Or, Stop Telling Me How To Run My Band
By no means did I intend for my third guest NAP post to come so soon after my second. I got talked into doing this by Marshall and Ramon after an article entitled 10 Music Writers Walk Into A Bar, Decide Bands Should Get Off Their Lazy Asses appeared on the Houston Press blog. This post was an account of a group of music writers getting together “to address the question of how [they] could better serve the music community,” the answer to which apparently was that bands need to do a better job of promoting themselves. An ancillary discussion was sparked by Doug Spearman’s rant on the Hands Up board (permanent PDF version) bashing the Press, in response, for basically sucking.
“Discussions” like this have become something of a tradition in the world of online discussion of Houston music, growing out of the decades-old truism that the Houston music scene totally sucks, a condition which is often blamed on those lazy, lazy bands who don’t bother promoting themselves and never go on tour (or go on tour too often, whatever floats your boat).
To be honest, I wrote the headline of this post earlier in the week, before a 10K human rights debate with Marshall sucked all the bile out of me. I just don’t have the mental energy to be pissed about this stuff anymore. Now it just makes me depressed. I’m so goddamn tired of music writers complaining about the scene and telling bands what to do. One meme in particular that is extremely annoying is along these lines:
This is a business. Once you walk out your house or garage to play a show or sell a tape, you are in the machine. -Craig Hlavaty
You can only make music for your friends for so long before it becomes a pointless exercise. – Jeremy Hart
If you don’t want people to hear your music, then why bother making it at all? – Brent Grulke
I call bullshit on the “we don’t care about fame/glory” excuse. If that’s the case, why be in a band at all? Why play shows? Why not just stay in your underwear and play guitar on your bed, in the comfort of those flannel Star Wars sheets? – Brittanie Shey [nerd-baiting, always a winner when you're ARGUING ON THE INTERNET]
This attitude drives me absolutely crazy. There are a lot of musicians- among them some, if not most, of the best- who play music because they have a creative impulse, and just play shows because that’s just what you do when you play music. It’s a performative art that in a very real way does not exist until it’s either performed or recorded. There are also people who just don’t care for one reason or another. I have no idea why music critics and other people in the music industry seem to have such a hard time understanding this. Getting up on stage because you think it’s fun and wanting to be on American Idol aren’t the same thing.
Going along with this, another “thought” that ALWAYS surfaces in these things is that “bands want success handed to them on a silver platter/ believe they will be ‘discovered.’” I’ve never seen this accusation leveled against any of the real people that supposedly hold this belief. Which means it’s just thrown out there as a generalization. Heck, what’s wrong with THAT? Surely musicians who practice for years to learn their instruments, spend all their money paying rent on nasty practice spaces with no A/C, and send e-mail after e-mail to people that never come to their shows already understand that they’re all entitled losers because some no-name music critic didn’t get a CD in the mail.
To sum up, the takeaway on both of these complaints is: when you have something to say, JUST TELL US WHO YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT. If you want to take shots, you have to put yourself in the line of fire. Making these kinds of sweeping generalizations like “bands are fucking lazy” (Marc Brubaker) is insulting. And, I might add, pretty damn lazy.
I wouldn’t mind these articles half as much if they weren’t so value-laden, as if bands are somehow doing something morally wrong by not marketing themselves properly. Matt Wettergreen (whom I met when I was in college and we were both DJs at KTRU, and whom Ramon has previously slimed, I think- not to open a whole other can of worms- a little unfairly, on NAP) illustrates this nicely:
Why in the world does anyone care about what someone in Chicago thinks about the Houston music scene, and why is it a duty of Houston musicians to make national news? I just don’t get it. Wettergreen, at least (and I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t think this is valuable, because it is) has as his stated goal helping musicians to build their careers; this attitude makes even less sense coming from a music critic, as was frequently the case with John Nova Lomax when he was in the music section at the Houston Press. As a music writer myself, I’ve never had the faintest inclination to address this subject, because I really don’t understand why it matters, and I can’t believe anyone who reads music reviews give a fuck. I guess it’s easier to formulate an argument about business than it is about music, although Lomax has no problem constructing sentences about music or anything else.
I really can’t understand why anybody thinks shaming bands is worthwhile. At the risk of repeating myself, pointing fingers at musicians for not doing things the way you want them to doesn’t help anything. It demoralizes the artists, it makes you look like a tool, it creates bad feelings all around and just is generally corrosive to the camaraderie that a community depends on for existence.
