weird scenes from the 5 and the TCH: metropolitan structure and rock in Canada

It was November 1977, and it was the first time any of us had traversed our home and native land. We soon found out what a big-ass country Canada is. The ground in Saskatchewan was covered with snow, and it was so fucking flat that you could see a grain elevator miles away. It looked like the earth had been run over by a giant bulldozer! Let's just say the beauty of the heartland is an acquired taste. The road was like a skating rink through eastern Manitoba. I drove through a flotilla of cop cars and tow trucks, my knuckles white from grippin' the wheel.

- Joey Keithley, I, Shithead: A Life in Punk (pg. 39).

This passage from the autobiography of D.O.A. frontman and Canadian punk pioneer Joey Keithley, a.k.a. Joey Shithead, conveys a fact of life known to all Canadians: theirs is a huge country with a fairly small population. Consider this: in 2011, Canada had a population of 33,476,688 residents within its 3,855,103 square miles (9,984,670 square kilometers). That gives the country a population density of 8.7 people/square miles (3.4 people/square kilometers). By contrast, in 2010 the U.S. had a population density of 83.0 people/square miles (32.1 people/square kilometers), while the U.K. had the respective figures of 661.8 people/square miles (225.5 people/square kilometers).

Of course, most of Canada is undeveloped or inhospitable by "modern" standards (scare quotes to give the country's indigenous First Nations inhabitants their due). Thus, its population is geographically concentrated within a relative handful of cities close to the U.S. border. Canada's statistics office reports that in 2006, 80.2 percent of its national population lived in "urban areas." (I couldn't find the most recent 2011 figures for urban population.) The census metropolitan areas for Canada's three biggest cities alone — Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver — account for 42.3 percent of this urban population, or 34.4 percent of the entire population. As a point of comparison, you would have to sum up the 17 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the U.S., from NYC to San Diego, before you reached a comparable proportion of the national population.

It might seem that Canadians with an inkling to visit the big cities would have an easy time of it, considering how few of these major metropoles their country has to offer, but the vast distances separating the three cities can raise a significant obstacle. This point was illustrated to me when I met up recently with a recent graduate from Vassar College who hailed from Victoria, a charming little coastal British Columbian city some 70 miles (114 km) and a ferry ride away from Vancouver. A bright, intellectually curious student, this individual is very much what I'd call an urbanist by disposition. Just last summer, she bicycled across the U.S. with a team raising funds for Habitats for Humanity. And yet... she had never visited Toronto or Montreal, Canada's two biggest cities.

Although I have no idea how typical her experience is for Canadians living on the West Coast, I'll bet it isn't all that out of the ordinary. U.S. citizens wouldn't necessarily expect all Seattleites to have visited Chicago or New York City. Why should we expect Canadians living just across the border to have spanned similar distances? Well, speaking from an American point of view, we do it because Canadians have so few big cities in Canada to choose from than we do. Essentially, if you're looking for the cosmopolitanism, diversity, amenities and cultural developments (including architecture) that we associate with 'great cities', there's really only three places in Canada to choose from. Why wouldn't a self-conscious urbanist take the time to visit these places?

Perhaps the construct of national borders blinds us to the more relevant metropolitan structure. To return to my example, this individual did have a repertoire of cities that she was intimately familiar with growing up in Victoria. They were situated along the Pacific West Coast and U.S. Interstate 5 ("the 5," in regional parlance): Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego. Indeed, Washington state's San Juan Islands stared at her and other Victorians any time they took the ferry, while her story of the family roadtrip to Disneyland could be substituted for any U.S. resident's experience, except for the added element of passports.

These features of Canada's metropolitan structure, particularly the vast distance separating Vancouver from the country's bigger cities along and off the Trans-Canada Highway, have exerted an overlooked influenced on the development of pop music — in Canada, the rest of North America, maybe even further. Here now, three vignettes from the North America's highway vector, along the 5 and the TCH.

The Collectors

I recently watched "Shakin' All Over: Canadian Pop Music in the 1960s," a CBC documentary from 2006 based on Nicholas Jennings' book Before the Gold Rush: Peace, Love, and the Dawn of the Canadian Sound. The doc moves quickly through the usual suspects (Neil Young, Joni Mitchell) to focus on the national groups who had hits and played gigs within Canada. As for the ascent of bona fide 60s rock played by and for countercultural freaks is concerned, the doc assigns Vancouver a key role in the story (at about 14:00 into this clip).

The Canadian music scene continues to thrive locally in the mid-1960s, but without any national music infrastructure. There is no cross-country radio airplay or touring circuits, so West Coast musicians look south to the psychedelic sounds of California. Like San Francisco's Haight Ashbury, Vancouver's music scene is based in incense-filled clubs like the Afterthought and the Retinal Circus. Dozens of adventurous bands spring up with their own mind-expanding lightshows and groovy poster art.

The first significant group in this story is the Collectors, flower-punk pioneers from Vancouver who morphs into a Haight Ashbury folk-rock group, Chilliwack. Tapping into the West Coast connection wasn't merely a matter of musical influences for the Collectors; it was also a matter of career practicality.

It was easier for us to travel 1500 miles to L.A., and there was a great center of music there, than it was for us to go 3000 to Toronto or New York.

- Bill Henderson, The Collectors

In turn, the geographical shift of countercultural musical energy to the West Coast between 1967-69, the key years for the Collectors, gave Vancouver groups special access to the central influences, markets and industry feeding the baby boom rock generation. This was a not-inconsiderable advantage that groups from Toronto and Montreal would be hard pressed to match. 

The Deviants

The West Coast urban chain is also the setting for the final burnout of London's late-60s underground legends the Deviants. Led by Mick Farren, a writer for the underground publication International Times, the Deviants recorded three albums between 1967 and 69 that never quite met the musical standards set by their inspiration, Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, but nonetheless capture the anger and anarchy of the freak community residing in London's Landbroke Grove neigborhood. By the third album, the group took on Vancouver guitarist Paul Rudolph, whose hometown connections lay the basis for a brief Autumn 1969 sojourn to Vancouver. Deviants manager Jamie Mendelkau explained the idea in Rich Deakin's Keep it Together! Cosmic Boogies with the Deviants and the Pink Fairies:

In simplest terms, the gig was arranged via Paul Rudolph and his pal who owned the Colonial, and it was seen as a great way to reopen the place. I don't know if he had ever listened to any Deviants albums at this time. Paul Rudolph was well known enough in Vancouver music circles to pull a crowd (pp. 132-3).

These gigs at the Colonial were disastrous. Few people showed up at first, and when they finally did, they received an abusive earful from Farren:

THIS IS BRITISH AMPHETAMINE PSYCHOSIS MUSIC AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT, YOU CAN FUCK OFF AND LISTEN TO YOUR IRON BUTTERFLY ALBUMS!

Farren's aggravated state ("They were actually seeing a human being in neural disintegration, right onstage, without hesitation and shame," he recalled) burned the final bridge to his bandmates. Rudolph, bassist Duncan Sanderson, and drummer Russell Hunter sacked Farren from his own band and, stranded in the U.S. without return airfare, obtained a week-long residency at Seattle's Trolley Club opening for... the Collectors.

From their they made a pilgramage to San Francisco, where they played a few poorly attended shows, crashed at various communes (including Chet Helms' Family Dog; see the photo below, with Rudolph sitting to the left of a pontificating Helms), and caught gigs by the Grateful Dead, Jeferson Airplane, Steve Miller, It's a Beautiful Day, as well as touring performances by the Velvet Underground and Crosby Stills & Nash. Rudolph and Deviants Roadie Boss Goodman even made it to Altamont; in exchange for help setting up the stage, they had backstage view to "loads of little magic moments" and "some of the most atrocious sights you'd ever seen" (in Goodman's words; pp. 148-9).

Perhaps most importantly, it was in the music room of an Oak Street commune belonging to one "weird hippy religous sect" that the three remaining Deviants put together a new set of material, including an epic new jam, "Uncle Harry's Last Freakout." After a final sojourn into Canada for a series of gigs at Montreal's McGill University, the band finally made it back to England. By the end of 1969, the three Deviants convened with psychedelic musician Twink — ex-Tomorrow, ex-Pretty Things, and creator of the Farren-produced/Deviants-supported solo album Think Pink — to form the Pink Fairies.

