the dull ubiquity of placeless music festivals

Some questions for investigations here, presented in the form of a rant. As part of my research in musical urbanism, I consume a fair amount of music coverage in print and online. Jesus Christ, all I seem to find these days is "writing" about generic touring festivals headlined by Coldplay/Metallica/Fiona Apple/Beach House/you name it. News about new music festivals. News about cancelled music festivals. News about how the concert industry, which has put so much of its eggs in the festival basket, now outpaces the recording industry. And the evergreen question, what's the line-up for Coachella 2013? Look, I fully support the right of youth to indulge in the mass communion of bad sightlines, expensive food, sunburns and portapotty stench for the romantic pursuit of sex, drugs and [insert any pop genre here]. I've indulged in that myself.  Coachella, Glastonbury, Sasquatch, Werchter et al—by all means, let them be the gateway drug to a rich life as a music listener. But it's interesting and, frankly, discouraging that the generic, touring festival seems to be the end game for live music these days, with generally no thought being put to how live music might be presented more imaginatively and meaningfully for listeners and musicians alike. And, conversely, little attention is given to those more imaginative and meaningful festivals.   Place is an especially important concern here. While geography is what ostensibly differentiates one Live Nation mega-event from the next, inside the venues the performers, the lineups, the layout, the vendors etc. are generally undistinguishable and internchangeable across the events. They're carefully themed spaces that are paradoxically placeless, at least beyond the conceits of the event. The rise of generic touring festivals don't yet make me worry for the fate of cities, urban economies, or local music scenes. But I sometimes wonder if the dull ubiquity of big-money touring festivals makes younger audiences eager for the theming of their everday spaces: the commodification of colleges and universities, the insularity of the hipster neighborhood, and so on.

It's understandable why 'independent' music, which at one pre-ironic point in cultural history was opposed to such commodification, increasingly hitches its wagon to corporate music festivals today. Although touring the music-festival circuit can be a draining, exhausting slog, the promotional opportunity can't be beat, at least when these events are all any music publication or blog wants to write about. I suspect it also helps that "indie rock" is now mainly the purview of 20- and 30-somethings without dependents to tend to.

This is something that the EDM industry has especially figured out. The facts that this music thrives in nightclubs and other smaller venues, and that rock music has long dominated the festival circuit, make me think there's nothing intrinsically "rave" to the big-field setting for EDM festivals today. EDM has more likely thrived because the barriers to entry for performers are low. Bringing along a laptop or (for the old-school purist) a crate of records is all it takes for most DJs to hit the stage—no long load-ins or soundchecks necessary. Perhaps this infrastructural advantage is the real basis for the recurring rockist insult that "no talent is required to play electronic dance music."

At least those are my hypotheses. Here are a few more.

1. The context for this state of affairs isn't live music itself. Obviously, this is what happens after the recording industry loses its profit model. Live music is what David Harvey would call a spatial fix—a secondary circuit of accumulation that capital taps into when profits in the primary industrial circuit dry up. We're simply seeing the next iteration out from the recording industry's abandonment of artist development and its short-sighted embrace of the quick-profit singles market.

The above means let's not celebrate the initiative and entrepreneurialism of the "concert industry" just yet, since the high rate of event cancellations suggests they're still largely throwing business models against the wall to see what sticks. An important question for further investigation is, Just how distinct in name/experience/profile are the players and financial backers in the "concert industry" from the rest of the "music industry"?

2. If we might expect the bovine migration of the corporate sector to the music-festival sector, I'm more disheartened by the failure of imagination on the part of the music media to write about anything else. Their rote, uncritical coverage isn't limited to summertime, when festivals generally overshadow the release of noteworthy albums and (another dismaying phenomenon) the TV season for Idol, The Voice, etc. How many freakin' tweets have I read about Coachella: the bands, the fashions, the line-up for next year, the threat of its cancellation, yada yada yada? And South By Southwest... thank god for the SXSW tweet-blocker. I think at least three factors could be culprits:

a) the collapse of the publishing industry, which has shrunk staff, dried up money for original reporting (i.e., news that isn't "researched" via Twitter or a YouTube livestream), and made it hard for remaining music/arts & culture reporters—particularly at weekly alternative newspapers, still the source for the best local music coverage—to keep their ears to the local ground and make a living;

b) the tail-wags-dog rationale of bigger publications covering "what younger readers want." So Spin Magazine calls its July/August edition the "Outside Issue," etc. Implicitly, this further yields the album market to older/occasional listeners who (it will be assumed) want "the next Adele."

c) the convergence of culture reporting and business reporting that has been encouraged by the dominance of Richard Florida's creative-city paradigm. While the shrewd promoters will spin a line about how their event borrows from the SXSW model, city papers can now rationalize their arts coverage as a means to a more 'legitimate' end.

3. What's perhaps most surprising is the absence of traditional urban business community involvement in the music-festival sector. Why is this? The rare "post-rave growth coalition" notwithstanding, I suspect the players in most urban growth machines rarely overlap with the world of festival promoting. This may be because many of these events are held in big, exurban fields, which suggests that large-scale property owners will be the main node of connection. But so far I don't see much active participation (as opposed to passive profit-making) in festivals that happen in city environments either, short of a few notable exceptions—Austin, Berlin, etc.

Traditionally, being an urban booster on the chamber of commerce has been the antithesis of hip. Historically, this has been the basis for criticism of its philistine Babbitry. In these ironic, hipster-saturated times, it's a rare source of integrity for the urban business community. I happened upon a rare music event organized by a urban business improvement district recently: the Downtown Albany Blues Music Competition. Evidently the Chamber of Commerce even got to select the line-up of performing. How "hip" is that?

positively Mt. Auburn Street: Joan Baez & the Cambridge folk scene, 1958-60

The role of folk music in America's postwar cultural and social history doesn't lack for testimonies. Being the privileged soundtrack to the middle-class generation born during or just after the war, the story of how this music 'changed the world' won't go unrecorded thanks to Baby Boomers' economic and political hegemony. And yet the peculiar registers of this moment are often glossed over by the folk sounds of pop music today: indie-rock eccentricity (think Fleet Foxes and Joanna Newsom), Laurel Canyon solipsism, the genteelity of Nashville's alternative scene (think the Civil Wars), and an ever-growing genre of Bob Dylan hagiography. Surprisingly little is remembered of folk's coming-of-age in the late 1950s except for that most hackneyed of college-town clichés, the coffeehouse.

