Caught in the Carousel

Re-Make, Re-Model

By Chris Stroffolino

What's a studio musician gossip column?

Well, from the perspective of a more regular scenester, show-goer, a studio musician gossip column may tend to make a mountain out of a molehill...

Like, "Wow, can you believe I got to see the woman who wrote 'Windy' in a little club in San Francisco?" Or, "Wow, Sierra Frost of The Downer Party knows Barry McGuire" (I forget if he was a friend of the family or actually in the family). Or, "My roommate met Rustee Allen, (the bassist on 'If You Want Me To Stay') at Laney. Or, "Wow, Jay Whiteside, my drummer last year totaled his car on his way to visit Sky Saxon..."

The hippest places in town in the last several years rolled out the red-carpet for folks like Roy Head, Biff Rose, John Doe, and Bob Lind.These names stick in my head more, coz I heard their names in my formative years and perhaps coz I developed the New Yorker's love of national celebrity culture...

The Bay Area's music celebrity culture, on the other hand, well, I don't feel qualified to make any authoritative statement, And, why, because I've become a studio musician gossip columnist-S.F. may not be much of a walking city like NYC, but living in the Mission was (and probably still is) amazing, coz it was much easier to meet musicians, get offered gigs and even find a DJ or record label—sometimes just by walking down the street. But, when you leave, if you don't come to the Mission, it won't come to you (kinda like NYC that way).

I'm kind of sad because Nick Tangborn is going away—

Nick Tangborn

I met Nick Tangborn when I first got involved with the Mission-centric (it always felt like the Make Out Room/Latin American Club). Outside, holding court, cigarette and tall, talking about Dan Penn (or some of the other legendary folks his label put "tribute albums" together for—Joe South, Kris Kristofferson, etc.) He also turned me on to many local musicians, and introduced me to quite a few. His record label strived to live up to its only semi-ironic name of being a "social club," as he helped launch many a local act, most notably Kelley Stoltz.

He brought many different people together, and had an authority in his taste in music that seemed to have a lot to do with creating a scene that for me was the heart of my Mission music year (2003-04), a scene which still ends up being a little more under the radar in terms of the national media than other recent bay area music trends...

Trying to pin down the central qualities of Nick's scene is probably a doomed endeavor, but there was a vaguely "alt country" aspect to it at the inception, but it rapidly moved into a deeper sense of redneck roots, and the eccentric loner genius child "pub rock" (say England, '75) was in there too—definitely not freak folk, definitely not punk, or new-wave synth; not "cute," perhaps a little older demographically (at least when I jumped in); but not too earnest singer/songwriter, either—throw in a little "power-pop" guitar riffage, and a dab of prog minimalist Moe Tucker-esque trance grooves, and make allowances for the ragged beauty of the bar band that got away (and occasional appearances by older luminaries such as Jonathan Richman) and you got a pretty cool scene (even if the relative lack of poseurs may deceive you into believing there's less glamour)...

(I was half-hearted about the culinary metaphor; so I let it stand...)

Okay, I'm not sad for Nick. Maybe it'll finally be the excuse for me to drag my ass to Austin (though any time but during SXSW!—don't hold me to that)...

But I felt this sadness as I looked at the large crowd in the audience of his going away party. Yeah, maybe I'm just projecting. But I felt, uh, Who's gonna fill the void now that Nick's gone?!

And then, after a deep breath, I asked myself; "Well, does it really matter? Come on, Chris, you haven't even been making the S.F. (as opposed to the Oakland) scene much since your bike accident like 5 years ago, so who are you to complain about it not getting together..."

And then I get all nostalgic for Philadelphia, circa 1989 (is it a coincidence that both booker Todd Cote, and musician Tom Heyman, were in Philly during this time?) when the local college station and 'zines clearly directed the newcomer to the heart of the most vital music in Philly.

Well, I get nostalgic for the '80s in general...(but leave that for another time...)

Maybe we can get Nick to write in about the successes he had running a record label with very little capital in an unsupportive environment, but in the meantime the uncertainty in the American economy psyche, and a top-heavy record industry, in which vinyl is making a comeback as retailers go out of business, conditions are changing so fast that Nick's model for the record label social club would be considered obsolete.

But fuck that! That's like saying hope is obsolete.

hope

Sometimes I fear I act (talk, write, or sing) way more like a "militant" than I am in social situations, but I know the Bay Area music scene could be a hell of a lot better.