There’s a tremendous amount of survivorship bias in music criticism, and I wonder if that doesn’t play a part in the hold that these kinds of articles seem to have over the critical imagination in Houston: when you look for success and there’s none to be found, naturally you start looking for answers. Unfortunately, everyone seems to be coming up with the wrong ones. It’s true that some bands who work hard and go on tour end up with a national reputation. Way more of them end up with an empty bank account, an old broken-down van, and five years of their lives missing. Playing in a band and trying to make it takes an incredible amount of time and money and usually doesn’t lead to anything much. The odds against you ever being in the right place at the right time are discouraging, and when you live in Houston, they’re downright staggering, because not only is it never the right place, ever, it’s about 1,000 miles from the closest place that even could be.
Instead of another round of advice on how best for bands to pimp themselves, I’d really like to hear more in these “state of the scene” articles about how often bands do everything that all the books and the blogs tell them to do and still fail. I’d like to hear about how Lance Walker ended up with a storage space full of unsold CDs from Ojet records. I’d like to hear about how the Kants hit a wall with touring and just gave up. I’d like to hear about why the Fatal Flying Guilloteens broke up despite rave reviews for their last record. I’d like to hear why I still can’t buy a Satin Hooks record. I’d like to hear about how Feow records crashed and burned and then one of its two releases went on to be a hit for another label. And I’d like to see some speculation about how long these people might have lasted and how much more great music they might have given us if they hadn’t pushed themselves so hard to succeed. Linus Pauling Quartet and Rotten Piece (they don’t even have a website people!) both have deep discographies and more than a decade under their belts. Neither are much for self-promotion.
I’d also like to hear an admission of how ridiculous and unnatural the whole idea of self-promotion is in the first place for people who have any amount of self-awareness. Contrary to popular belief, rock musicians are not all rampant egoists who think they’re the best thing since Hendrix. A lot of them, especially the ones I’ve met in Houston, are nice, normal, thoughtful human beings who may not feel terribly comfortable with constantly pushing their art on everyone around them and generally acting like they’re rock stars when they know damn well they aren’t. Tex Kerschen once told me that the secret to DIY touring was to have absolutely no shame. I have to say that seems like a pretty draining way to live if you aren’t cut out for it.
A few years back, I did a couple of interviews with a guy named Michael Dean who used to play in a reasonably successful band called Bomb. He wrote a book about DIY music called $30 Music School that had a lot of the same information that you can get from blogs on the same topic. My copy of the book itself seems to have flown the coop sometime in the last five years, so I can’t quote him directly, but he said something like, “Being a successful DIY artist takes about eight hours a day of promoting yourself in addition to actually making your art, for the rest of your life. If you aren’t prepared for that, there’s no shame in just doing it for fun on the weekends.” I’d add that if you’ve made that entirely rational choice, it really sucks to open up your favorite music website and hear about how lazy musicians are and how pointless that art that brings you so much joy is.
The crushing irony of the original blog post- hardly even the worst of the bunch- being the breaking point for me is that the local music press in Houston is more robust and varied than it has been probably ever. Since moving to a blog-heavy format, the Houston Press under Chris Gray has really stepped up its game in music coverage generally, and Craig Hlavaty in particular (dear Village Voice Galactic Empire: author search. figure it out) is absolutely tireless in writing enthusiastically about nearly everything that’s going on. Space City Rock publishes new material probably five or six times more often than it did when I started writing for them, and Jeremy’s showlist- no less functional twelve years ago than it is today- is still the single most ingenious and valuable resource for a music fan in Houston. Sara Cress at the Chronicle has built 29-95.com (which I’ve been writing for recently) into the source for some of the highest-quality music writing in Houston. The Free Press is a true voice of the community, and Omar Afra- who, to his credit, I can’t remember ever seeing quoted in one of these stupid state-of-the-scene articles- has not only reopened the old Oven as Mango’s, but also put together a series of incredible music festivals, to put it rather mildly. David Cobb at Houston Calling does more actual work digging up unknown bands these days than anybody else. And there’s lots of other valuable work coming from sources that didn’t even exist five years ago, like Breakfast on Tour and Houstonist.
I know it sucks when people bitch about the local press when things are better than they’re ever been. Sorry, Doug. But, as Marshall put it, to see true dysfunction, you’d have to go back to 1998. Considering how far Houston has come, couldn’t we get down to the business of talking about actual music, accept that not everyone has to do everything the same way, and dispense with all the inside-baseball scene-is-broken hand-wringing? That shit is such a bummer.