An exceptionally entertaining book that restores the place, time and culture of this period in folk music is David Hadju's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña. Not the usual narrative about a generation finding its voice, the book focuses on the mutual inspirations, comraderies and rivalries that Dylan and Baez drew from Joan's teenage sister Mimi and her husband, Richard. (His story is especially forgotten and thus particularly edifying; Richard died at the age of 28 in 1966, on the day of his sole book's release and Mimi's 21st birthday.) 

 
Hadju also rectifies the historical record in two important ways. First, in his commercial success Dylan followed Joan Baez, who was the first young iconic figure to emerge from the folk scene in the late 1950s; Joan trumpeted Dylan's significance when he was still fairly obscure, and their duets were a regular feature of her concerts prior to his 1962 debut album.

Joan is representative of the "new wave" among the younger folk-singers, who are disenchanted by the commercial, over-arranged-and-orchestrated trends in folk music performance, where the individuality of the singer is sacrificed to the arranger's conception, and where "sound" rather than meaning predominates. On the other hand, she does not follow those singers who painstakingly imitate the rich ethnic heritage, often thereby submerging their own presonalities and more often draining the tradition of its essentially dynamic, creative qualities (from Maynard Solomon liner notes to Joan Baez's 1960 self-titled debut LP).

Second, putting Baez first means shifting the setting to a place whose importance in American folk music I never really appreciated: Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hadju's discussion of the Cambridge scene is brief and limited to 1958-60, from when she enrolled at Boston University for one semester Baez until she recorded her debut album in New York.

In the bohemian pockets of most major cities and college towns around the country in the 1950s, coffeehouses modeled upon European cafés emerged with foreign-film festivals and bookstores that sold imports of Henry Miller novels as outpots of intellectual and sensual dissent: the Blind Lemon in Berkeley, the House of Seven Sorrows in Dallas, the Green Spider in Denver, the Gas House in Los Angeles, the Laughing Buddha in St. Louis, the Drinking Gourd in San Francisco. "You could walk from New York to California by just stepping from one coffeehouse to another without touching ground," Oscar Brand joked. Their allure was conspicuously counter-American at a high point in the United States' world prominence—espresso and existential doubt, no cocktails, no glitz, an appealing combination to postwar college students seeking their own generational identity. The original sound of the milieu was jazz, a music recently abandoned by the mainstream American public. As folk surfaced, it spread into the coffeehouses; earthy, unpackaged, economical, and cool, it fit naturally with the Middle Eastern sweets and the cigarettes. In Cambridge, the center of artistic radicalism around Boston since James Russell Lowell wrote The Biglow Papers in the 1840s, the first European-style coffeehouse opened in 1955; run single-handedly by its owner Tulla Cook, the Coffee Grinder was a dim, unadorned place, no larger than a living room, on Mt. Auburn Street, a block from Harvard Square. There were no performers, just Tulla's AM radio. At the coffeehouses that opened after it—the Cafe Yana, the Salamander, the Golden Vanity, the Unicorn, and Club 47—music soon predominated. "One night I walked past the Cafe Yana and heard this jazz coming out and went inside—the room was full of conga drums," recalled guitarist Peter Rowan, who grew up in rural Massachusetts and visited Cambridge as a teenager. "Harvard Square was about jazz music. It was mostly college people, and they were talking about William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, or trying to. It was turtlenecks and skinny girls. It was very Beat Generation. The next week I walked past and looked in the window, and some girl was playing the guitar, and there were fifty guys in tweed jackets smoking pipes sitting on the floor, and I said, 'Well, this is different.'" If the young scholars of Harvard Square were seeking something anti-intellectual as a respite from or a challenge to academic authority, they could no longer presume to find it in jazz, which had grown in esteem to be regarded as highly advanced, serious music. In folk, however, Cambridge intellectuals could find all the anti-intellectualism they wanted (Hajdu, pp. 15-6).

JOAN BAEZ: Club 47 was a jazz club, but folk music was becoming the new thing. The first time I sang there [in 1959] I was in absolute panic; there was practically nobody there. But then the next week it was half-full and after that there were lines and lines of people. I was a big smash hit and I was getting $10 a night. By the time I let (the next year) I was getting $25. Big bucks for me (liner notes to Joan Baez's Rare, Live & Classic [1993]).

 

Whatever the degree to which Joan drew from the work of Debbie Green, Richard Zaffron, or anyone else in the Cambridge folk scene during her apprenticeship, her voice was her own—a ringing, mezzo soprano with an unusually forceful vibrato that Joan had trained herself to produce, in order to sound older. She was gifted with exceptional intonation, especially by the forgiving standards of vernacular music. Striking and clear yet tightly wrought, self-consciously projected, Joan's singing demanded attention without apology for its determination to get it. the forces at odds—natural ability and sheer will, nerve and insecurity—helped make her singing enigmatically compelling. There was also a detachment in her approach, an isolation from the emotionality of her material, that worked in congress with her taut stage manner to give Joan an air of regality or ethereality. In folk circles, where audiences had come to expect down-home characters groaning in and out of tune, Joan Baez seemed like the spirit of a child-queen, floating in off the moors (Hajdu, pg. 19).

