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Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

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  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: On Durham and identity
  • Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 11:20:21 -0400

How do you get touring bands to choose Durham?

1) secretly arrange it so that the Cradle & 506 are both already booked on the night when they want to come to town
2) get the Coffeehouse to agree to pay a guarantee that no other club could afford to match

I'm not even really joking about either of those, nor am I joking when I say that Frank Heath has right of first refusal for the vast majority of midlevel touring acts. It's a known fact, and you can ask any clubowner who has tried to compete in that space.

But this leads to your second point. I would argue, from my admittedly somewhat skewed perspective, that anything that fuels a vibrant local music scene is a good thing, and that a vibrant local music scene should in fact be the end goal. In some towns, venues pay the bills with big sellout out of town shows, and then contribute to the health of the scene by hosting local shows that don't necessarily turn a profit. Sometimes all they want is to break even on such shows, since that keeps the bartender employed, and helps a little towards the rent, which is the same amount whether you have 4 shows a month or 24 shows a month.

In other towns, the venues who wind up supporting local music are restaurants, or pubs, or co-op spaces, or laundromats, or record stores, or anyplace where having live music a few nights a week can help to augment the income from other sources, attract more people to the core business, or just generally make life a little more interesting.

I grew up in a town where it was much more the latter than the former, and I've always been partial to the latter. I'm one of those socialist goofs who believes that expecting an arts scene to be profitable on its own kinda takes some of the fun out of it.

See also this column in this week's Indy: http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A62757

Setting aside the fact that it's easier to make rent when you're doing more than just selling beer & music for 5 hours a night, think about how many different constituencies overlap & rub up against each other when the rock music happens in a restaurant, or a store, or wherever else. In a bike co-op, for example.

I guess this is a roundabout way of not getting around to arguing that people should worry first about making music for themselves & for their neighbors, and if folks from outta town want to make the trek over, then that's nice, but it can't be relied upon nor worried about.

We crack wise sometimes about bands and their tours of the Triangle (Hem of His Garment are in the middle of one of those right now), but isn't that sort of the best of all possible worlds? You get the exotic experience of traveling to another city to play in front of a crowd of strangers who just stare at you, but you still get to go home & sleep in your own bed.

James Hepler wrote:
Seems more like a band that draws big but
seldom plays the Triangle would have to choose Durham
over Chapel Hill or Raleigh. The question becomes,
how do you get THEM to choose Durham?

That's assuming one wants Durham to move beyond a
handful of venues that serve Durham almost
exclusively.




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