Thanks to NAP for having me back so soon. Hopefully I haven’t worn out my welcome with all this depressing crap.
You will likely never wear out your welcome here.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you about bands promoting themselves. I’m really not sure what they’re supposed to do differently. They announce shows and play them. Most of the time, those shows even get on calendars in the local press. Bands are even recording and releasing their music. As you mentioned, this stuff rarely happened ten years ago, mostly because all of those things were hard. Now computers have made them nearly effortless.
I went to Wettergreen’s first “Bandcamp” function. I’m not sure why I went because I really don’t have much to do with local music anymore. I guess I wanted to see what he put together. What I saw was several not-particularly-thoughtful presentations about how you can promote your band by people whom I’d hardly consider to be experts in their fields. The presentations themselves were plenty self-promotional. Maybe Wettergreen wanted this to come off like TED for bands, but what he ended up with was Zig Ziglar for bands, where speeches often ended with a pitch. “If you want help with this, here’s my card.” This was a real missed opportunity. A better approach would have been to put all these people in a room and have them start working on something. Because in the end, the important thing is what you produce, not how much you talk about what you produce.
Finally, despite all the contrary press, I don’t think bands in Houston are any lazier or less self-promotional than bands in any other city. I think the difference is that people in Houston are less interested in hype. It amazes me how much other cities buy into their own bullshit. I am personally not the least bit interested in and usually repelled by the bullshit, so it’s a positive for me to be around people who are similarly skeptical about it. I guess the downside of that is the endless stories by lazy journalists about how lazy they think bands are.
in the end, the important thing is what you produce, not how much you talk about what you produce
I should have let Justin write this post, could have saved myself four hours.
Pfft. I’m so lazy I can barely do my post.
Well said. Yeah, it is very hard for many music writers to understand that bands are not playing music for any reason other than the impulse to play music. Pretty simple right? It is a bad idea to make it any more complicated than that. Anybody who writes music with a music critic in mind should be decapitated. Today.
Nice.
But for the record I would like to say that my tirade was not aimed at much more than the insulting tone of the mentioned piece. That’s it. That’s all. No motive to get some PR or whatever. Just thought it was a crappy thing to publish. And I have no problems with the music ads in the Press. They print just about every show and that is good. I was just tired of the insulting tone ad implications.
I completely understand where you were coming from, Doug, because my emotional reaction was exactly the same. I do think you were a little unfair to the Press. Like every other publication in the nation, they’ve been dealing with an absolutely dire financial situation for the past couple of years, which is really tragic, because it came along at a time when Chris was just coming into a position to really start pushing the section to improve. When you evaluate them, you have to account for the fact that they really are trying every day to do more with less. To be fair you have to put things in context, because they suck SO much less than they used to. I understand the urge to vent, absolutely, but next time maybe do it after lunch or something.
Good read, Daniel. I alone am so far out of the loop of local music in Houston nowadays, it was actually kind of prevertedly refreshing to read about all the bullshit that continues to run through being a Houston band member since – I am fairly certain – some time in the 80s, before my own ancient ass started doing it. I don’t miss paying attention to the local music press, which as you may know I contributed to somewhat myself for a while. it’s tiring, vaguely insulting and pretty damn tedious. I can’t add much really since I have absolutely nothing to do with the world of Houston music anymore, but thanks for adding some sense and reason to a very long and ridiculous story.
It’s funny that this post and this discussion should come along at this very moment for me. I’ve never desired or undertaken any self-promotion for any band I’ve ever been in until just recently. It’s only because I like so much of what we do and am playing with such an interested and engaged crew of musicians that I am actually taking over the booking and promotion process for us. My self-promotion really only consists of begging people to come to our shows because otherwise we’ll be terribly, terribly lonely. But it’s a big step for me.
I still play because of my overriding creative impulse and because it’s probably my death not to, but frankly I want to share at this point and am not afraid to tell people they may in fact enjoy themselves.
The most salient point in this debate, one that Danny makes pretty well with reference to particular examples, is that bands that try to “make it” usually end up with similar or worse outcomes compared with bands that don’t care about touring and promotion. In this respect, bands aren’t all that different from professional athletes.
If you’re a pitcher or running back, you face daunting odds, even if your only goal is to be paid at what you do for a living. If you “succeed”, you might only expect to play professionally for three or four years on average. Even at hefty minimum salaries of 300-400k (should you miraculously make it to the NFL/MLB), your opportunity cost compared with taking your free ride at university and going into the workforce is significant. You sacrifice your 20s and maybe part of your 30s to live a dream, that at the margins, isn’t all that dream-like.
