Adam Endres. Wham City united many young people in the Baltimore art and music scenes who maybe didn't even know they needed uniting

In fact, the Wham City collective is but one spiky tip of a massive, tangled ball of creativity currently lurking just under Baltimore's liquor-licensed layer of legit bars and venues, galleries, and theaters. Bands are multiplying like sui generis bunnies in little warrenlike warehouses all over the city, and they're being formed by folks either too young to be squatting and making a racket five years ago, or not even living in the city, or both. These bands do intersect occasionally with the city's longstanding free improvisation/noise crews, but with their vestigial connections to punk rock and their continual reification/recycling of the pop-cultural junk they grew up on, they're not really experimentalists. They're making pop music that bends at various wonky, acute angles.

And though the music is the loudest and most obvious manifestation of all this energy, you can feel it in everything from local T-shirt designers to zine makers to video artists to sculptors to performance-art shenanigans yet to be named. More often than not, they're the same kids in the bands. Wham City has been, if not quite at the center of all this attention, certainly a central node.

Since you can hum along to some of it, the indie-music world outside Charm City is taking note of Baltimore's young underground. National media outlets have started to glom onto Wham City and its satellites as another installment of the Baltimania that's given us a hundred half-assed articles on club music and The Wire in the last 18 months. Just a week ago, Deacon was featured in the The New York Times, where he was hilariously described as a 'sensitive electro-party rocker.' Baltimore bands recently swarmed the annual South by Southwest music industry clusterfuck in Austin, Texas; Deacon played no less than five shows that weekend.

Locally, evidence of this explosion is increasingly easy to find on the records released by labels such as Wildfire Wildfire, Creative Capitalism, and recent Washington transplant Carpark (which is sucking up Baltimore bands at a quick clip); at exhibitions and performances at Current Gallery; at the biweekly Are We Not Men? dance party at the Depot; at the Talking Head club until its closure; at shows in the artist-riddled H&H Building; at house parties and one-off loft gatherings; at Baltimore institutions of 'high' culture like the Walters Art Museum; and at Wham City itself, until recently. See, all this celebration comes at a strange time, because Wham City, as it was, is no more.

All illegal venues live on borrowed time; last September--after a string of shows plagued by assholes pulling fire alarms, smashing windows, and setting fires--Wham City was forced to stop holding shows following alleged complaints by the fire marshal to the building's management and threats of eviction from the building's owner. The collective rallied and is hunting for a new, potentially legit, space, but at the moment there's a feeling that the local arts community has lost something important just as its intensity is peaking.'...

The collective initially formed around six friends, but its ranks have swelled to include anywhere from 16 to 24 people in Baltimore, and 11 of them are here today. It's two days before everyone has to be out of the building for good....

Stranded in a city where they knew almost no one, the Purchase kids developed a drunken bunker mentality, holed up in the space that would become Wham City with no phones, blowing what little money they had at the local liquor store, and destroying personal property when boredom threatened.... [But, as the article explains, things got better.]

The past six months alone have already seen a Wham City theater night, a cross-country tour, sundry live shows around town (and their attendant poster art), two episodes of in-house talk show The Ed Schrader Show, several records released by various WC-related bands, a gallery exhibition, a museum showcase, various videos, two issues of Catatac (a traditionally folded-and-stapled zine published by Kate Levitt, Mark Brown, and Kevin Sherry that's full of contributions from Wham members), and a bunch of stuff not yet ready for prime-time consumption. "I know of at least two board games that are being developed," Connor Kizer says. Sure, not all of it needs to be documented, but the irrepressible, overwhelming mass of stuff that Wham City churns out is always impressive."

Mexico City and indie rock

Los Dynamite Noiselab Mexico City Rock - New York Times, 5/13/07: "Thanks mostly to the downloadable avalanche of globalization and the rise of MySpace the current independent rock scene is full of artists who may be from Mexico City but sound as if they could be from New York, Stockholm or Paris....

The debut of MySpace in 2003 couldn’t have come at a better time for the Mexico City indie scene. In the 1990s major labels could still afford to be interested in a diverse swath of rock and alternative acts, but by 2003 they were no longer signing bands whose sales weren’t projected to reach gold in their first month or who weren’t easy matches for telenovela soundtracks. In response a string of indie labels emerged to fill the void, and suddenly it seemed that there were more bands than ever. There were more young people making music on home computers, more places to play (galleries and storefronts as much as clubs) and more international acts — like the White Stripes, which made Mexico City a heralded early stop on a 2005 tour — coming to town.

Most in the scene agree that the watershed moment came in 2004 with the appearance of Reactor, a taste-making, state-supported radio station. Unlike previous Mexico City alternative rock radio ventures, Reactor made breaking independent and underground bands from Mexico as central to its mission as playing the latest from Franz Ferdinand. 'If a band has a strong following, we take notice,' said Raúl David (Rulo) Vázquez, the station’s lead programmer.

Everything, then, was in place for an indie explosion. MySpace just struck the match.

'There’s always what we call the Mexico City lag,' said Luis Arce, a member of Chikita Violenta, whose debut album, 'The Stars and Suns Sessions,' was recently released on Noiselab. 'In the U.S. there was the college rock boom — Pavement, Sebadoh, even Nirvana — and now in Mexico City we have our own version of that. This is our own ’90s indie boom, just a decade or so late.'...

'In previous generations the goal was to present yourself as part of the city, to define the city and express the city,' said Jorge Hipolito, a veteran of the Mexico City scene who works at Noiselab. 'Now that doesn’t matter so much.'...

One particularly controversial result of Nafta has been the growing number of young bands choosing to sing in English, even if the members don’t speak it particularly well. Most of these bands claim that it’s not a bid for crossover success, but a direct reflection of their musical upbringing. 'We’re more comfortable singing and writing in English,' said Mr. David of Chikita Violenta. 'We’re proud of being from Mexico, but this is the way we like to do music. It would be dishonest for us to sing in Spanish.'"