DIY in the age of CanCon

In 1971, the Canadian Parliament legislated the recommendations of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission that radio and TV begin broadcasting a fixed minimum percentage of content that is in some way written, produced, presented, or otherwise contributed to by Canadian citizens. Known as the CanCon requirements, the law responded to longstanding concerns about the Americanization of content broadcast on Canadian airwaves. CanCon's impact on creating awareness among Canadians of their own popular culture is immeasurable. Furthermore, as intended, CanCon gave a massive boost to the economic sectors associated with Canadian television and music. In the case of music, Canadian bands now could expect that national record labels might give them a serious lookover — at least in the aggregate.

(Famously, Canadian rockers Rush was totally ignored by Canadian labels, and they had to independently release their self-titled 1974 debut album. It took the surprise breakout of the album's single "Working Man" from a Cleveland rock radio station to get them signed by a major label: the U.S. wing of Mercury Records. The whole situation was "pretty pathetic when you think about us being the biggest band Canada has produced," Neil Peart told Sounds in 1980. "It makes you a little bit cynical about the [Canadian music industry].")

Still, Canadian radio formats remained wed to the generic designations promoted U.S. radio consultants (see Line Grenier's 1990 article, "Radio Broadcasting in Canada: The Case of 'Transformat' Radio," published in the academic journal Popular Music). A punk-rock band in Canada could no more make headway into mainstream radio or the bars venues booking pop and rock acts than it could in the U.S. at this time. Thus the predicament facing Joey Shithead and other punks: they would have to do it themselves. As described in the opening quotation of this essay, Shithead took his first band the Skulls east to Toronto, where a lively punk scene had emerged in 1977. Still, it was fairly tough going at this time, as he recalls in his autobiography:

In one sense Toronto was like Vancouver: there were very few places to play. We had heard about the Crash'n'Burn, a place the Diodes had helped make famous, but it was closed by the time we arrived. We did go to to a couple of parties the Diodes threw, but they came across as art school posers to me.

Perhaps one incentive for the Skulls to make the daunting drive east (during a cold Canadian November no less) was that the trip was always meant to be one-way; after making a name for themselves in Toronto, the Skulls had aspirations to move to London. After their ignominous failure in Toronto broke up the band, Shithead returned to Vancouver and formed D.O.A. Significantly, this band found like-minded groups and made a name for itself largely via travels across the border and along the 5. Jello Biafra was a particular champion after D.O.A. shared several bills with the Dead Kennedys; he included the D.O.A. track "The Prisoner" on the seminal hardcore compilation Let Them Eat Jellybeans! (1981), and his Alternative Tentacles label would periodically release subsequent D.O.A. recordings. Through such support, the band went on to become legends of hardcore punk, opening up smaller cities and towns throughout North America to the punk-rock circuit that in turn laid the foundation for "alternative music's" hegemony by the 1990s.

Another hardcore band that was committed during this period to playing "secondary and tertiary markets" (as Henry Rollins sarcastically calls these overlooked places, above) was Hüsker Dü from Minneapolis. "D.O.A. and Dead Kennedys were the two bands that were the most instrumental in getting Hüsker Dü to the West Coast," Bob Mould writes in his autobiography See a Little Light (pg. 48). In turn, Hüsker Dü laid important ground for punk rock along the Trans-Canada Highway. Mould describes the inaugural dates of Hüsker Dü's first North American tour (1981) in Calgary at the Calgarian Hotel ("a flophouse with a bar and lounge on the ground floor"). A real baptism by fire for the band, the event also provides a view onto the conditions for punk rock in Calgary, then a city of 591,857 people.

       I'd sat next to bleeding unconscious people in bus terminals, I'd watched Johnny Thunders shoot up, and I'd watched drunk women attempt to vandalize our musical equipment; I'd experienced sketchy before. But this was a whole new level of sketchy. One woman who was a regular at the Calgarian was stabbed on Monday night, and then stabbed again that Wednesday. It was that kind of place.
       Early in the week, we were playing our first set while a handful of local Native Americans were getting drunk. During the second set, some ranchers started showing up. Then the two groups started going back and forth at each other. A fair amount of fighting happened around the pool table between the cowboys and the Indians — those are crass stereotypes, but it was the reality. We would fire the music back up, and they would stop what they were doing and say, "What the fuck is this punk rock? This band sucks!" So now the cowboys and Indians were putting their beef on hold and uniting against the punk rock; not ony against us, but also the punks in the audience. Of the fifty or so people in the bar, there would be a dozen cowboys and a handful of Indians, but the majority were the punks. You might that that ratio would have discouraged the cowboys and Indians, but it didn't. We'd finish a set, get off the stage, leave the drums and amps behind, run upstairs, go back to the rooms they gave us for free, and just sit there and say to one another, "We have to go back down there?" Fights were pouring out into the street, and since our room was in the front of the hotel, we saw everything. It was like a barroom brawl straight out of an old western movie.
       This continued for six straight days. By the end of the week, we'd not only managed to keep ourselves out of harm, trouble, and jail, but we'd also become acquainted with several folks in the Calgary punk rock community. It was a hell of a way to start a tour (pg. 50).

As this passage suggests, there was already a small punk rock community in Calgary whose flames Hüsker Dü only had to fan. One wonders if the band didn't have a special affinity, coming from the U.S. nothern midwest themselves, for punk rockers stranded in the Canadian plains, hundreds of miles away from the next outpost of good music.

swimming in the indie music ecosystem: an interview with Scott Reitherman of Throw Me The Statue

Scott Reitherman is the singer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and main guy behind Throw Me The Statue, an indie-pop band based in Seattle. They have two albums out on Secretly Canadian, an independent label based out of Bloomington, Indiana, and are currently in the studio recording a third one. Their 2007 debut Moonbeams got a warm reception in indie-music blogs and end-of-year lists, and since then they've managed to maintain decent if not vast interest in various North American cities where college kids and 20-somethings are into music like the kind made by the Shins et al.

I first met Scott at Vassar College, where he was a student in my Intro to Sociology class in the spring of 2001. Let the record show that Scott got an A- in the class; he did nicely in the sections on Marx and Weber, although he could have done a little better on Durkheim. (Actually, so could a lot of American sociologists.) After he declared Sociology as his major, I became his adviser. There were several meetings in my office where conversations drifted in and out of college issues, and soon we discovered a common obsession with music. I told him about various bands I played in after college, and he revealed that he played guitar and wrote songs. I imagine I signed off on the Electronic Music Production class he mentions below, but I never suspected that music would be his post-graduate pursuit.

In the spring of 2004, I got rid of all my old cassettes that I had been lugging around for twenty years. At the time I was living right off campus, so I put a crate of tapes out on the street and shot an e-mail to a few music-minded students. The tapes were gone in an hour, and years later Scott told me he scooped up most of them. If anyone detects the influence of the Fuzztone's 1985 album Lysergic Emanations in the music of Throw Me The Statue, I'll take the credit for that, thank you very much. Scott graduated from Vassar College that May, and we lost direct contact for awhile.

Fast forward to 2008, and I found a message on my office phone from Scott, too late: he was in Poughkeepsie, playing with his band, and could I make the show? This was probably the first I learned of his musical career; another student informed me that Scott's band was called Throw Me The Statue, and they were actually pretty good. I downloaded the albums—yes, they were pretty good, quite accomplished even. We got back in touch, although I'm still waiting to see the band play.

Making no aesthetic judgements about their music, Throw Me The Statue are clearly a 'real' indie-rock band. They're fortunate enough to have a label that distributes their music and sufficient attention to get them covered in Stereogum and other niche media. However, like so many other bands buzzed about by discerning young listeners, Throw Me The Statue has yet to reach to the next stage of success whereby their momentum becomes self-sustaining in even the medium term. The band can continue as long as they keep recording and playing to audiences, but any pause in this activity quickly renders their livelihoods precarious.

Knowing about my interest in the economics of musical creativity, Scott wanted to share his view on the subject. "More and more, it's harder to keep four people afloat with a band," he said in a phone conversation last July. He pointed me toward a Pitchfork interview with David Berman, who broke down in clear numbers the imbalance between expenses and revenues that characterized the Silver Jews (an apt comparison to Throw Me The Statue, insofar as both are similarly ambiguous as one-man projects fronting as bands). "One way for a band to support as a functioning ecosystem is to only support one person, the principal songwriter," he told me. "You need to take a significant leap in how successful you are before you can support four people."