Your musical equivalent to the life of an above-average PRO athlete is someone who’s in Sleater-Kinney or Animal Collective. Congratulations, you’re famous, but you’re not going to be wealthy. Or even close to wealthy. But, hey, you’re in the top 1% of people who ever try to do this whole music thing. That is, for every one of you, there’s 99 (or maybe 999) nobodies who racked up 20-40k in credit card debt and wasted 10 years trying to buy themselves a modest, short-term income and a certain level of critical notoriety. It’s a goal that ultimately eludes all but the luckiest and most talented.
So to be one of the all-out, self-promoting, tirelessly touring rock bands, not only do you have to have no shame. You have to be willing to ignore the basics of probability and expected value calculations. Remember, this isn’t about making music. You can do that in your spare time. It’s not about putting out records, that’s also relatively cheap, now. It’s about TIME. And how much of it you’re willing to spend to blow off your productive post-college years so you can make less than a high-school teacher or full-time waiter.
Don’t get me wrong; would I rather be in Built to Spill or Pavement or My Morning Jacket or Flaming Lips than be a hospital lawyer? Yes. Yes I would, of course. But what if my choice is really more like, say, The Paper Chase or Pernice Brothers or Slobberbone? Still, amazingly, a close call for me. But in reality, even that modest level of success is really hard to achieve.
This is what’s missing from the “lazy band” debate. An appreciation of just how irrational you have to be to pursue conventional success in a ever-dwindling music business.
Of course, many a journalist has faced—and still faces—a similar type of daunting reality. And they say, “what the hell, I’m going to be a music journalist. Never mind that I compete with people who will do the same thing for free. I’m going to roll up my sleeves and write about local bands.”
The whole “lazy band” thing makes more sense when you view it like that. And frankly I’m glad there are people willing to ignore the odds. There’s a lot of great music and great music writing by folks who, thankfully, aren’t that good at math.
I glossed over this aspect a bit because, as Kin Kade quite rightly pointed out on the HUH board, my post was WAY too long already. So I’m glad that you elaborated, Marshall.
This serves as an excellent response to Matt Wettergreen’s post last fall called What’s Your Goal?:
It’s like Martin Atkins said at last night’s free talk about touring for musicians: “Never start a war without first knowing the outcome. Touring is warfare.” . . . The reason why Houston bands are so stereotypically unsuccessful: they lack a goal. . . Another thing Martin said last night that stuck with me: “The Great Wall of China started with a few bricks. Could I tell you how to play in front of 20,000 fans? No, but I could tell you how to pick up two more tomorrow and sell a t-shirt on Saturday and get five more people on your email list on Sunday… Each live show is not one brick, it could be 50. ”
And again, I don’t want to beat up on Matt, because he’s just trying to offer people help, which is great. But this argument glosses over what the options are for musicians in terms of goals. It’s easy to come up with a goal as an independent musician. I want to play South by Southwest. I want to sell 1,000 CDs. I want to go on one tour. Each of these is a nice feather in your cap, which you can achieve given a certain amount of work. However, each of them is also only a teeny-tiny step toward the ultimate goal for most independent musicians, which is making a living by playing your music. A live show might be 50 bricks, sure. But the Great Wall of China has like 4 million bricks in it. If you don’t luck into the assistance of someone with a backhoe or an army of slaves, you’ll be dead of old age long before that wall is finished.
Each live show is not one brick, it could be 50.
And I’m sure none of these “lazy” bands has ever thought of this. This is just oversimplified nonsense of the sort you can get at any feel good personal empowerment event. It’s snake oil, straight up.
I don’t know, Justin, I think I could accurately describe many, many of my shows as “bricks.”
About five years ago, maybe more, I wrote a letter to the H Press directed at J Lomax regarding an article that not only fit this bill but had front page billing and was categorized as “news” (as opposed to being placed in the music section of the paper).
My bottom line point which I still see going on today is that the thing most wrong with the quote unquote Houston scene is the goddamn writing about it: boring, rambling, locally-fixated-to-a-fault and self-pitying. Point a finger back, why are you writing about this? Nobody asked for it and it’s not a good read. This style of writing, I do not see in healthy music towns (while there’s basically a band in every town doing that thing you like that that band in your town does).