As Joan advanced through the ranks of the coffeehouses, from Cafe Yana to Club 47, she refined a public image exquisitely in sync with the emerging campus folk audience in the late 1950s. "Joan Baez was more mysterious than anybody around—she really had that East Coast, dark, bohemian type of thing—and the beginning of the West Coast, sixties earth-mother thing," said Paul Arnoldi, the singer and guitarist. She had what seemed like an incredible authenticity, partly because she was vaguely ethnic," said Joyce Kalina Chopra, who, with her friend Paula Kelley, founded Club 47. Because the Baezes were so thoroughly assimilated, however, Joan merely suggested the idea of being Mexican through hints in her appearance and her surname; this, of course, made her the ideal kind of Latino fr white audiences: a wholly familiar, non-threatening abstraction. "And she never smiled once," said Chopra. "She was very serious, which was all part of the folk scene—very grave. And she was singing these songs most of us had never heard before. So when she sang about lost love, and sang all these English ballads [from Boston folklorist Francis J. Child's 5-volume book series, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads], it somehow seemed important. So that for young people at the time, who were searching for things to be serious about—that was very powerful" (pg. 21).

These riffs contrasting folk's "anti-intellectualism" and "seriousness" to the business of the education and socialization students would receive at Harvard are jarring, I admit. They evoke the Cold War America that C. Wright Mills criticized: a culture of "crackpot realism" (in The Power Elite, 1957) whereby "[l]eisure time thus comes to mean an unserious freedom from the authoritarian seriousness of the job" (in White Collar, 1951). As well, they're far cries from the custodially-caretaken playgrounds that characterize many exclusive private colleges today, as depicted most recently in the 2010 film The Social Network. 

Joan settled in as a weekly regular at Club 47, a sizable storefront on Mt. Auburn Street, a block east of Harvard Square, that had previously been Fournier's used-furniture shop. To darken the mood of the place, which had large commercial windows on two sides, its young proprietors hung long brown curtains and painted the walls glossy black. A photograph of the room taken in the spring of 1959 shows Joan standing along the rear wall, singing with her head bowed; more than a hundred young people sit listening, their eyes heavy, faces drawn. "Joan was a sensation," said Joyce Kalina Chopra. With no promotion beyond mimeographed flyers and little press coverage except items in a few of the college newspapers, the eighteen-year-old singer found herself performing to progressively larger and more responsive audiences, indicative of the Cambridge folk scene's growing popularity as well as Joan Baez's position as its chief beneficiary and stimulus (Hajdu, pg. 22).

The Cambridge folk scene is further mentioned in Joe Boyd's 2006 memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, which emphasizes the cohort a couple years behind Baez (particularly Geoff and Maria Muldaur) but overlaps in a couple of areas (people like Eric Von Schmidt, the denouement at 1965's Newport Folk Festival). Here's a nice online testimonial from 2001, which notes the passing of Mimi Fariña, an event that just escaped mention in Hadju's Positively 4th Street. And just last week, a new documentary about Club 47 made its premiere in Boston. 

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.

between champagne & eviction: more new wave rent party

My last post introduced an imaginary sub-genre that I call new wave rent party and covered the basics of its aesthetic principles and historic urban context. Here, I continue that discussion with some more material from 1977-81 era. Well, maybe a couple of years further on as well—the sub-genre went on a few more years past its historic sell-by date.

New York

New Wave Vaudeville

I’m thinking a whole article could be written about the underappreciated signficance of those self-consciously arty, goofy, and amateurish performance spaces that flourished under the umbrella of new wave. Did these new wave theaters/cabarets/vaudevilles evolve into new form after the genre declined? Do we see them in today’s open-mic nights, poetry slams, theater marathons, something else?

In the last essay I cited Klaus Nomi and Ann Magnuson as examples of artists who broke out of the new wave vaudeville circuit. Behind that statement, I had in mind “The Nomi Song,” the 2004 documentary directed by Andrew Horn. This clip, which focuses on Nomi's debut at the 1978 "New Wave Vaudeville" in NYC's Irving Plaza, conveys the peculiar combination of urban cynicism and hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show guilelessness of the form better than anything I could write.

Needless to say, Klaus Nomi could fit comfortably under the category of new wave dance party. Although (so far as I can tell) his act involves only men, the performative play with gender is obviously there. So, too, is the urban oasis of culture and “the finer things” that a cohort of 20-somethings sought to create for themselves after the emancipation of punk and the disturbances of the urban crisis. If Klaus Nomi seems far more aesthetically sophisticated compared to, say, Martha & the Muffins, I think this reflects, first, the remarkable way in which his art emerged fully formed from the get-go (the whole point of the clip above). Second, the rent parties Klaus Nomi attendered were, shall we say, a hell of a lot more fabulous than your rent parties! Drawing a gay and multinational population with its foot in high fashion and high art (he was even pursued by David Bowie!), he underscores the general straightness, whiteness, American and suburban origins that characterized new wave rent party as a general rule.

Ze Records

This last point also holds true for the stable of musicians, entrepreneurs and bon vivants associated with Ze Records, the NYC-based label whose initial burst of activity between 1978-84 overlaps largely with the heyday of new wave rent party. It’s no accident that the Waitresses (whom I discussed in the last post) signed to Ze Records. True, any label that has August Darnell as a house producer has nothing amateurish about it, and any label that draws on the art worlds of Europe, Detroit, No Wave, and the Paradise Garage for its “mutant disco” vibe has broader horizons than the narrow generic domains of so many new wave rent party groups. But then, if an artist like Cristina doesn’t embody the romantic dream of champagne and urban decadence that drew more than one girl to find her future across the bridge-and-tunnel, then no one does.

The Feelies

These Hoboken legends operated in the aesthetic wake of Talking Heads, the Modern Lovers, and a variety of other familiar new wave sources to come up with something subtle and ineffable yet clearly original. They're often lauded for the 1980 debut album, Crazy Rhythms, but I think this originality is best captured in their subsequent recordings and their various side projects (the Trypes, Yung Wu, the Willies): an eyes-closed surrender to percussive, strummed-guitar rock that's often quite danceable.

Just for kicks, here's their appearance (credited to the Willies) in the high school reunion scene from Jonathan Demme's 1986 film, "Something Wild".