Very intrigued, I proposed that Scott write an essay for the blog, but eventually the format evolved into this e-mail exchange, which began in earnest in January 2012 while Throw Me The Statue were entering the recording studio. As will become quickly clear, I'm no music journalist. With these questions I wanted to draw out the basics of Scott's situation, including many that go unasked in typical music-press interviews, in as much detail as necessary, much like I would approach any extended informant interview. Scott politely indulged me as I elaborated some of the more esoteric sociological and geographical implications of his responses, none of which is out of line with the recent scholarship highlighting the networking and organizational recycling that make musical scenes cohere. If Scott's experience in the Seattle scene isn't necessarily a unique one, his responses nonetheless illustrate how a musician can shift in and out of this musical ecology at different stages of their creative activity and personal life. (When we began discussing this interview, Scott was living in Los Angeles; by the end, he had moved to his hometown San Francisco before returning to Seattle.) He betrays a note of worry that he may soon be reaching the ends of how much more personal and geographical flexibility he wants to give to his music.

* * * * * * *

To begin, tell me about how Throw Me The Statue got started. Was it originally a band, or just you plus whomever you could find, or what? And where did Throw Me The Statue finally get off the ground?

Throw Me The Statue was born out of the Electronic Music Production class at Vassar that I took as a senior. It was a year long course, and halfway through it I decided to focus on songwriting and used the last couple projects in that class as the "debut" recordings under that new alias of mine. After graduating I moved to Seattle with some Vassar friends and Sam Beebe and I started a record label called Baskerville Hill with the intention of releasing our own music. Sam made music as Black Bear and I as Throw Me The Statue, and pretty soon we met people in Seattle with whom we collaborated and began to promote their music as well. It was really fun, equal parts elaborate art project and pseudo-company. Sam and I both released our first records on Baskerville along with a compilation of music by us and our friends. Sam moved to Germany, and about a year later I got Throw Me The Statue signed to Secretly Canadian Records, at which point I let Baskerville Hill gently fall to sleep and focused entirely on my new opportunity with Throw Me The Statue. I got some musical friends together to help me pull off some shows and touring, and the first year or so of promoting the Secretly Canadian debut was this familial version of a band.

What was your original vision of how much Throw Me The Statue would be a recording project versus a touring entity?

At first it was only about making recordings. Live shows were intimidating to me, I needed to work up both the nerve to sing in front of people and assemble a group. So at the beginning I was completely content just making recordings and demos. But once I got a taste of pulling off a good show I was on to that thing. How do we do this more? And linking up with a real label put us in touch with a booker, and from there it felt much more real and financially viable to be able to do both recordings and tours.

Why Seattle? Was this a place where you recognized like-minded musicians and receptive audiences?

Really dug the Northwest music of The Microphones, Modest Mouse, Bobby Birdman, Little Wings, Built To Spill, and record labels like K, States Rights and Marriage. We knew when we graduated that we wanted to start our own label so we plopped ourselves down there in the hopes of I don't know what, just proximity to what we though was cool I suppose. In hindsight it was a great city to stake our claim in, but a bad city to try and do tours out of. The East Coast is far denser and easier to tour within.

You left Seattle for Los Angeles recently. What happened to Throw Me The Statue along the way — did any musicians move with you? Did the concept of the band evolve at this point?

My girlfriend and I moved to LA by ourselves in order to see something new. At the same time Aaron Goldman, one of our original members and a friend of mine from high school, finished his Microbiology PhD at UW (which he'd been working on throughout his Throw Me The Statue tenure, including everyday in the van on tour!?!!) and took a job at Princeton. The other two remaining members of the band — Charlie Smith and Jarred Grimes — stayed in Seattle. Those two are still in the group, yet in some ways the identity of Throw Me The Statue has shifted back a bit towards its solo project origins. It's clear that after doing this for 5 years now, it can only reliably sustain my livelihood. The other guys have jobs and other pursuits, for me Throw Me The Statue is basically all I do. In LA I started tutoring high schoolers on the side, but mostly I focus on TMTS and can draw a living wage from it most months of the year. The move was basically a life change that Jess and I wanted and the band was both at the end of a promotion cycle and not lucrative enough to stay planted indefinitely in Seattle.

As for the concept of the band, yes it has changed a bit. Without going into all the details of how we divide our money and royalty percentages, I write the songs and then bring them to the group, and in that dynamic it can be a very large commitment that you ask of your bandmates without enough financial return for everyone. If you're in your early 20s and/or making oodles of dough then perhaps it is easier for the folks involved to drop everything whenever it's time to get back in that van, but for us we're getting a little older and we've started to move on from that model.

If I recall correctly, you're a native of San Francisco — by birthright, a sworn enemy of Los Angeles! But seriously, how amenable has LA been to your relocation of Throw Me The Statue? Have you played many shows there yet, or found studios to rehearse and record in? Or at this stage are you still mostly writing songs in your bedroom, the way we think how Joni Mitchell used to do in Laurel Canyon? How much do you need to interact with other people in LA to do your music?

In LA we rented a small one bedroom apartment in Echo Park and were there for 15 months. I needed additional space to set up my studio, so after looking around unsuccessfully for unique spots I had to get your basic band practice space at a rehearsal facility. In Seattle I had paid $450 a month to live in a house with my bandmates, and the basement of that house was our musical playground. In LA, Jess and I were renting our apartment for $1550 a month and then my music studio cost a little over $400 a month. So the cost of doing my thing was significantly higher in LA. My system was go to the rehearsal space in the morning and write songs. The bands wouldn't be there then, most of them showed up after work hours around 6 pm and onwards. So if I was out of there by then I could usually avoid the ungodly, soul-crushing din of umpteen bands all practicing around your room. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. The rooms range from somewhat soundproofed to not all, which is why I actually had to move my studio three times before I found the best space at a decent price.

As far as meeting other musicians LA was pretty ok. I met lots of people in groups, but I was in a writing phase while I was down there. Throw Me The Statue had just finished a round of touring and supporting our last record before we moved to LA, so at that point I was really only focused on writing new material.

While LA is a very big city, the indie music ecosystem seems pretty contained to the Silverlake / Echo Park area around where we lived. All the venues are for the most part around the Eastside as well. But now that it's time to finish our next record and play live again it makes the most sense to go back to Seattle, where the band is from.

I realize I haven't explained the last 6 months or so. I am actually in Half Moon Bay now, where I grew up. I left LA in May, to move home. My parents got divorced early this year and I had the flexibility and felt the need to come home and be around, spending time with both of them, etc. Then in the early fall I went back to Seattle to begin recording on our next album, and I am moving back there for the year in a few weeks. So LA is effectively a closed chapter for Jess and I now.

Awhile back you sent me that interview with Dave Berman, who really broke it down in terms of how economically difficult it is to keep Silver Jews happening. He of course has some unique circumstances to deal with (grad school, rehab), so let me ask your perspective on the economics of being an indie-rock band today. First, tell me what a "living wage" (your words) means at this stage in your life. What are your living expenses like? (BTW, is LA more or less costly to live in than Seattle?) Do you have health insurance, school loans car payments, other long-term expenses? Remember, I'm a sociologist, so by asking all these questions, I don't assume your personal situation is all that unique; I suspect a lot of other people of your age doing all kinds ofcreative pursuits face similar situations.

A living wage for me is probably around $25,000-30,000 a year. Over the last five years of my music career there have probably been a couple years I didn't earn that much. I pay auto insurance on two vehicles, my own car plus the band's tour van, about $120/month. I pay for basic health insurance, at about $130/month. Good music equipment is expensive. I don't go out to bars that much anymore. LA was more expensive than Seattle, but not as pricy as San Fran or NYC would be in my opinion. In Seattle you can rent a small house for about $1000 a month and that affords you the space to have a home studio. In LA those places are harder to find at that price. And as I said, down there I had to find a separate space to have my studio, at significant extra cost. Had we have not lived in a fun part of town we could have found a small house I think for about what you can in Seattle, but we chose not to make that sacrifice. In LA I took a job tutoring high school students to bring in a little extra money while Throw Me The Statue was inactive and not earning much except the occasional royalty check.