Why not write for the “scene” whatever it is and stop lamenting what it’s not? Heaven knows local bands do need a critical point of view since they’re not very good at self-criticism. But I mean that solely towards their musicianship not their efforts at self-promotion.
So why do writers write this stuff? Because a very small number of people get irritated and write a bunch of blog comments like this. Because this self-pitying quality might not be inherent to the writer; it might be contagious.
Enjoying your posts – thank you very much for contributing.
I’ll just, again, mention my fallback on this discussion, which as Cramer mentions was already going on decades ago (and I can’t believe it’s still going on) – making music and making it in the music business are completely unrelated.
And if you still have questions, read The Manual. Here’s a quote from it that I just love:
To get a number one hit: “If you are already a musician stop playing your instrument. Even better, sell the junk. It will become clearer later on but just take our word for it for the time being. Sitting around tinkering with the Portastudio or musical gear (either ancient or modern) just complicates and distracts you from the main objective. Even worse than being a musician is being a musician in a band. Real bands never get to Number One – unless they are puppets.”
One of the things various bandmates have found annoying about me is that I’m so averse to self-promotion that I don’t even tell my FRIENDS when one of my bands is playing. I just assume they’ll hear about it somehow or another, or if not, they’ll hear about it next time. I don’t know why, but I just find it absolutely abhorrent to pimp my band out to whatever friends I have left, so I’ve eventually swung around to the opposite extreme of not even mentioning upcoming shows I have. I’ll usually mention something about Linus shows, at least to people I talk to face-to-face on a regular basis, but rarely do I think to mention anything else, and honestly I’m lucky if I remember to mention anything at all. On the down side, you’ll never get a decent enough sized crowd to make a venue want to book you again if you do it that way, and your friends will inevitably berate you for not telling them about something if they actually wanted to see it (fortunately my free improv stuff is generally pretty unpopular with most listeners, so I don’t get that so much, except occasionally from Ramon or Mike or some other people who themselves do free improv), but on the up side, there is something kind of cool about dropping in to play a show, knowing absolutely no one there, and then having someone you don’t know and who has no other reason to compliment you tell you that they enjoyed your stuff. So there’s that.
Dang, I just realized I posted without getting to the point. Point is, Daniel and several others have made the very valid point that self-promotion isn’t just something lazy people avoid, it’s something some of us are actively averse to, and simply can’t stomach. I feel a weird underlying sensation of crappiness just telling friends about shows, because it feels kind of like blackmail: “come see my band if you want to continue being my friend.”
Now this leaves out entirely the concept of self-promotion to people who don’t have any personal relationship to the musician, but really, you’re going to start somewhere, most likely with the people you know, and anyway as someone else pointed out above me, most bands already flyer and let the local rags know what’s what, so beyond that (and with the proliferation of Facebook, MySpace, etc.) it seems like the only thing really left is self-promotion with friends. I guess some of these bandcamp type things go into other options, like how to promote to total strangers more effectively, so I guess there’s that, but again, if a basic sense of modesty prevents you from telling your friends about your shows, then it does sort of stand to reason you’re not going to go much further trumpeting about them to the general masses. Plus, going the extra mile to push push push your show into the consciousness of who knows how many people out there in an effort to convince them to become part of your audience just seems like the sort of thing that would turn someone off to being in a band in the first place. It has nothing to do with the music, and everything to do with being a salesman. Most of us really ARE in bands because we feel the urge to make music, music is a social art which really benefits (I believe anyway) from being shared, and most of us do it also because it’s fun. There’s nothing wrong with busting your ass to pimp your shows to anyone and everyone, but there’s also nothing wrong with not doing that, and simply playing your shows, and seeing who shows up.
In regards to self promotion…
1) It is much, much easier to get excited about a friend’s music and plug that than to plug your own, no matter how proud (or embarrassed by) you are of your stuff.
2) No one wants to be a tool. There’s already so much advertising online and I don’t want to be another person shouting “Look at our stuff! You’ll love it!”
3) The more personal the relationship, the more my insecurities can rear their ugly heads. At the end of the day I don’t care nearly as much about a random internet visitor that doesn’t like my music (but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t), but there’s a big part of me that wants my close friends to like it. And not because they like me, because they genuinely like the music. Even though *I* know if you’re going to take risks you’ll probably produce some crap, but if I make something I’m genuinely happy with, I want my friends to like it. And if they don’t, on some level its hard not to take it personally, because that creation is in some way a piece of yourself.