The Shirts

From Park Slope, Brooklyn, the Shirts had the good fortune of becoming regulars CBGBs back in 1975, when the club first made its unexpected splash on NYC and rock music at large. They played an early string of dates opening for Television, and they were counted among the "Top 40 New York Unrecorded Rock TALENT" that advertised CBGBs' first Summer Rock Festival. God knows how they managed that company, based on the chirpy pop-rock they recorded that survives on Youtube.

In Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (Faber and Faber, 2011), Will Hermes describes the Shirts as "an amiable bunch of rockers with catchy songs and a strong-voiced, Little Rascals-style frontwoman, Annie Golden" (pg. 140). Annie also pursued a career on stage, and she landed major roles in "Hair," the 1977 Broadway revival and subsequent 1979 film adaptation by Milos Forman. Her charisma takes the band far — maybe far enough to distract you from the band's trite gestures of "rocking" and "entertaining."

San Francisco

There must have been something in the water in San Francisco to make it an especially fertile city for new wave. San Francisco’s punk and new wave bands and clubs did their best not to live under the shadow of New York and Los Angeles; certainly they succeeded in overshadowing whatever comparable was going on in Chicago at the time. If the San Francisco scene never gained quite the prominence it deserved, we can still marvel over the great local bands that played punk (Crime, the Avengers, the Offs), hardcore (Dead Kennedys, Flipper), and whatever category one feels like assigning to pre-punk heroes like the Residents and Chrome.

The Nuns

In terms of new wave up through 1983, Romeo Void (discussed in my last post) and Translator were probably San Francisco’s best known groups. And then there’s the Nuns, whom I really don’t know what to do with because they split the difference between punk and new wave so closely. Probably best known today as Alejandro Escovedo’s first band, they came out of the first wave of San Francisco punk and had the good fortune of opening (along with the Avengers) for the Sex Pistols’ final gig at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January 1978. By their 1980 debut album, they’ve become like a tough but tight rock band behind Jennifer Miro’s vampy vocals. Presumably the Nuns’ future success was predicted on the basis of their generic resemblance to Blondie, but the music they made on this album sounds closer to Pat Benatar, and their “punk” background appears largely in their shock-value titles like “Decadent Jew” and “Child Molester.”

Pearl Harbor & the Explosions

Now we’re getting back into the center of San Francisco’s new wave dance party — its goofy, antiquated center. My 3rd edition of The New Trouser Press Record Guide calls Pearl Harbor & the Explosions “danceably forgettable.” The music doesn’t hold up that well, but these clips from San Francisco’s public access show “Girl George and the Supperstars of the Future” reveal a couple of interesting facts about the band. First, they opened for Iggy Pop at the Fillmore Theater in 1980 alongside the Police (yes, the Police opened for Iggy Pop!). Second, they had some remarkable things going on in the sartorial and choreographic departments — see for yourself.

Los Microwaves

Whatever happened to Los Microwaves, one of the city’s earlier synth-based combos? (They morphed into the equally forgotten Baby Buddha, that’s what.) The influences of the Residents and Devo are rather apparent. This whole strain of new wave used to be lumped under one word: quirky.

Los Angeles

The Motels

I’m torn about whether the Motels are new wave rent party. Originally from Berkeley, Martha Davis had been kicking around an incarnation of the Motels since the early 70s, and her pluck got the band placed in credible new wave settings in L.A. (the Rodney Bingenheimer show, new wave nightclub Madame Wong’s, a rehearsal space at the Masque that they shared with the Go-Go’s) before they made the big-time. Their 1979 self-titled debut album is inconsistent and schizophrenic in a pleasing way; “No Control” (their first commercial success, albeit overseas) already points the way to their MOR future, but there’s also some stranger tracks with that resonate with the new wave theater/vaudeville/cabaret vibe. Yet the Motels were always professional in their career determination and technical ability, and Martha Davis didn’t so much challenge the conventions of what a woman could do in front of a band, so much as use new wave’s retro umbrella as artistic license to revive an iconic torch-singer style.

I say, enjoy the Motels’ big hits “Only the Lonely” and “Suddenly Last Summer” (both of which deserve their heavy rotation as 80s oldies), and as you watch this video, try to think back to an earlier period when new wave and punk were a convenient step on the way to bigger things.

Slow Children

Originally from Los Angeles , Slow Children also had the quirky thing going on in Pal Shazar’s vocal styles. Some KROQ airplay, a single released in England—it seems like it never quite came together for Slow Children, who juggled a hodge-podge of 80s aesthetics and relocated to London without much to show for it.

...and then the South

The Graphic

A North Carolina group fronted by Treva Spontaine, the Graphic illustrated the “new south” that enthralled college radio for much of the 80s. The association with Don Dixon (who produced their album) and Mitch Easter (who played on a solo record by Treva) underscores the Graphic’s jangle-pop bona fides: we’re talking the same territory as the dB’s, R.E.M., and Let’s Active, just a little less distinguished. The sprinkling of 60s folk-rock and power-pop influences also brings to mind Katrina and the Waves.

How does this mild pop-rock qualify as new wave rent party? I think it’s not so much the music but the social precedent that Treva Spontaine set locally. She’s a far cry from the iconoclastic frontwomen exemplified by Kate and Cindy of the B-52s and Vanessa Briscoe of Pylon, but then the college towns of North Carolina don’t exactly have the same subcultural edge as Atlanta. For most of the south, Treva’s commitment to making rock music independently and outside the norms of Southern rock had to be pretty inspirational.

Ultimately, new wave rent party declined as an aesthetic moment alongside the broader new wave genre. The brief window for formal, sonic and (most relevant to this sub-genre) performative innovation became incorporated into "new rock of the 80s" and a more mannered, professional mode of performance suitable for MTV. And, as the cultural response of a largely middle class suburban cohort to the opportunities for personal freedom, nightlife pleasures, and self-expression found in North American cities of the late 70s/early 80s, new wave rent was submerged under the tides of the neoliberal urbanization. Wealth streamed back into the city in more pronounced and uneven ways, as epitomized by the new talk of "yuppies" and gentrification in the Reagan era.