One of the most interesting challenges to making the finances of indie rock work out is the money schedule. You can go a while without receiving a check, and then one day a company will finally decide to pay you for a license agreement you made with them months or a year ago. Or perhaps a new licensing offer will fall from the sky and land in your inbox. This feast and famine cycle is not very different from other forms of freelancing. Being on a legitimate record label certainly helps in instances where you need someone to go ask nicely "hey by the way, where is Scott's check?"

Basically when you make the transition from regular job and regular paychecks to pursuing music full time because you have the opportunity to have a real audience for your work, it can be a tricky financial adjustment. It is always tough when you're in the famine part of the cycle, but I am also very fortunate that I have a partner and a family that really support what I do. Probably that more than anything is the most important element in one's ability to stick around in the business of making independent music. If you summon the guts to go follow your passion you just need to be dead set on it. And it helps to have a good support network. But if you work hard at it and you're kind and you have some talent then you'll probably convince some people along the way. If you want to make the best loot travel back in time to the late 90s and become an internationally renowned house or trance DJ. Ride that wave into the sunset, that is my advice.

You talked about getting a little older. What, are you 30 years old by now? How far ahead are you able to envision your life into the future, in terms of, gosh I don't know, marriage kids house the whole nine yards?

I turn 30 in a couple months, thank you for that reminder. Yesterday Jess teased me that I was 30 and I said "Hey I'm in still in my twenties!" She said, "Scott, you're in your twenty-nines." Yes I want kids and the whole deal. If I can pay for that future with my music career I would be a very happy person. I don't know if I can realistically afford my share of the pricetag of a family in my home-state of California. Sometimes I think about where we could live that we could both pursue our careers (Jess is a freelance graphic designer) and be happy at a lower cost of living. Go live in Austin, Nashville, probably a lot of parts of the South and Midwest. Maybe upstate New York. But I don't know. My family is here on the west coast, this is where I'm from, so I feel that magnetism and someday in the next few years I may really have to move music to the side of my life and get a better paying career so that I can afford that future. Which by the way, I am totally fine with, it's just not Plan A.

You said that Throw Me The Statue can "reliably sustain" your livelihood, but only yours. How does that happen? What have the records and the tours brought in?

The tours last about a month each and bring in about $2,000-8,000 grand usually. It depends if you're headlining the tour or on as a support slot. So we've always split that evenly amongst the band. Best case scenario we're looking at coming home with one or maybe two months of rent for each of us. The records have earned between $10,000 to about $30,000 in profit. We split that with our label 50/50. ASCAP Royalties are something but they're also hardly much. Maybe at best a few grand in a year. Licensing agreements are really the way that I've been able to stay afloat, and those at times have been a $10,000 dollar bump in a year's earnings to about $30,000 in a good year.

I'm getting the picture of how these revenue streams let you avoid getting a steady wage-paying job and get on with the business of making music full-time. To be awkwardly sociological, I would say your musical career is sustained by mobile assets (the profits/royalties/licensing/merchandising checks that find you, the supportive partner who lives with you, maybe support from your parents) and then geographically fixed assets (the money from gigs and the merchandise you sell there). Does that sound about right?

Yep.

Just as a parenthetical, I recently read in Simon Reynolds' book Retromania about Tim Warren, who runs Crypt Records and releases these Back From the Grave compilations of ultra-obscure garage punk. He put in a ridiculous amount of work trying to track down the members of these no-hit wonder bands from the 60s, digging through Library of Congress file cards that match his vintage singles then searching through archived Yellow Pages directories for matching names, just so he could cut these guys some royalty checks. It really highlighted how in a pre-Internet world, bands could lose their economic renumeration once the members drifted apart and moved away from the town listed in their pubishing. Never mind the professional mindset that a DIY career like yours requires; the technology that lets you be contacted at any time no matter where you are seems to be the invisible link in this contemporary music system.

Let me ask you about Throw Me The Statue's profile as a band. Last year I noticed that a lot of my favorite indie-rock albums — by artists like Kurt Vile, EMA, Marissa Nadler, Cass McCombs, Luke Roberts — consisted of a style that some might call folk-rock, at least insofar as (a) they were essentially solo artists and (b) their music was clearly composed on acoustic guitar or other instruments they could accompany themselves with. And many of them took it further to a Laurel Canyon vibe, i.e., an intimate conversation with the listener, via first-person confessional or visionary revelation. Obviously these artists might go out on tours backed by a group of musicians, but it seemed interesting that several of them used to be members of formal bands (the War on Drugs, Gowns), and now they're not — they're going out solo. Initially I thought that was kind of a cultural zeitgeist thing for this moment in music, but your responses make me wonder if this is also a reflection of the new business model for DIY music.

Well yes there is absolutely a vibrant trend of folk-based confessional music out there now. And I think that you see some bands do quite well when they participate in a nostalgic, yesteryear aesthetic. Part of this is an artistic community reacting to widespread hipsterdom, where identities are purchased from Urban Outfitters and all of that, and songwriters retreat from that and attempt to poetically mine their unique experiences. Also, a big part of this is due to baby boomers, who — god bless em — still pay for music. I don't know how many people in this demographic are buying Kurt Vile and Cass McCombs, but you bet they're buying big numbers of records from the more well-known and well-polished acts like Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. And don't forget Adele, that billboard juggernaut who eclipsed 6 million sales on her latest record at last count! [Make that 20 million records sold worldwide as of April 2012 - ed.]

But to your point, yes I think artists like some that you mention who have a similar aesthetic (confessional, with a classic folk-y core) absolutely find their way to that sound in part because of the finances involved. Many-membered bands like Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, or maybe a Polyphonic Spree, these are the successful exceptions, and they really have to know the size of their audience before they trot out on tour with an entourage of that size. I believe the Bon Iver tour these days is close to ten musicians on stage as well. So you see that organic model at work, guys like Sufjan or Bon Iver start as solo artists, and then bloom out on stage and subsequent records as there becomes an audience that can support that. That's a romantic and classic arc for a songwriter to take — start small on the debut, and then as an audience embraces your music you show them what you can do with a bigger canvas on your follow-up effort. But it's often inherently tied to an economic event that opens the door to that opportunity, and the guys that tour around solo now would probably more often that not flip the switch on the backing band as soon as they could afford to.

I'm usually interested in a maximalist approach to songmaking, using a lot of instruments in the mix. So on stage it becomes "how can we pull off these tunes with as few people as possible so that they still sound as full as they do on record?" Sometimes you just cut certain parts out, but sometimes we rely on laptops and samplers to fill in the musical elements that we don't have enough hands to perform. And that's not always ideal, but when you can eliminate the need for paid musician on tour you can make your bottom line balance out more sustainably.

To be explicit about my interests behind earlier questions, I'm always curious about the many ways being in a city is important to a musical project like Throw Me The Statue at this stage. Now you're back in Seattle making the new record with Charlie and Jarred. Has anyone else joined you in the studio?

Yes we've hired some Seattle drummers to come and play on the record. We've had James McAlister (Sufjan Stevens), Michael Lerner (Telekinesis), and Tyler Swan (Truckasauras) in.

And these are other Seattle musicians? How did you come across these folks?

We've known each other via other Seattle musical friends or shows we've played together over the years.

So does that make you the migrant in the band, so to speak? Have these guys played in other Seattle bands while you've been gone?

I suppose it does make me the migrant as far as returning to Seattle, although these guys also tour and play with different people in different configurations and bands all the time too.

What studio are you recording in? Are you working with someone you know behind the boards? Are you hoping they'll help you acheive a certain "Seattle sound"?

We have done some tracking at Avast and some at Robert Lang. We did exclusively drums at those two spots, and we were working with Cameron Nicklaus who we had known from before when he was one of the house engineers at Avast. Then we have been doing the bulk of the recording at Charlie's Studio Nels/Bart Radio. By day they work on commercials and by night or their off-days we sneak in and overdub vocals, guitars, keyboards, etc. It has become the homebase of the record making, and it's a huge plus for us to get to work freely there. Charlie has been there for a few years now and this is really the first time we've spent a serious chunk of time there, but it has been really wonderful. Charlie has been doing a ton of the producer work on this record and he really understands his own studio, so we've been getting a lot of good results from the extended time we spend down there.

