Three years of publishing behind us, and now begins the fourth year, and guess what…we’re still not taken seriously!
There’s one little, tight, intractable knot of music scene insiders who are never going to forgive us for not being one of them doing this, and/or not covering their agenda exclusively – but the majority of the paper’s readership don’t even know who these people are.
Part of the problem is the people who are most persistent about launching a viable music scene cannot see beyond Laurel Street (a reference to the Oregon Hill crowd that sat in the Laurel Street bars all night) or will not admit that there is something worth listening to other than what they’re doing.
We’ve been guilty of that, too. We haven’t attracted any writers interested in classical music, hip hop, blues, jazz, R&B, or even the Grace Street scene.
I suspect every year I’ll see “the official paper of the Richmond music scene” suddenly come into existence before Route One South (a citywide music festival that lasted only two or three years where all the clubs in the city hosted a night of three or four different bands – we tried to be South by Southwest but failed) and disappear immediately after. This year’s official paper’s “special music issue” consisted of one article on how cool the ‘80s punk music scene was. Other papers work on the principle that any unknown touring band from out of town is of more interest than a local band. Add an article on skateboarding, surfing or roller blading, and that’s the formula for local music newspapers.
It’s a lot of work to do even a half-assed paper, and it makes no money and gets less thanks.
It requires just being into it. It’s like the musicians I know who work in restaurants all their lives, washing dishes or cooking because all they really want to do is play unbookable jazz fusion and they can’t make a living doing that. I understand. Newspapers are my jazz fusion. I’ve had seven different unrelated day jobs since I started the paper and need another one now.
The other thing about longevity in a single topic newspaper is burn-out. After three years of going out four nights a week or more, week after week, year after year, you’ve seen it all. You write about a band once and if nothing dramatic happens with them, there’s nothing left to say. Bands ask when am I going to come see them again? Or I came to a show, but a new review didn’t appear in the next paper. What do you write after you’ve written it all?
You get new eyes, that’s what. This year I actively sought new writers to recover ground we’ve already covered and find new bands. The results were mixed. One ad produced six volunteers, all of them wanting press passes to see Neurosis at the Biograph, a band that took an ad out to promote their show and CD and paid me in tickets. A month later, I still haven’t received a write-up from any of those people. Not one!
But we keep trying.
Some writers made extraordinary efforts. John Church makes long distance calls at his own expense to get press passes to touring acts so he’s in the photo pool at the front of the stage. Killer Montone, even after moving to Tennessee, continued to review local music. I’d mail him a bag full of tapes and get them back a week later with thoughtful, well-written evaluations attached.
I also owe a gratitude to the big three: Richmond Music Center, Don Warner Music and Metro Sound Company, independently owned instrument dealers who gave me a piece of their advertising budget to wage war against each other, with intermittent sniper fire from Backstage, Second Street Guitar and A Major Music. (Sam Ash and Guitar Center came to town during the last years of the paper and wiped them all out except for Metro Sound, and they did no local advertising.)
Moondance has been a reliably supportive venue from the beginning, matching their commitment to local music. Lost Sock, a laundromat, advertised a long time. In Your Ear was the first recording outlet to run a series of ads.
I can always depend on Friedman’s Loan Office (a pawn shop where musicians worked), the Red Light Inn (topless bar) or Absolute Art tattoo parlor to buy a small ad if I came by and asked. Plan 9 often placed an ad even though they had their own publication.
The band High Roller made us a regular part of their promotional budget when they launched. (They had day jobs.) It wasn’t easy to convince bands we were as good as a free telephone pole for getting the word out.
For all the businesses that made it possible to print the paper, there were a few who made it a nightmare. A club called Dakota’s still owes me $40 and were rude about it. Another Shockoe Bottom club owed me $7.50 for the smallest ad, and it took me three months of dropping in on them to collect it.
Still, I was encouraged by a devoted core of readers somewhere. I could tell by the way the message line would start ringing around the time the paper was due out, checking for my recorded greeting confirming the new issue was on the street.
And I could tell by the way the comments and complaints started pouring in during the 48 hours after the paper came out. It was being picked up right away, read and evaluated, condemned and adored with equal fervor. And the haters were the first ones to grab them up, eager to hate it every month.
Every anniversary of the paper, I write how ungrateful the music scene is, how incredibly helpful some writers and advertisers have been, how crazy and amusing our readers are, and how my personal disasters make me wonder how long I will be able to keep this up. (The “personal disaster” that eventually caused me to end the paper was I got married and got a full-time day job on a weekly community paper).
In 1996, I was beaten and robbed in Shockoe Bottom in front of the train station, which left me still reluctant, a year later, to be on the street trying to get home after midnight. So many bands persisted on going on stage at 12:30 a.m. to a third of the audience they could have had at 10:30, just to say they “headlined.”
The summer of ’96, I was hit by a car crossing the street in Carytown. Virginia is a contributary negligence state, so there was no settlement since I wasn’t in the crosswalk. With my arm in a cast, I was not a suitable front desk person for the personal injury attorney I was working for (her practice depended on convincing people to stay out of work as long as possible to increase the settlement, as her 33 percent), so I lost that job and its medical insurance and went through a long, financially devastating period of unemployment. (On the upside, I had to ask the man I had only been dating a few months if he would move in with me and cover the rent – he had a job – and he did, and five years later, we were married.)
I ended the article hoping that in November 1997, I would write another one. (And I did.) And hoping Eddie Van Halen would let David Lee Roth back in the band. (He did, briefly).