The college graduate demographic that typified the new wave rent party generation was always implicated in this uneven urban development, but by the mid-80s, as these kids entered their 30s, it must have felt like time to shit or get off the pot for many of them. The music of new wave rent party, which was really about fun and dancing and the thrills of urban nightlife that young people (particularly women) might enjoy amidst the urban crisis, was no longer as innocent or credible as it once seemed. Hip hop exploded, the urban economy of art and creativity heated up, the downtown musical underground abandoned groove for noise—as the 80s progrssed, the lines between urban accomodation and urban revolt were drawn in increasingly bold strokes.

One hypothesis, maybe too tidy, about what happened to new wave rent party was that the music moved to the South. Or to college towns. Or, better yet, to college towns in the South, where the networks to the art/culture/entertainment economies of big cities weren't so well established as to incorporate the aimless, jaded pursuit of musical kicks. The mid- to late 1980s were the era in which Austin, Athens, and Chapel Hill were ascendant; the era gave us R.E.M., the new South, and the film "Slacker" (the latter in 1991, technically). In the South, where patriarchal values of honoring "daddy," family, and heritage still prevail, young middle-class kids, especially women, could experience the pleasures of personal autonomy and artistic self-expression as something new and genuine, much like it was for their counterparts in big North American cities 5-10 years before.

Postscript

In the five days between my last post and this one, news came that Laura Kennedy, bassist for the Bush Tetras (discussed in my last essay), passed away. The blog Dangerous Minds posted a touching obituary, including this quote from Kennedy, which nicely evokes the aspirations and worldview of new wave rent party:

Us New York City kids from the ‘80s, often transplanted from other cities, other countries, occasionally other planets (take a wild guess who I’m talking about) - we’ve kicked ass. We’ve taken names, too - and a good many of us have not only lived to tell, but are rockin’ the telling and rollin’ the living in a way that’s inspirational… We keep going, and going and going. I defy you to tell me that all of us weren’t defined by that moment in time that we shared. This has been apparent to me for a while, but more so now that we’re a decade into the oughts. We were blessed to come together in this life at a time that defined the End of a Century.

under the shadow of Woodstock: listening to the Hudson Valley

Another problem with the "Brooklynization of Hudson River Valley" thesis that I discussed in my last post is that the music in these parts isn't very hip.  That's not a judgment, just a statement of fact if by "hip" we mean the product or embrace of 20-something hipsters who disproportionately reside in Brooklyn. 

However, the Hudson Valley does have a musical soundtrack, if you will—a distinct set of styles, artists, and local events that are used to musically represent the region to the world at large.  Separately, there's some noteworthy musical creativity going on in the region.  That these two scales of activity don't coincide in the same way that we think of, say, Brooklyn indie rock or New Orleans jazz tells you something about how music contributes the cultural geography of the Hudson Valley.

Maybe I've overgeneralize in this post too much.  I'd be eager to hear others provide counterevidence to this thesis.  But first, let's look at the music and musical lifestyles currently found in the Hudson River Valley.

MUSICAL CREATIVITY

To begin, let me acknowledge that despite the fact I've lived in this area for 12 years and have always been curious about the music created here, I'm still no expert.  In part that's because this is a big, six-county region, and a comprehensive, balanced view of its musical geography isn't easy to access.  But also, my investigations in local music are significantly directed by my tastes, which tend toward new and exciting stuff out of the rock tradition broadly speaking, e.g., indie, electronic, dance, punk, metal, and so on.  If I'm a modernist in expecting music to innovate and move forward, I can also be historical and sentimental in my musical tastes—one reason I have oldies and classic rock on the radio a lot.  In truth, I'll go see almost any live performance if it fits my working dad hours (which tends to keep me from seeing 75% of the decent concerts around here) and is reasonably close to where I live (which takes out another 22%).

Indie rock

Since I've been talking about the Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley, I'll begin here by noting that indie rock, the sound of Brooklyn today, is conspicuously underrepresented in this region.  None of the big nightclubs, theaters, or commercial performance venues specializes in it; no "alternative" or independent commercial radio stations play it.  Occasionally one of the bigger acts of this genre come to one of the area's bigger concert venues, usually only if they have some sort of crossover appeal with an older demographic who can pay higher prices for tickets.  For instance, Bright Eyes and Dr. Dog are coming to Poughkeepsie's Mid-Hudson Civic Center, a 3000-seated venue, in September; tickets are well into the $40 range once service charges are added, and unless the area's college kids find about it (few live here when school is out), I suspect the show will be undersold.  The draw would probably be larger if the show were in the southern part of the Hudson Valley, like Peekskill in Putnam County, but then a lot of touring bands are prevented from playing here by the 100-mile radius restriction in their concert contracts with NYC venues.

The oases in the indie-rock desert around here are the area's colleges.  I know the three four-year liberal arts colleges in Dutchess County best: Vassar, Bard, and Marist.  The first two are (to put it crudely) notorious hipster colleges, and not surprisingly they've graduated a number of indie-rock musicians.  In the past decade, bands like Beach House, Throw Me The Statue, and the Bravery came from Vassar.  Bard College has gone so far as to officially inventory all the bands that ever formed at Vassar, the most famous being Steely Dan (who recall the college in Annandale-on-Hudson scathingly in "My Old School"). 

The other big college in the area—the biggest, in fact, with about 8,000 students—is SUNY New Paltz in Ulster County.  The town of New Paltz itself is probably the only real college town of note in the Hudson Valley.  Located next to the Shawangunk Ridge, a Northeastern destination for serious rock climbers, the town draws an outdoorsy constituency across age brackets, and I've always thought of SUNY New Paltz as having an appropriate musical aesthetic: jam bands, roots reggae, and folksingers.  However, a Vassar student described it to me as also "something of a folk-punk mecca" that draws touring DIY performers like Paul Baribeau, so I stand corrected.