L-R: Cameron Nicklaus, Charlie Smith, Scott Reitherman

Photo by Tae Rhee

I don't try to attain a Seattle sound, and I honestly don't think that one really exists. Or if it does, I think it might define other genres of music better than the kind of thing I'm working on. But that may be for residents of other places to judge. I do hope that people in Seattle dig it though!

The Seattle scene has been witness to so many disparate sounds and success stories over the past five years. There's a legitimate movement in hip hop here, there's the folk revival thing, there's still always going to be pop rock bands and hard rocking bands. The people here are into a lot of different kinds of things, it is a musically enlightened and receptive population. And 90.3 KEXP is a fantastic resource for the city and keeps people up to speed with a lot of different sounds. It's one of the only places I know about where the radio station still plays a vibrant role in the community.

This may seem like an odd angle, but another way I think about the whole flexible/solo nature of music today is in the way musicians go about naming their projects. Not to date myself too much, but I came of musical age in the mid 80s when people talked about "forming bands" — and they usually meant just that, bands whose musical identity would somehow be tied up with the specific combination of musicians and integrity of the line-up. They didn't necessarily pick a name that followed the "plural noun" format (most recently revived in the early 00s: The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Hives, etc.), but it always seemed understood that this was a collective undertaking. You could see this in the music press of the time, I think, where a common angle for an article about a band might be how this member chafes under the dominance of another member, or how an obvious bandleader expresses their commitment to the band process (an example being Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders).

I'm interested in why so many solo projects in indie rock today adopt what could be interpreted as a "band name." Throw Me The Statue is as good an example as any. You talked earlier about choosing this name as an "alias." Have you thought about this larger trend in music today? I asked some friends of my age about examples from the 80s, and we couldn't really think of many (The The and the various Foetus projects being two better-known exceptions).

I think young people and the people in new bands of this decade are hyper aware of their image and conscious of how important (unfortunately) it is to their reception. When we're able to spray our thoughts across the internet, whether it's to build ideas up or to tear ideas down, we see how powerfully important it is to craft our message. So I think when solo acts attach themselves to aliases it's to both protect themselves and to engage in myth-making. You remove yourself one small step from negativity and judgement when you make art under an alias. Maybe you can temporarily forget about your worry that nothing getting made today is truly as interesting as things that came before you. You can make it bigger than you. You can dress it up and make it more interesting. It's almost like an imaginary friend. And in that self-made myth you can slink into a place where you take risks you might not have otherwise been brave enough take.

on the stroll: a book review of "The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll" by Preston Lauterbach

Cities shape music, we know, but how does music shape cities? To be specific, how can a DIY music industry heat up urban economies, enliven public spaces, foster local idioms and local traditions of artistic practice, and even create jobs? This question suggests the policy criteria adopted by creative-city analysts, as well as the legacy asserted by musicians and fans of punk rock and hip-hop. But they can be insightfully posed toward an older, less documented, but undeniably influential era of popular music: the chitlin' circuit of jazz, blues, and soul music that flourished in the American South from the 1930s to the 1960s. 

This is the titular subject of The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll, a fantastic book of music history by Preston Lauterbach (W.W. Norton, 2011). Most histories of black music frame the topic through the lens of particular genres, musicians, or record labels. Lauterbach takes a different tack, focusing on the many nightclub owners, promoters, publicists, do-gooders and street hustlers who brought live music and racous good times to the black neighborhoods of the Jim Crow South. No single musical movement or figure held the stage over the period Lauterbach studies, from the late 1920s to the 1960s. Indeed, such creative dynamism, he argues, gave rise to rock 'n' roll—not the circuit's primary destination, but a legacy too often overlooked by music audiences and critics—in its continuing evolution as a base for soul and (finally, it seems) blues music today.

While music buffs should count The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll in the best music writing lists of 2011, the book can also be read as urban theory of how an oppressed people's cultural practices—musical performance, nightlife rituals, and economic activities (legal and illegal)—can put cities and regions on the map, so to speak. Lauterbach documents how, in a historical context of Jim Crow and African migration from the agricultural countryside to industrial cities, a subaltern music industry established, extended, and deepened a regional geography of venues and affiliated activities that supplied entertainment and collective validation to black communities. Studying the chitlin' circuit reveals the cultural significance of cities like Indianapolis and Houston that usually go unexamined by urban theory (or, for that matter, much 20th-century African-American history). Arguably, the chitlin' circuit revived Memphis, a legendary center of African-American cultural production, whose black district inspired W.C. Handy's seminal jazz trilogy ("Memphis Blues," St. Louis Blues," and "Beale Street," written between 1912-16) only to stagnate over three decades of police harassment and political oppression. Like alveoli in an expanding lung of black culture, the chitlin' circuit developed African-American markets and created community consciousness across small cities and podunk towns in the South. How many of us can locate, much less say we've visited, all the cities where the chitlin' circuit touched down?

No dot on the map was too large or small: Ardmore, Muskogee, Oklahoma City, Taft, and Tulsa, Oklahoma; Houston, Longview, and Tyler, Texas; El Dorado, Hot Springs, and Little Rock, Arkansas; Monroe, New Orleans, Shreveport, and Tallulah, Louisiana; Greenville, Hattiesburg, Jackson, McComb, Vicksburg, and Yazoo City, Mississippi; Dorthan and Gadsden, Alabama; Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Cordele, Macon, Savannah, and Waycross, Georgia; Jacksonville, Pensacola, St. Augustine, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Tampa, and West Palm Beach, Florida (pg. 50).

PLAYING THE CHITLIN' CIRCUIT

There are several so-called chitlin' circuits where different forms of black performance culture have flourished under the radar of mainstream (white) commercial culture. The comedy chitlin' circuit gave us Redd Foxx, Dolemite and Richard Pryor; the drama circuit has most recently launched Tyler Perry into bigtime success. At times these have merged with the live music chitlin' circuit that Lauterbach documents; before the Depression, they all came together in a black vaudeville circuit that also included dancers, novelty acts, and burlesque entertainment. Whatever the type of performance, the chitlin' circuit refers to a low-budget scale of venue where black performers play primarily for black audiences. These are pointedly not the great theaters of Harlem, Chicago, and other industrial cities where African Americans moved en masse over the Great Migration of the early 20th century, but rather the no-frills dancehalls, roadside shacks, storefront backrooms, converted churches, and other utilitiarian spaces that black entrepreneurs could wrangle in the segregated south. Circuit veteran Sax Kari remembers:

Chitlins to black people were like caviar to Europeans. It's played out now, but it was a delicacy. The average chitlin' dinner was a dollar. You could go to one place and buy supper, drinks, and see an orchestra perform. It doesn't exist now as it did then. Back [in the 1940s] you had big bands, anywhere from ten- to twenty-piece bands that had to squeeze themselves into a corner if there was no bandstand. There were no inside toilets at many of the places; you had to use privies. Now, when you got into a place that had running water inside, why you were fortunate. They sold ice water. They didn't have air conditioners; they had these big garage fans: two on the bandstand and one back at the door. These were wooden buildings on the outside of town; there were very few concrete buildings or places in town. It was seldom you'd find anyplace for blacks that would hold more than six hundred. The people'd be damn near on top of you. We'd get the brass and reeds on the back of the stage and get the drummer and rhythm section down front where you could see over their heads. You would play for two and half hours straight, then take a thirty-minute break, then come back and play for the next hour and a half. Four-hour gigs (pg. 10).

As this suggests, the chitlin' circuit entailed hard work for musicians in unpretentious settings—hardly the glamour associated with famous venues like New York's Apollo Theater, much less the urban theaters and big-time nightclubs that commercial crossover to white audiences brought. Additionally, there was the unrelenting hustle associated with touring the circuit. Another veteran, drummer Earl Palmer, recalls circuit bands as "always traveling, working one night stands. Barely getting by, but [sounding] good. The raggedy bands, we called them, big raggedy road bands" (pp. 91-2). Laterbach writes, "The chitlin' circuit's pounding succession of one-nighters kept bands on the road, sleep-deprived and sardine-fed, for hundreds of miles a day through poor weather and past cops who took exception to a Cadillac limo or flexi-bus full of slick black dudes" (pg. 159). For this exhausting and often risky musical life, the pay-offs were playing raw and uncensored music before audiences itching to let loose the daily burdens of racist America, hopefully ending the evening with a few dollars in your pocket, and living the dream of the musician's life.