Great post Danny. I no longer have a dog in this hunt, and I think some things have become clearer to me since I have been off the beat.
The talented bands don’t promote themselves. True artists disdain such dishonorable grubbing for attention and justifiably believe their work should speak for itself. I had the privilege of watching Townes Van Zandt up close throughout his career — my dad managed him and he was a close friend of my mom and stepfather’s — and he actively worked against any wider fame that came his way.
The douchebags bands do promote themselves. Every time I would fire off one of the diatribes you linked above, the story’s wake would find me deluged in (well-constructed) press kits (complete with CD and gig schedule) from bands with names like Durrrty Sanchez, Lil’ Skeeter and the BloozeDawgz or Deraynged, each followed up with a phone call from some tool in the 281 “reaching out” to me and then “circling back around” a few days later, trying to firm up that I would go see that band in some strip mall shithole on the corner of FM 1576 and Huffmeister-Kohrville Road or whatever. Trust me, Danny, I was punished thoroughly for writing those screeds.
However, some, but not all of the talented bands whine about you not covering them, when they have not so much as sent you a CD or asked you to come out to a show. That would piss me off to no end.
Houston badly needs artist manager / promoter types, liasons between the media and the musicians, shameless assholes with great ears and absolutely no dignity.
As for why this is such a staple of Houston rockCrit, it’s pretty simple. Writers would love to see one of the bands they cover make it for the simple reason that it’s exciting to be part of something successful.
And where’s the excitement in writing about a band that doesn’t really have any dreams of its own? How many times can you say “These guys are pretty good at being a local bar band and they won’t ever amount to much more than that because they don’t even want to, but this is honestly the best way to spend your Saturday night in a city of 5 million people?” and still fake-believe it, when not even the bands themselves dare to even pretend its true?
Jug O’Lightnin was a fucking great band without a clue about promoting themselves. Aaron Loesch could have been what Beck allegedly is, but he has such low self-esteem he actually believes he is a better mechanic than he is a musician. He shouldn’t have had to promote himself — he needed somebody in his corner to do that for him.
Linus — y’all rock totally and completely and even today its some of my favorite music to suicide-bike through Third Ward to. As a fan I love y’all’s disdain for the limelight, but as a critic and paid quasi-booster (or maybe I was more of a pseudo- or even anti-booster) of the scene it drove me nuts. Y’all should be a national treasure, not a Houston one.
And I won’t even get in to Haaga except to say that album only sounds better now than it did five years ago. I believe it will be rediscovered somehow, someway, by somebody, when people finally come to their senses about what in so many ways has been a lost decade for quality rock finding the wide audiences it deserved.
It’s been a decade of sizzle before steak, and the scenes that sizzle are the ones that have the people whispering hype and lies and genuine excitement about the bands to the critics and thence to the fans.
It’s been a decade of sizzle before steak, and the scenes that sizzle are the ones that have the people whispering hype and lies and genuine excitement about the bands to the critics and thence to the fans.
I don’t believe this for a second. There will be no steak and thinking there will be is nothing more than wishful. Don’t get me started about scenes because they are little more than group identification.
Linus, my vote for Houston’s best band for a number of reasons, is almost so self-contained as to be even smaller than a local treasure. That’s not meant as a slight, by the way. Beyond that, I can’t even imagine what “national” would even mean to them, because honestly, they do get national attention. It just isn’t as in your face as it could be – much like their local coverage.
The only issue I take with bands not promoting themselves as it relates to music critics is when they bitch about not being noticed but do nothing whatsoever to be noticed. Project Grimm and The Mike Gunn made little to no effort to be noticed and consequently never bitched about being ignored. That seemed idiotic. When we did get press attention (good or bad), I was always genuinely impressed, unless it was wishy-washy. I always preferred hatred over indifference.
I’m blathering. And worse, I have no stake in this anymore.
Sorry.
John, that attitude was more common than you might think. Worse, with the rise of the Internet, you would often find these bands talking shit about how you suck as a writer even though they never sent you their CD or told you about their CD release party. I think there are lots of bands that wanted write-ups not because it would help their career in any way, shape or fashion — I mean, not even bring out six more people to a midweek show at Rudyard’s — but merely b/c it would stroke their egos. If you have any illusions of being a real journalist, being treated like a publicist by bands like this was beyond irritating.
Justin: How did a bunch of bands from Omaha briefly all become famous in 2002-2004? Most of them totally sucked, but there was briefly some buzz about Omaha being the new Seattle and so on.