Significantly, few bands of any note actually formed while college students in the Hudson Valley.  From Vassar, I know so far of three exceptions: Alan Licht's early 90s post-punk group Love Child, their lo-fi contemporaries the Sweet Things, and mid-'00s post-metal iconoclasts Genghis Tron.  Otherwise, the general pattern is for musicians to move away after graduation and form bands elsewhere, usually in the big cities; they may continue to collaborate with fellow alumni (again, see Steely Dan), but more often they'll find musicians along lines other college alma mater.  Here as in other regards (recall my last post), this is a region that characteristically exports people once they hit the post-college age bracket.

Hip hop

The Hudson Valley is comprised of swelling suburbs (particularly in its southern half along the main parkways and thruways), historic towns and villages, quite rural hamlets, and a handful of cities.  Of its six counties, only half of them have municipalities registered officially as "cities", and of these there are only seven: Middletown, Newburgh and Port Jervis (of Orange County), Beacon and Poughkeepsie (of Dutchess County), Kingston (of Ulster County), and Hudson (of Columbia County).  Generally, these cities reveal the history of rustbelt industrialization, as river, canal and railroad made them well-placed locations between NYC and its hinterlands to the north, east and (via the canals) midwest.  Demographically, the cities were built upon the waves of ethnic immigrations associated with NYC, including substantial numbers of Irish, German, Italian, and African-American groups through the WWII era, and continuing in recent decades with West Indian, South Asian, and Latino residents.  And as is the norm for ethnic hierarchies in the Northeast, white ethnics largely moved on to the Hudson Valley's towns and villages while blacks and Latinos remain disproportionately concentrated in cities still struggling to emerge from the post-WWII urban crisis.

This, as you might expect, is a fertile geography for hip hop to bloom in, and it's probably not a stretch to say that hip hop is the go-to music among the cities' African American and Puerto Rican youth, maybe West Indian youth as well (particularly in its dancehall hybrids).  Of course, hip hop is the favorite music for many white kids in the suburbs and colleges as well, but I'm not sure how many venture into the cities' clubs where hip hop plays on the speakers.  While hip hop performers will play to fanatical student audiences in the colleges, theirs is a different environment for hip hop than the inner cities that many youth of color would recognize in Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Hudson and Kingston.  Ghetto realism and hedonistic materialism are the themes of the clubs, while high school students might find older rappers teaching consciousness in hiphop-oriented school programs and community organizations.

So who are the Hudson Valley rappers?  I'm out of my area of expertise here, but I imagine an enterprising visitor to the area's hip hop clubs could walk away with dozens of mixtapes and CD-Rs.  (Whether they're good enough to interest non-locals, I couldn't say.)  Yet it seems very few MCs or DJs of wide regard have come from the region.  My Vassar colleague Hua Hsu thinks the most important one is probably J Rock from Newburgh, whose 1991 album Streetwise is a minor classic of ghetto reportage.  In the early 90s, a 20-year-old redhead MC going by the name of Sarai dropped a major-label debut album and gathered a lot of hype as a "female Eminem."  (Am I correct in recalling she made the cover of Hudson Valley Magazine as well?)  Now she goes by the name Miss Eighty 6 and works the TV/film soundtrack angle.

It may be that the Hudson Valley's hip hop scene is overshadowed geographically and musically by New York City to the south.  Cities like Newburgh and Poughkeepsie often appear in NYC hip hop narratives as satellites of "the City" and its urban hustle.  With its entrenched gang violence, Newburgh is sometimes called the "sixth borough" of NYC, while Poughkeepsie (at the end of the commuter rail) is commemorated in "'98 Thug Paradise" by Tragedy, Capone and Infinity as a place for NYC's drug dealers go to cool out:

Capone bag the keys

Let's move like a gypsy

It's hot out here

Relocate to Poughkeepsie

 

Reggae and Latin music

There are two very different genres, but their similarity appears in the regional context.  Namely, the Hudson Valley's West Indian and Latino populations have expanded sufficiently to support concerts featuring acts from the West Indies and Latin America.  These events are rarely announced in the cultural calendars and concert listings that most white residents peruse.  But go to the ethnic stores, and you'll find the slickly printed color flyers announcing the latest dates.

Contemporary Jamaican acts with dancehall riddims and lyrical slackness play the Hudson Valley's urban nightclubs around (I'm estimating) 5-10 times a year.  Vintage roots reggae performers like the Mighty Diamonds, Burning Spear, and Culture might also play these venues, although they also have a significant constituency in the bucolic hippie/jam-band stronghold of Woodstock—hence the Woodstock Reggae Festival.  I couldn't tell you how much audience crossover there is along lines of race and age across reggae's "murrrdah!"/"one love divide," but it's an interesting question to investigate.

The Hudson Valley's immigrant Latino population has boomed in just the last 10 years, another small milestone in the new immigration outside the U.S. Southwest.  In cities like Poughkeepsie, the new Latino presence has significantly revitalized a downtown once known for its vacant storefronts.  Mexican tiendas and restaurants play corridas on the jukeboxes and cable TV; now, performers from that genre are touring the area.  (There's a smaller but growing Central American population in the Hudson Valley, but so far I haven't detected a corresponding musical presence.) 

For reggae and Latin music, I don't see local performers performing these styles at a significant scale (i.e., beyond the sound systems and DJs for hire).  Maybe that's the point: these are non-U.S. acts performing for an immigrant audience.  As West Indian and Latino families put their kids in local schools, another interesting question is whether they'll give up the taste for reggae and corrida for "native" music like hip hop and rock, much like they do the traditional foods their parents want them to send them to school with.  Alternately, maybe they'll be drawn to the urban genres that fuse the old and new worlds: reggaeton, merengue, and other sounds easily heard on the streets of NYC.