A few stories and sounds drawn from over six decades of the chitlin' circuit illustrate the diversity and ethos of the music performed on the chitlin' circuit, as well as Lauterbach's gifts as a raconteur, historian, and critic:

The International Sweethearts of Rhythm 

The all-girl International Sweethearts of Rhythm began, similarly to their stablemates the Carolina Cotton Pickers, in the late 1930s as a moneymaker for the all-black Piney Woods Country Life School near Jackson, Mississippi. Piney Woods founder Laurence Jones assembled the group and bestowed the "international" tag to emphasize the Chinese sax player, Hawaiian trumpeter, and Mexican clarinetist in additionn to the fourteen African-American girls in the group. Rae Lee Jones, whom the school assigned to chaperone the girls on their travels, had convinced the ladies to throw off their amateur status mid-tour in early 1941, astutely pointing out that they could top their Piney Woods-mandated eight-dollar-per-week salary. They absconded to Arlington, Virginia, under the guidance of real estate developer Al Dade, who assumed their management. Piney Woods principal Laurence Jones did not take the news well. He reported the band bus stolen and several of the band's underage members missing. The Sweethearts ditched the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and made it to Memphis, where a roadblock netted the fugitives. Four of the girls returned to Piney Woods, and the decidedly square Laurence Jones threatened to withhold diplomas from the rest. They seemed to prefer Dade's tutelage, who reportedly introduced them to the wonders of makeup. He lodged the refugees at his property, redubbed "Sweetheart House," and they called him daddy. Clearly in need of a positive role model, the Sweethearts joined forces with Denver Ferguson as one of the first major acts at Ferguson Brothers Agency. Tiny David, a three-hundred-pound, proud lesbian vocalist, joined the group just prior to "one of the greatest one night tours ever staged by any attraction," as did Toby Butler, the group's first white member. The Sweethearts had as many nicknames as members of a male orchestra, counting "Rabbit" Wong, "Vi" Burnside, and "Trump" Gipson among their membership, and claimed to have musical chops on par with any bunch of no-good men. Still, the ladies understood femininity's value to the blues crowd. As vocalist Anna Mae Winburn sang, "I ain't good looking and I don't have waist-long hair, but my mama gave me something that can take me anywhere" (pp. 82-3)

Amos Milburn  

Milburn and his gang of five played every Houston joint, the Peacock, the Boston Lion, and the Big Apple, but they harbored a special affection for a rustic camp outside the city replete with picnic grounds, sixteen cabins for rent, and a commissary that served deep fried shrimp, steak, and chicken all night. Though formally known as Sid's Ranch, Milburn cooked up a theme song for the place called "Chicken Shack Boogie," a sure enough portrayal of a classic chitlin' circuit dive. Milburn lays down friendly, half-spoken verses, elaborating on the shack's out-of-the-way location and humble architecture, then leads his band through torrid instrumental breaks to illustrate the fun all would have. On stage, Milburn perched at the enge of the piano stool nearest the audience, turned his body toward the crowd, pumped that right leg, lashed his pompadour toward the keyboard, tore through his set, and ruined the audience for anyone less charismatic than T-Bone [Walker]. As a jazz quartet leader who was to follow Amos at the Keyhole recalled, "He was supposed to open for us, but we couldn't go on" (pp. 124-5).

Roy Brown  

"Boogie at Midnight"... captures [Roy Brown's] group's explosive form fans heard on the epic 1949 tour. As he had with "Good Rockin' Tonight," Roy sang it as he saw it on the chitlin' circuit in "Boogie at Midnight," in Billboard's description, "a frantic, shouting, hand-clapping, job that sounds like cash in hand." The song rocks harder than Roy's previous records, and would become his biggest hit to date, peaking and no. 3 on the Billboard R&B chart. You can hear rock's New Orlean's brass roots, the sanctified hand-clapping and choir chanting Roy brought to the sound, and Roy and [saxophonist Leroy] Batman [Rankins] pushing each other higher up the rafters. No more compelling document exists of rock 'n' roll as it was made on the chitlin' circuit (pp. 166-7).

Marvin Sease  

A former gospel singer named Marvin Sease wrote a song called "Candy Licker" in the late 1980s, and has enjoyed steady chitlin' circuit headliner status since. More than mere song, "Candy Licker" is a sometimes belligerent, ten-minute liberation of cunnilingus from black man taboo, sung from the perspective of Jody, a mythical lover conjured from the mists of Yoruban trickster lore. Jody does what othr men do not deign discuss. Even more subversively, he cares about female satisfaction. Jody calls out the sorry-ass men who won't go down. A sharp ploy, considering the conventional wisdom, dating to the 1930s, that black women buy more blues records than black men do (pg. 5).

THE CIRCUIT IN HISTORIC AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT

Many of the performers described in the book are known to fans of American black and/or roots music; a good number of them (like the highly successful Carolina Cotton Pickers who barnbusted the South through the 1930s and 40s) never recorded, which only underscores the great contribution of Lauterbach's research to American music history. But the book's broader relevance to urban research is twofold.

First, Lauterbach contextualizes these musicians' careers within the broader fabric of the black South under Jim Crow. His attention to the details and texture of black life, its historic events and subtle shifts over the decades of the Great Migration, is often astonishing. Dig the evocative poetry of this extended passage introducing 1920s Indianapolis, home of one of the chitlin' circuit's central characters:

In 1920, Denver [Ferguson] moved into a small home at 412 West North Street, abutting the Avenue's south end. He'd arrived with enough money to open the Ferguson Printint Company, and after some initial success running the business out of the house, he set up shop nearby at 322 Senate, overlooking Indiana Avenue, which would hold Denver's headquarters for the next twenty-five years.

From Denver's office, the Avenue streetcar line stretched horizon to horizon. The trolley clambered along the cobblestones, where the last stubborn carriages frustrated motorists. Buildings on the Avenue's south end near Denver's shop were brick, some oxblood red, others sandy brown with black flecks, two and three stories tall. They extended from two storefronts to a half-block wide. They housed junkmen, fish and game shops, clothiers, and cobblers. Striped canvas and painted tin awnings reached from the façades over the sidewalk, shading the concrete in the absence of trees. After sunset, electric lights, five milky-glass globes on an iron post, a half-dozen per block, wiped away the darkness in soft yellow puffs. Avenue men dressed the same, in long-sleeved, collared, white shirts, suspenders, and dark trousers. A few sported vests; fewer wore suits. The greatest variety was seen atop their heads: newsboy caps, ivies, derbies, bowlwers, straw boaters, and fedoras. Ladies' fashion functioned primarily to keep male imaginations active. Continuing up the street, broad brick buildings shrunk to double storefronts, with one- and two-story, tin-roofed wooden buildings interspersed among them. The architecture appeared increasingly modest farther up toward Fall Creek—raw plank shops and homes that would have blended in fine on an unpaved thoroughfare in the Old West.

The Avenue's first picture-show house, of corrugated iron, stood on bare ground. Each evening's show began with a fresh scattering of wood shavings to absorb the torrents of tobacco juice. The nearest thing to an orchestra in those days—a trio of piano, violin, and fiddle—sawed through the night at Vinegar Hall, where patrons dipped whiskey from a communal barrel. Another of the era's recreation spots, Bob Parker's Hole in the Wall, occupied the entire second story of a quadruple storefront. It was remembered only as "an institution of wide notoriety," a truly awesome distinction in this open town.

People lived above Avenue storefronts, where it stayed loud, and then spread throughout the rooming and shotgun houses along the cross streets. By 1920 most residential blocks adjacent to the Avenue were nearly 100 percent black. Sprawling family homes were divided to board the latest arrivals, and black families filled rooms where once a single white body had slept. Migrants adapted old Kentucky architecture to its new, high-density urban setting. They dug wells around back, and in one tenement installed a two-story privy that upstairs tenants had to reach by braving a wobbly, splintery footbridge. In winter, coal smoke from stoves and furnaces blackened the foggy, chill air, and ashy-gray snowmelt sloshed in the gutters. In summer, the fragrance of tomato plants punched through the humidity.