So I have this plan, but I have no money to act on it so I need to get others involved with it coz I'm extremely enthusiastic about it and that can be draining, to play the role of the enthusiast, but hey, I'm the kind of guy who can't promote myself UNLESS I feel I'm promoting something bigger than myself...And, yeah, the Bay Area scene seems worth fighting for but there's no way I can do it alone...

Like, here's one little idea—(to get the brainstorming started...) I will ask Rob Greenhill (a.k.a. The Duke Of Windsor), a DJ with a good following in the Oakland (underground) scene, to hold a contest; To get local bands to submit one or two of their songs and the winner will get his song played every time the Duke DJs, between his Animals and Small Faces, etc. In this case the live DJ will help break the new song—especially since many of the college DJs have abnegated that responsibility.

Duke of Windsor

If Rob says no, someone else will say yes...(or at least HERE! NOW!)

In the Bay Area, there are more than enough great musicians, and great songs being made, to make up the majority of the playlist of a local 24/7 radio station (there would be talk programming as well); the focus first and foremost will be on edgy, rocking music (or quirky, melodic pop that doesn't get played on commercial stations). The station will have commercial aspirations. We will try to establish firm connections to various locally owned businesses and offer them more glamour (for those who need video, it could be a video station, too-web only, what have you).

The DJs on this staff will also be community celebrity DJs (like the Duke of Windsor); musicians can DJ, and no charges of conflict of interest will be made if they play their own music! (In fact, we will grill them severely, if they don't play their own music, because we will consider them disingenuous; if we thought their music sucked, we would never have asked them to be on our station anyway.)

A new club must open (and it must not be underground, because we need shameless self-promotion), that is also a record store. Or, a new record store must open that is also a dance club. It can be called either, and MUST be called both (in ads and such), if its experiment in social combining is to have any chance at success. A dance club that has live bands as well as DJs, but the live bands are more like the football team and the DJ more like the marching band at halftime.

I like the IDEA of Brainwash café (if not the kind of music so much)—a club in a Laundromat, because right now we need to create venues for music that are not just "business as usual" rock, or other, music venues...Record stores seem sterile to too many people, alas.

A REAL record store that is also a café!

record store cafe

Food (and coffee) is even more of a basic necessity than nightclub. For that matter, live music at hardware stores—at least consider the possibilities. SI SE PUEDA, etc. DARME EL PODER (Molotov; Google it!) Back in the heyday of the music industry, it was coz SEARS had a really good record section (the downtown department store was the retail equivalent of the variety, of say, "The Ed Sullivan Show": Beatles for the kiddies, elephant tricks for the folks, and ladies lingerie 8th floor.).

(One of the possible advantages to this sinking economy is that it's getting people to think, "What was so wrong with one-stop shopping, and living near where we work, anyway?")

Musicians will donate their songs at first to a video that will also serve as an advertisement for a local business. This will be strictly barter arrangement at first; both WILL benefit. What will be robbed is the GLOBALIZED, syndicated, outside corporations that had themselves already robbed our local scene of self-determination and autonomy—it will help bring music closer to its original pact with the other non-musical industries (singing for your supper, whistling while you work)...

Not that we can totally avoid it; I'm not that crazy...

And, don't forget, I think that those who go out on the town and those who prefer to listen to records and radios alone in the room or iPod selfhood are way too segregated from each other—it's like it's two simultaneously culturally different times. Nothing against the great touring acts, but it's not like it has to be charity (like the way GM is disingenuously trying to push "buy American") to find a great local band; adopt a local band today.

Bring manufacturing back to America, and to Oakland.

Or at least get that Cereal Factory (the actual cereal factory) to make boxes of cereal with the pictures of the bands who've played at The Cereal Factory (the venue across the street from the Cereal Factory; Google it!); this is called the commercial tie-in—fighting the fire of SHREK FROOT LOOP ICE CREAM T-SHIRTS with a more insistent, wholesome, local entrepreneurial fire.

Yep, you might say, I gots me a lot of convincing to do...

Straggler notes...
(Yeah, if payola tipped the balance for airplay for two records of equal strength in 1975, when the ratio of SUPPLY of music and DEMAND for music was far more on the DEMAND side than it is now, imagine how strong a collective grassroots music corporation is going to have to be to compete with payola and "music industry" lobbyists today...

America may be a democracy, but clearly the abstraction called "the music industry" isn't. Yet, we could make it a democracy, don't ya think? All those damn teabaggers, well, had they gone against "the music industry" on the grounds that, yes, indeed, the music industry is guilty of "taxation without representation"...