Rock and heavy metal

One of my favorite deep cuts from Blue Öyster Cult is "Dominance and Submission" from the 1981 album Extraterrestrial Live.  This particular track was recorded live in Poughkeepsie, and about 2:30 minutes in, the band vamps as Eric Bloom addresses the crowd:

"Here we are in Poughkeepsie, New York!"  [audience cheers] " Yeah, I see we are sold out to the maximum!" [audience cheers louder]  "You know, we like coming up here once or twice a year because—we like coming up here from New York City because we know Poughkeepsie is SERIOUS about rock and roll!!"  [audience goes nuts]

And so it goes.  With its white blue-collar base, the Hudson Valley (like all of upstate New York) is a natural stronghold for rock.  Classic and alternative rock abounds on the radio and in the bars.  The biggest annual fair around these parts (in Dutchess County) draws graying stadium rockers like Foreigner and REO Speedwagon.  And the concert venues draws B-list and C-list reunions and classic-rock bills that can't quite sell out NYC venues.  (Boston Legends All Star Concert, anyone?)  Age and/or upscale the act a little more, maybe broaden the parameters of "rock" to include blues, vintage new wave and R&B, and you get a sense of the acts that play nice theaters like Poughkeepsie's Bardavon or Kingston's UPAC: Ray Davies, the Temptations, David Byrne, Pat Benatar, Los Lobos, Patti Smith, et al.  Demographically, it's not a mystery what's going on here.  With its aging population, there's a sizable market in the region for rock and pop of the baby boom and its Gen X successors. 

But what about the kids who just wanna rock?  Young bands playing metal, emo, metalcore, and guitar-heavy "alternative" can be found at busy venues like the Poughkeepsie Chance Theater or (just north of the Hudson Valley, past Albany) the Northern Lights venue.  This is a real meat-and-potatoes rock circuit, and, importantly, here you find a lot of local bands.  Replace the flyers with myspace pages, and it feels like a smaller version of the hair-metal scene found in most major American cities in the late 80s.  So far as I can tell, no bands of this ilk have "made it"  in a big way.  Maybe that's because none is any good, or because this scene seems rather tied to the conventional record-and-tour model of a rock music industry that's increasingly difficult to bust out of.

Some of you may recall that I have a special place in my heart for crazy black and death metal.  It's not for everyone, but its intrinsically esoteric, extreme nature offers a useful perspective to evaluate the metal scene in the Hudson Valley.  Occasionally I find myself browsing the local concert calendars looking for bands of this nature, and generally I find nothing.  A couple of years back I did go see Skeletonwitch, Toxic Holocaust and Trap Them at the Chance Theater.  It was a great show, and the first two bands in particular excelled in the unexpected retro-thrash sub-genre that brings 80s hold-outs like myself together with younger metal fans.  But that's just it: the bill satisfied both connoisseuring sensibilities and rather mainstream contemporary tastes in metal, but it was probably the latter that brought most of the kids out, and it's the latter that the local bands traffic in.  Until I find the real crazy stuff that tries to push the metal envelope forward in a serious way, that's my hypothesis about the Hudson Valley metal scene.

One final note: around 2006, when Genghis Tron were still Vassar College students, I recall that a Time Out New York listing for one of their NYC shows indicated they were "from Poughkeepsie."  This is a very rare regional identification for a Vassar College, but it makes sense in a metal context.  For one thing, most metal bands don't go around announcing they're kids; given the genre's proletarian aesthetics, that's quite likely a kiss of death.  (Google "hipster metal" for similarly scathing backlash.)  But also Poughkeepsie's hard-on-its-luck reputation provides a special aesthetic grain for post-metal groups trying to urbanize a genre typically associated with oppressive suburbs and Scandinavian forests.

Folk, blues and jazz

Here's another disparate set of genres united by local context. Go to any open-mic night at one of the Hudson Valley's many coffeeshops, and you won't have to wait very long before you hear folk music played, particularly in the Dylan/Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter traditions.  Turn on "Poughkeepsie Live!," the public access TV show featuring regional musicians, and it's a good bet you'll catch a guitarist wailing on the blues.  Go to a nice restaurant on a late weekend evening, and if there's live music, it's most likely going to be jazz.  Folk, blues and jazz are the default soundtrack for the amenity settings and quality-of-life districts of the Hudson Valley.  And, as I argued in my last post, these destinations characteristically serve an older, 45-and-up clientele; even if the musicians themselves don't come from that bracket, that's the audience their music reaches.  In short, it's lifestyle background music, by no means unique to the Hudson Valley, but certainly redolent of the rural getaways and intimate "third places" with which this region attracts baby boomers and well-to-do urban migrants.

Of course, the Hudson Valley is home to some serious practioners of these genres.  Folk legend Pete Seeger has lived in Beacon since 1941.  Jazz saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano live in Dutchess and Putnam Counties, respectively.  It's a separate question whether artists such as these can be considered local musicians—not simply local residents, but contributors to a local music scene.  A strong case could be made for Pete Seeger, whose presence in the region's various post-WWII left-wing camps and chataquas and whose activism on behalf of the Hudson River's health have created lasting local legacies.  This could be parsing an unhelpful distinction, but perhaps Seeger's local contribution as a folksinger has been political more than musical—at least, that's a hypothesis.

By contrast, the case is more straightforward for Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano.  Nominally associated with the NYC jazz scene, these are clearly artists of an international caliber for whom the Hudson Valley is essentially just a home base.  Their careers are so developed, they don't need NYC's jazz scene to get gigs and make a living.   Whether they desire the collaborations made possible by living and working among other jazz musicians is another question altogether, but I suspect there's a lot of musicians who would drop whatever they're doing for an invitation to jam at the Hudson Valley home of Sonny Rollins or Joe Lovano.

MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Now we get to the more famous musical associations, histories, and symbolic geographies of the Hudson River Valley.  In contrast to the hard work and promotional hustle that characterizes most of the artists I've talked about so far, at this level the musical "economy" is far more developed and successful.  A key reason is because the underlying demand for the musical representations of the Hudson Valley is national and even international in scope.  But let's be clear here: the demand isn't for musical recordings and performances, but for regional aesthetics and lifestyles made meaningful in some part by their association with music.

Second homes and the quality-of-life district

Pete Seeger, Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano are hardly the only musicians living in the Hudson Valley.  A load of popular musicians have homes in the area: off the top of my head, I can think of Natalie Merchant, David Bowie, Chris Stein of Blondie, Levon Helms of the Band, and Graham Parker.  Aside from these famous names, there's probably as many successful session musicians, technicians, promoters, agents and music industry executives. 