The Jews hung on around Indiana Avenue—Abraham Tavel and the Sachs Brothers ran their pawnshops, and the Schaeffer cleaners and Kappeler jewelers still did business—but the migrants had begun to transform the strip and were deep in the process of making it their own. Small-town Kentucky ways translated well to the Avenue. People lived intimately, publicly. Most homes lacked comfort, so folks spent their time visiting, out on the porch, walking the street, or lounging in a café, many of which served "Kentucky oysters," local code for hog intestines. Consequently, the track buzzed night and day. Everybody living on top of and in front of each other lent the weekly Indianapolis Recorder a penetrating vitality. It kept a second-story office halfway between the pawnshops and the hospital, where it saw and reported on everything. You might open it Saturday afternoon and learn who your sweetheart was seeing on the side, go find the cheaters in a café, cut their asses in front of everybody, and end up in the next edition (pp. 18-21).

Second, The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll documents the story of the music industry that organized the circuit. It's a story with a generous share of hustlers, criminals, and the temptations of the musicians' life—elements familiar to readers of Frederic Dannen's Hit Men and Dan Charnas's The Big Payback—but the businesses and hustles generally operated beneath the high-stakes arenas of the mass record industry and mainstream radio.

Perhaps in some way the chitlin' circuit should be understood as an accidental consequence of the Great Migration of African Americans out of the the south, for it was in the North, and in black Americans' reverence for the artists and writers associated of the Jazz Age and the Harlem Remainssance, that a peculiar market niche emerged which the Southern chitlin' circuit would serve. In the 1920s, Harlem and Chicago were strongholds of black swing orchestras (Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie) who performing for white audiences in big-city theaters of the North under the booking monopoly of the mob, a.k.a. the syndicate. The white criminal underworld had successfully forced its way into a mutually beneficial relationship with the white record companies: syndicate bookers needed records to promote their bands, and the Northern record companies needed personal appearance tours to promote their recording artists.

If a black musician wanted even to entertain this level of success, they would necessarily have to pursue their livelihood in the North. Conversely, since all the lucrative markets lay in the North, the big swing orchestras had little need to visit the Jim Crow South. African Americans in the South participated in black commercial culture via Northern output: recorded music and literature, including black periodicals, like the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier, that were "a forbidden pleasure, an ally from the outside world, and a trusted source for style points" (pg. 39).

On the stroll: Walter Barnes 

The end of Prohibition, the incarceration of mob kingpins like Al Capone, and the nosedive in consumer spending with the Depression brought this system to a steady close over the 1930s. Lauterbach argues that the first to perceive the commercial rewards of bringing Northern music to the South was Walter Barnes, a bandleader at Chicago's Cotton Club and a Southern migrant himself. Fortuitously, Barnes wrote a column on the black big-band scene for the Chicago Defender, which he unashamedly used to publicize his own orchestra as well as his more famous peers. More importantly, Barnes' column was the Twitter of its day (if you will) for the scattered territory bands of Black America:

These colorfully named orchestras worked according to the lean scale the Depression imposed. Many held a hotel ballroom residency and broadcast from there over low-watt radio stations, then toured as far as their reputations and broadcasts carried. Around these acts grew the rudimentary infrastructure of the Southern black dance business: dusty dance halls, hustling dance promoters, and hucksterish dadvance men, who went around drumming up gigs and publicity. In the absence of full itineraries, they barnstormed, packing into a Ford AA bus or Model A Woody, tying their instruments down to the roof, to catch gigs as they could.... They sent Barnes their locations and provided as much of a plan for the future as they had scripted: "Lee Trammell and his Spotlight Entertainers are barnstorming Arkansas. Skeet Reeves is traveling in advance. The unit will route for northern states in March and may be reached this week at Stuttgart, Arkansas." Though he began as Chicago orchestra columnist and self-publicist, Barnes rapidly became central dirt dispatcher for traveling black jazz bands. Barnes's readers learned the whereabouts (and names) of Dittybo Hill and his Eleven Clouds of Joy, Herman Curtis and his Chocolate Vagabonds, Walter Waddell and his Eleven Black diamonds, Jack Ellis and his Eleven Hawaiians, Belton's Society Syncopators, Smiling Billy Steward and his Celery City Serenaders, and A. Lee Simpkins's Augusta Nighthawks (pg. 40).

Barnes' column relayed musical news from black America's dispersed enclaves, or what he called in his hep lingo "the stroll": racially segregated black districts of Southern cities that were economically self-sustaining (at least until the era of desegregation and urban renewal). His dispatches also proved to be highly valuable "road intelligence" when he decided to tap these distant markets with his own Chicago band. Barnes toured the South regularly from 1932 until 1940 (when he and 208 others died in the famous Rhythm Club fire in Natchez, Mississippi). While on the road, he published boosterish dispatches from the Southern cities he plays in, thereby publicizing the urban markets for black entertainment and and the scattered venues, lodgings and services open to black musicians:

We are now driving down Desiard Street, the stroll in Monroe, [Louisiana]. . . . The Red Goose Barber Shop is the place where all the boys have their grooming down. . . . Lovely Brown's Beauty Shop is where all the ladies get fancy waves for the dances. . . . The Grog Cafe is the dining place of the profesh, and what good, Southern, home-cooked meals they serve here. . . . The Frog Pond ballroom located at 1003 Desiard Street is the most beautiful and spacious dance palace here (Walter Barnes, December 1936, quoted on pg. 53).

 
In the South, Barnes worked with regional promoters whose names would become eventual legend in chitlin' circuit lore: Don Robey of Houston's Third Ward; Frank Painia, former barber and owner of New Orleans' famed Dew Drop; Clint Brantley of Macon, Georgia's Cotton Club (and future manager of James Brown); Bill Rivers, Cracker Johnson, and Charlie Edd in Florida; and so on. But in the 1930s, their operations were largely unconnected and limited to an intra-state area, maybe a few states. It was Denver Ferguson, an Indianapolis booking agent, who coordinated these promoters into a single industry and thus, Lauterbach asserts, deserves credit as "the man who invented the chitlin' circuit" (quoting Sax Kari, pg. 5).

Stickin' his neck out: Denver Ferguson 

Originally a printshop owner, Ferguson first became a mover and shaker in the Indianapolis numbers racket by printing daily lottery slips that resembled harmless baseball scorecards. His career in musical entertainment started with a tip about a lucrative parcel of Indiana Avenue real estate across the street from an unannounced future housing project. Here he built the Sunset Terrace, which flourished in the 1930s amidst the Depression, cutthroat rivals, and corrupt police, until a 1940 nightclub murder brought enough heat to lead him into a somewhat safer venture, talent booking. In 1941, Ferguson opened the Ferguson Brothers Agency to serve a bigger and remarkably underserved market for entertainment.

Denver, knowing well how the syndicate controlled black bands in the big Northern Cities, built his circuit in the territory Walter Barnes had pioneered for black bands in 1932 and virtually closed with his death in 1940. Unlike the syndicate, Denver put the black audience first, a simple variation at the core of his innovation. Denver knew the black South intimately... Denver understood the ways black neighborhoods functioned, and he knew that because of racial segregation, all-black enclaves existed in every excuse for a town. Whether he had read Barnes writings or not, Denver was in touch with the stroll concept and its prevalence across the map. He brought his own street-financial expertise to the enterprise. The money principles of the numbers game applied: the Negro individual lacked financial resources, but the stroll possessed collective wealth in nickel and ime increments. Add those nickels and dimes, multiply by numerous bands playing different joints simultaneously with a percentage of proceeds from each flowing back to Ferguson, repeat nightly, and you come to see, as Denver correctly surmised, that there was serious cash down there (pg. 87).

Ferguson puts his printing press to use printing advertising materials and tickets to be couriered to future tour stops. His publicity machine also benefited from a board member placed within the black periodical Indianapolis Recorder. J. St. Clair Gibson, a.k.a. "The Saint," relayed tall and flattering stories about Ferguson acts, such as the "creation myth" of one reasonably overlooked King Kolax, for black America via the Associated Negro Press wire:

They were holding a jam session at the Savoy Ballroom one night in the month of May 1940 . . . and all the cats had their axes sharp for some deep cutting. . . . As the session started and the cats started swinging . . . a young fellow came up from out of nowhere and asked to sit in. . . . This young fellow with his horn under his arm hit the stage in two jumps and told the pianist to take "Honeysuckle Rose" in E flat. . . . This kid raised his horn toward the ceiling and started blowing and for 10 choruses he kept them jumping, hitting the high notes with a different riff for every chorus. When this kid had finished, one of the old timers said, "There is your new King of the Trumpet" and this new king was King Kolax (J. St. Clair Gibson, July 31, 1943, quoted on pp. 85-6).