How do buzz bands emerge in this day and age? Why do so many bloggers unanimously praise the same three to six bands in any given year to the exclusion of hundreds or thousands of other equally to much more talented bands? I believe it has to be simply that those buzz bands have paid smart people to tout them to the right ears.
I’m not saying that buzz doesn’t lead to eventual break-out, I’m saying that for any given artist, that sort of popularity is not likely to ever happen. Operating under the delusion that one day all this low-level buzz is going to pay off is the sort of positive thinking nonsense that you could find in The Secret. Oprah may believe it, but I don’t.
Yes, bands from Omaha suddenly became semi-famous after Conor Oberst achieved his (criminally undeserved) fifteen minutes, just as in the wake of Nirvana, The Melvins suddenly found themselves on a major label. The stupid money in the music industry believed in scenes and thought it could go shopping for a piece of one in the hope of making the big score. If this were still true, there surely would have been a scene explosion in Houston after Beyoncé. These days people become popular on the internet and the internet is not a specific place. Without looking, can you tell me where OK Go is from? Are we to expect more meme-worthy YouTube videos from other Chicago bands? That’s something that the industry would have chased ten years ago, but the internet has largely deprecated the A&R man’s tenure as gatekeeper, so I wouldn’t expect much city-based scene plundering in the future.
I could never figure out why bloggers—or any music writers—all come to same conclusions. That’s a pretty complex dynamic which they themselves probably don’t understand. Though, I think it has much more to do with “cool” than it does with the whispers of shills.
I really admire your passion. I don’t envy the pressure and demands on any “local weekly” music editor by local bands. But on the local level, I don’t think success is defined by potential to be the next blog sensation, the next fly-by-night internet hit, or even potential to get signed to Asthmatic Kitty etc. The “Almost Famous” bug seems to infect a lot of music editors, but on the local level it really seems mis-directed.
On the local level, above any individual band dreams and goals, the thing to strive for is a good “scene” which I mean only in the most easily defined sense: good venues, good bands, and a reliable crowd. The crowd being the least diverse and most problematic issue in Houston. It might be wishful thinking, but I do feel a local weekly with a solid theme could positively affect the local scene. But it does seem in Houston, editorially things get off track pretty quick and nobody has locked into a theme and tried to make it work.
Recently, Houstonian turned Manhattan DJ, J Toubin sent out a plea to Houstonians to go see a couple of touring bands he likes. He wrote “be nice to the outta town folks for once.” This is actually a telling comment because it’s true that Houston’s scene is locally fixated to a fault. I fell victim to this myself. That hillbilly sentiment appears to be infectious. It gets turned on its own in the writing world but the main focus is off track –”hey world look at us. we’re doing it too!” Yeah. So. Just do it.
”hey world look at us. we’re doing it too!”
I hate this. Our new mayor went on “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me” recently and made a point to talk about how “international” Houston is, echoing previous mayors and their “world-class” boosterism. If you have to say it, it ain’t true.
The fact is, the only talented rock musicians who stay in Houston are either total slackers or kind of insane. Sometimes both. Why would you stay here with Austin a couple of hours away?
We are a little bit similar to Atlanta in that regard: a big metropolis too close to an idyllic little college town with for the good of its rock scene. Austin sucks out not just our musicians, but also huge numbers of the kids who should be at shows. Which brings up another problem here: there just aren’t enough artsy kids here compared to other cities this size.
I don’t mind Annise touting our cosmopolitanism on NPR. There are plenty of people who live here who don’t know shit about weird Houston ’cause so much of it is in unfashionable precincts outside the loop.
Why would you stay here with Austin a couple of hours away?
I know there’s a popular perception that Austin is somehow a better place to be for musicians, “live music capital of the world” and all, but the reality leaves a lot to be desired. There is municipal support for Austin’s musicians, but this basically translates into a couple streets with lots of bars that occasionally host live music. Sixth Street seems to be the exclusive domain of the tiresome blues-rock band (Awesome, they’re playing Credence again!), leaving three or so venues on Red River that actually have music I might be remotely interested in hearing. There are just as many venues in Houston that have this same distinction. I guess Houston’s venues aren’t all within walking distance of each other, but I fail to see the advantage that offers.
Not to mention the fact that Austin has a major band congestion problem. Yes, there are loads of bands playing, but on any given night, they’re all crammed into a relatively small section of town, so people can just wander around going into bars and getting drunk. Like Justin says, that’s the only advantage Austin has, and even then it seems like less of an advantage: why research what bands are playing that night and pick one that might really interest you (i.e. put in some effort) when you could just go down to 6th street and walk around?