What characterizes these musicians' relationship to the Hudson Valley is choice made possible by their success.  Many of them are in states of semi-retirement; some pursue their non-musical passions for writing, painting, entrepreneurialism (the B-52s' Kate Pierson runs a rather curious B&B in the old Catskill resort area), and other elective avocations, just like many non-musician Hudson Valley migrants of their career success do.  Although they may live rather private lives in rustic idylls—you don't really see David Bowie and Imani picking up vegan burritos in Woodstock, do you?—their proximity to the entertainment industry center of NYC is a key asset.  Through industry contacts, fellow musicians, and major airports in the city, they can shift their activity into higher gear for a recording session, long tour or even just a rare concert guest appearance.  It's in this sense that their Hudson Valley location isn't really local.  Whether their residence here is actually a second (or third, fourth, etc.) home or not, this region serves as an exurban residential enclave for artists with significant autonomy over the substance, schedule and location of their work. 

In this way, these musicians are perhaps no different than your garden variety doctor or publishing executive who's bought a home in the Hudson Valley: all move here to consume the region's scenic amenities, residential/outdoor opportunities, and local quality of life as a private experience.  Or so it might seem.  In fact, the major difference between musicians and other quality-of-life migrants is that we don't hear about the famous medical history or publishing history of the Hudson Valley.  Yet we hear about the musical history of the region—specifically, of one place, Woodstock—all the time, and that cultural discourse precedes and heavily informs these musicians' relationship to this area.  Indeed, in some way it informs every Hudson Valley resident's relationship to the area.

Woodstock

I can't believe that as I write, today is the 42nd anniversary of the Woodstock Festival.  There's so much to be said about Woodstock, and I can hardly do it justice here.  I would contend that like Hollywood, Woodstock can be understood as a place, an industry, and a sensibility; and only in a very narrow slice of a Venn diagram do these three definitions overlap. 

• The place is the town in Ulster County.  It wasn't the site of the 1969 festival (that was Bethel, in neighboring Sullivan County), but that hasn't deterred a continual stream of visitors to Woodstock the town.  (Bob Dylan did have his motorcycle accident here, however.) 


• The industry is the industry of history, memorabilia, and nostalgia associated with the famous music festival and its cultural import.  The Museum at Bethel Woods is an official gatekeeper of this memory ("The Story of the Sixties and Woodstock", its main exhibit promises), but a hundred books, a hundred documentaries, and a thousand and one bootleg t-shirts (preferably tie-dyed) also keep the flame alight.


• The sensibility is... well, do I have to spell it out?  A reverence and optimism for the dream of 1960s peace, love and freedom embodied by the festival, perhaps, and an aptitude for tuning in and turning on this dream, through drugs or other forms of consciousness heightening. 

Woodstock is a place-based musical sensibility if there ever was one.  It can be discerned in the jam-band festival and the "one love" roots reggae ethos, but it skews heavily toward the 1960s and 70s rock baby boom demographic enamoured of classic rock and related 60s genres (particularly folk and blues).  Every summer weekend, people come to Woodstock the place by the hundreds and patronize Woodstock the industry in order to partake of this Woodstock sensibility.  It seems alive in the town's mountains, streams, and architectural landmarks; it feels sustained within the bookstores, record stores, health food restaurants, galleries, art-house cinema, flea markets, benches, and patches of grass of the town. 

I don't want to suggest this is merely the simplistic, commodified Woodstock sensibility that you can buy on a PBS pledge drive.  If David Bowie, hardly the pop-culture symbol of natural living and spiritual authenticity, can find himself drawn to the symbolic geography and lifestyle zone of Woodstock, then it's clear we're talking about a complex, multivalent discourse that can withstand diverse interpretations and critical artistic/intellectual gestures.  Even cynical indie-rockers are negotiating their peace with Woodstock's symbolic geography, as illustrated in the recent indie-rock music festivals, All Tomorrow's Parties and the Truck Festival US, that were scheduled (and in the latter case cancelled) nearby.  Understanding what Woodstock means and how it sustains a creative life isn't a simple, commodifiable experience.  It can be a worthwhile, long-term project, and it's one that has drawn many people, musicians and others.

If it's not clear by now, there's really no current music scene in Woodstock to speak of.  The town has some great performance venues, and musicians still record in various studios in and around the area.  Occasionally a "Woodstock native" will play locally, the most famous being Levon Helms' monthly Midnight Ramble.   Usually, just the local knowledge that famous musicians have long lived, and still do live, here or nearby is enough to sustain the enchantment of the region's musical geography, even if it's not something you can hear on a recording or take home with you.

Probably Woodstock's most important musical export nowadays is the independently-owned radio station, WDST.  With a playlist combining the contemporary and vintage sounds of jam bands, alternative, blues, singer-songwriters rock, and reggae, it's become a model of "adult alternative" radio that's rarely heard outside of subscription-based satellite radio.  Locally, WDST fills the airwaves with what must feel like the living sound of Woodstock and the Hudson Valley more broadly to anyone who travels to the area.  The region's other radio stations with bigger market shares provide functionalless, place accompaniments to everyday life.  By contrast, WDST enables consumption of a distinct sense of place.  No doubt its random discovery of the car radio dial has tipped the scales toward moving to the Hudson Valley for more than one migrant.

If Woodstock is the chief metonym for the musical representations of the Hudson Valley, its global recognition underscores how almost no Hudson Valley musician or genre today can carve out a successful, global profile under its shadow.  Woodstock continually evokes the past, thereby eclipsing most anything musically exciting in the present.  It's the sound of baby boom dreams that lull residents and newcomers into privatized, domestic lives in quaint villages and rural idylls—and compels everyone else in the Hudson Valley to live with the burden of that market demand.  No, the Hudson Valley is not becoming the next Brooklyn.  Rather, Woodstock is absorbing aging Brooklynites, wherever it is that they actually come from.