Perhaps the most game-changing of business practices that Ferguson introduced involved his method for securing effective local promotion across a staggeringly expansive region. Lauterbach writes that Ferguson "stuck his neck out," sending his people on the road and making many roadtrips himself to enlist the dispersed regional promoters from the territory-band circuit or "make" them (instruct a well-placed novice) himself.

Denver approached his relationship with these far-off promoters just as he had his numbers runners on the Avenue. If a promoter failed to pay Denver or his act according to the terms of their deal, then Denver would drop them from the circuit. No need for violent reprucussion. He could always make another promoter. He wanted his freelancers, either in the street or on the circuit, to recognize the long-term value of their arrangement. He wanted them to see that they would make thousands more dollars with him over time than the few hundred they'd make off with by disappearing with the proceeds of a single dance. If they were incapable of this, let them go, Denver said. This was the closest thing to loyalty he could breed (pg. 88).

Characteristically, he would sell each promoter blocks of shows across their region, which would encourage them to tap all their established venues and then find some more. The concerned parties—regional promoters, local venue operators, and his own performers—would then be linked together with a contract of Ferguson's devising. The tradition on the chitlin' circuit was to pay performers "first money in the door," which promised next to nothing if a gig was poorly attended. Ferguson transformed this incentive structure into a mutually reinforcing association:

Denver negotiated for his talent to ensure that the act, and agent, got paid before anyone else regardless of attendance. Denver and the promoter settled on a guaranteed fee. Denver extracted a deposit from that figure, paid before the show to "guarantee" the appearance... refundable only if the artist failed to show. If the gig proceeded smoothly, Denver kept the deposit and the artist kept the remainder of the guarantee, which the artist collected from the promoter at intermission. The promoter kept an amount equal to the artist guarantee, and if profits exceeded payouts, the artist and promoter split the surplus, according to the term of their deal referred to in contractual lingo as the "privilege," often, but not always, 50 percent. A chunk of this also went back to the boss. A Ferguson-employed road manager (who might also be the bandleader, as in the Carolina Cotton Pickers' unfortunate case) accompanied the agency's acts to count heads in the dance hall and then wire the cash into Denver's pockets—just like an Avenue numbers runner (pg. 90).

The circuit starts rockin' 

With more cities and towns to play in, the far-flung chitlin' circuit set in motion big changes for black music in the South. World War II was an important catalyst. Wartime mobilization put blacks to work at rates not seen since before the Depression; thus, folks had some money in their pockets to spend on entertainment. The war froze the record industry for several years, as jukebox factories converted to martial production and shellac rationing brought record manufacturing to a stop in 1943. Thus, black demand for entertainment in the South would be channeled into live entertainment. These were about as good a set of circumstances in which black musicians could pursue a career, and the chitlin' circuit began to overflow with performers.

Finally, wartime allocations hasten the decline of the big jazz orchestras, as the Office of Defense Transportation imposed a bus ban as part of fuel rationing, a direct blow to the traditional means of big-band transport. The end of the war saw blacks lose work en masse, and the subsequent dampening of entertainment demand meant club owners could no longer afford big orchestras' fees. Smaller units were best adapted to these circumstances; with fewer musicians to pay, savings could be passed on down to ticket prices. The meteoric rise of Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, the small jump-jive combo fronted by a zany bandleader, to the top of Billboard Magazine's "Race Records" charts in 1943 illustrated the decline of the jazz swing orchestra in black America's popular music (this music would remain beloved to mainstream white audiences for many more years). 

Instrumentation would change with the shift to smaller bands; vocalists and electric guitar would especially benefit in the musical space opened up. Guitar and saxophone would symbolize a new aesthetic. Now, the music rocked, and the lyrics would often say as much, most famously in Roy Brown's 1948 smash hit "Good Rockin' Tonight"; Lauterbach asserts this was the first rock'n'roll record (albeit before the genre had such a name) to come out of the chitlin' circuit and reach major commercial success.

The shift to smaller bands in turn changed black musicians' employment circumstances. "After Louis Jordan's rise pushed the vocalist into the limelight, the band became an afterthought," explains Lauterbach. "Early rock star-attractions Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris, T-Bone Walker, Cecil Gant, and Ivory Joe Hunter traveled without bands. Hell, anyone could be the band, as long as the star, whose voice you heard on the jukebox and face you'd seen on the posters, was there on stage" (pg. 116). For most chitlin' circuit musicians, finding a gig no longer involved joining a roadworthy band, but rather being in the right place when touring musicians came to town. This was the context in which Memphis' musical juices began flowing again:

By [1949], area band activity all ran through Sunbeam [Mitchell, the main promoter in Memphis], as the Mitchell Hotel became an informal musicians' employment agency, a regional chitlin' circuit hub. Like New Orleans's Dew Drop, Dallas's Empire Room, and Indianapolis's Sunset Terrace, bandleaders organizing tours of the region would check in at Sunbeam's cantina to find musicians to hire. Rain or shine, night or day, someone could be found (pg. 193).

From this setting, unknown Memphians could occasionally become overnight stars (e.g., Johnny Ace, who hit big in 1952 with "My Song" only to by his own gun in a mysterious accident two years later). Thick with local talent, Memphis would be the site of America's first radio station with an all-black music format: WDIA, "73 on your dial," in October 1948. A Mississippi guitarist named Riley King would get a DJ slot on WDIA as "Bee Bee King," ultimately to become blues legend B.B. King. Memphis musicians would transform and blues and "rhythm & blues" (Billboard's new name for its former Race Records chart) into soul music on local record labels like Stax and Hi. The rest, of course is history.

THE LOCAL HEART OF THE CHITLIN' CIRCUIT

The story goes on, with a significant chapter closing as the record industry eclipses the chitlin' circuit to make stars out of Southern musicians like Little Richard, James Brown, and Al Green.  But for urbanists, what's especially interesting about the chitlin' circuit—and there's no reason to think this has changed significantly, although the caliber of venue (at least the quality of its construction) has slowly upgraded—is how much it got the whole of each far-flung black community involved in the local show. It's well known how central were music, performance, and nightlife for segregated black America at this time in history, but Lauterbach offers new insights into what happened before each gig. In "making" his promoters, Ferguson would explain in considerable detail how to enlist local businesses ("the black barber and beauty shop, restaurant and bar" [pg. 88] and assorted hustlers into the work of promoting each show. Today, the old concert posters and window placards collected blues and roots music afficianados evoke the neighborhood publicity machine that Ferguson set in motion, and which still gears up for new generations of booking agencies and promoters pushing chitlin music below the commercial radar.

The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll documents some unexpected aspects of tearing down the fourth wall between performer and audience. In touring stops too small to support black hotels, promoters would plug out-of-town musicians into home-style accommodations. "We couldn't stay in the white hotels," bandleader Andy Kirk recalled. "I'm glad now we couldn't. We'd have missed out on a whole country full of folks who put us up in their homes, cooked dinners and breakfasts for us, told us how to get along in Alabama and Mississippi, helped us out in trouble, and became our friends for life" (pg. 90). The local economies that grew to support touring musicians (let's not forget local tailors to mend uniforms, auto mechanics to fix the cars...) saw their parallel within the club. In these "nondescript places" (as Sax Kari called them), nightlife amenities were rarely provided in-house. Providing the suppers, cold beer, garage fans, frontdoor security and the like would be tasks outsourced to local residents.

Maybe it's tempting to overstate the solidarity among musicians, their employers, audience and community. The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road to Rock 'n' Roll has its share of backstabbing, violence both threatened and real, and mundane exploitation—and that's just inside the club. Lauterbach is appropriately unsentimental about how racial oppression and economic misery could be the parents to the desperation, predation, and self-destructiveness found in so many ghettoes. Still, this book testifies to the fact that the backbone of the gemeinschaft that the chitlin' circuit instilled in so many black districts of the South lay not just in folks' love for the music, but in the economic networks—often legit, sometimes informal, and once in awhile just plain criminal—that emerged in each city and town to make the show go on.