It seems to me that Austin has a huge music scene, but the hugeness of it just serves to obscure its participants further; talented musicians would have to shine that much brighter to be noticeable in such a morass of bands, and even then, you’re relying a great deal more on blind luck in garnering an audience of any size.
As you say Charlie, those arguments could be used for either side of the discussion. I say that those are problems to have. The local scene should be solid enough that a live-music fan doesn’t have to do any research – just go out and see what one finds because one has found that it’s a pretty reliable, diverse scene. There’s always people out, the venues have good beer and the bands are generally pretty good.
The more competition the better. To get those cherished gigs (at venues where you know somebody is going to see you), you have to really work at your craft. You realize you’re not so special –everybody is doing it (this is a good thing). The more variety in close quarters the better too. This sort of mix and consistency brings all kinds of people out of all ages. A culture is built that is more accepting of music variety. You might say you’d rather be in a town where it’s not so hard to get a gig, but then you might also be in a town where nobody goes out to gigs either.
Well, the thing is though, I’ve been in Austin, and largely found what Justin found… sure, everything was in walking distance, but as none of it particularly stood out to me, it was fairly overwhelming in terms of always wondering if something was better at the next bar over, but not wanting to pay two dozen cover charges to find out. For me, the venues in Houston being farther apart from one another means I’m likely to go to one place and just stay there, so I better know that I’m going to like what I find there. Sure, once I know a band by name and know what I think of it, that’ll make the decision easier, but it also means when I go somewhere, I’m much more likely to be committed to the evening’s music because I know to go somewhere else means not only paying another cover charge, but having to drive there and find parking. Don’t get me wrong: I prefer Houston’s way. Every time I go to Austin, even leaving aside the fact that most of the music doesn’t do it for me, it’s just frustrating. It might be easier if I knew more of the bands in Austin, so maybe it’s the fact that I’m not more integrated with that scene than I am, so perhaps that’s skewing my perception of it; if I lived in Austin and kept up with the scene, maybe it wouldn’t seem to huge and unmanageable. Then again, maybe if someone came to Houston, they wouldn’t be able to find a show at all. It’s hard to say since I’ve only really got the one perspective. Certainly in Houston if you’ve been around long enough, you know what to expect from certain venues in the sorts of bands they book, so you have the consistency you’re talking about. Quality of course is another matter, but that’s also very subjective. While I’ve found a greater quantity of bands to be found in a smaller area in Austin, I’ve found it to be overload, and relatively speaking, a smaller percentage of it was appealing to me.
I will say though that the “really work at your craft” comment brought to mind one of my biggest problems with Austin, and pretty much any place where there’s a possibility of “making it”: many (though certainly far from all) of the bands I’ve heard from Austin sound a little too crafted for me. I actually prefer the somewhat off-the-rack feel of Houston music. It seems to me that the pervasive fatalistic notion that no one ever “makes it” in Houston has benefited the city’s music scene immeasurably. This attitude that no one gives a shit anyway leads to a lot more adventurous music and risk-taking, as well as a great deal more cross-pollination between bands since few people feel any sort of need to remain in some way loyal to their band by not forming other bands and collaborating in side projects more. I don’t really know how much that sort of thing occurs in Austin, outside of the many bands that Scott Telles is/was involved in (ST 37, Bahrain, etc.), but I’ve never gotten a strong impression that band memberships were as fluid there as they are here. I think some might call that greater focus, but of course I enjoy the fluidity, so I’d see it less positively. And again, I could be totally wrong. But I do think that while there are loads of Houston musicians who really work at their craft, I also think there are loads of Austin musicians who perhaps overdo it in that area, but of course that’s a matter of personal taste.
As usual, posting from work causes me to post pretty haphazardly. The more I think about it, the more I realize it really is personal taste, and very subjective. In my experience many (though again, not nearly all) Austin bands have realized the possibilities for success in the place they’re at, and have honed their craft and all that to such a degree that it sounds technically perfect, and the time and effort put into it have rendered the band members very serious about what they do. For some reason, I find technical perfection and taking yourself very seriously to be fairly anathema to the kind of music I really like, so of course it doesn’t speak to me when I’m exposed to bands like that, and for whatever reasons, the particular sub-scenes I’ve aligned myself to in Houston don’t really do those things.