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How's the club scene in your town?


Lee Flier

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Washington DC. Getting better constantly. Felt like a wasteland to me a few years back, and quite likely I was just missing all the good stuff, but now there are two new venues opening that we're all expecting to be pretty decent places (one of which will be an all-ages place, which we really lack) and I'm hearing more good bands lately than I have in the past.

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In my town it's so overbooked you can catch Carlos Santana at the Everett auditorium.

 

The only act you can't catch here in the next couple of months is Ashley Simpson.

 

:D:D:D:D

 

This here town is drowning in music.

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Ours is alright in Houston. Are town loves original and cover music. As long as is gets the place movin', they like it. Getting gigs is kind of easy, really easy if you know the right people. Our original music scene is good for bands, but the music is not that great. Most working original bands in Houston are either screamo metal or emo 'punk' BS. It gets tiring for my band because we don't fit in these catagories so we have few band friends we can do shows with.

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We're at the beach and there are alot of small clubs, its really a pretty good scene. We're established in this area so we stay fairly busy but the same clubs that we play are always giving the new bands a chance.

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I live in Detroit ROCK City, so.......EVERYONE'S in a band. if you are in a good band, however, it can become competitive to get into the big clubs...pay toplay situations where the band must sell 60 $12 tix to step on stage without even a national act booked on the bill.

 

if you have a following, you survive and move on to make Kid Rock money...if not, ya sink to the bottom of Lake Erie.

 

 

:(

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Kansas City...hmmmm....

 

A lot of blues clubs. A lot of blues bands. And blues snobs. Yes, there are blues snobs...the kind of people who can sit there and say they've got an original Chess pressing of some dead guy hardly anyone has ever heard of. Which is fine...but...

 

Then there's a bit of a rock scene, which is cool...but probably a bit young for my taste.

 

My problem is, although I love blues, I don't JUST love blues. I like a lot of different stuff. And although I'm probably primarily a blues guitarist, the stuff I write usually doesn't even remotely resemble blues.

 

Then you get to the fringes of town where they like BOTH kahnds o' music, country AND western.

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Pretty bloody aweful here in South Oz. Just about every pub has poker machines which, in a nut shell, killed off live music when they were introduced around '96. There seems to be quite a number of venues available for duo's but not four or five piece rock bands. :(

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If you ask ten New York players what the rock scene in NYC is like you'll probably get ten different answers.

 

I've been playing lower Manhattan clubs since the seventies, and it's basically the same crap just a bit smaller and meaner.

 

There are still a number of clubs to play but most of them don't have a built in crowds like clubs used to have, whoever your band gets in the room is all the people that are going to see you. There just isn't as much youth culture or interest in live music to support all the bands that are knocking around New York. It's hard for a band to make any dough doing original material (which is what I still do). And most bookers don't try to match up bands that are similar.

 

But I think the crowds are way more forgiving than they were years ago, it seems NYC crowds will accept any horrible crap onstage and be really sweet about it, which is cool with me. Back in the punk seventies we would boo just about anyone for just about anything. I generally think bands tend to be nicer and more supportive then they were years ago.

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Originally posted by Lee Flier

So, where do you live, and how's the gigging scene there? What kinds of bands are the most popular, and it is fairly easy to get gigs, very cutthroat, a lot of diversity in the musical styles or very little?

 

 

The music scene in Baltimore SUCKS!!!

 

The clubs generally suck and don't pay sh!t.

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Austin is pretty good... the pay sucks, and it's hard to build a buzz and draw a good crowd, 'cause there's so much competition, but it's friendly competition, and the fact that *I* can go see great music so often outweighs the fact that it's sometimes hard for my band to draw bigger crowds and really progress.

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Well, I don't play clubs w/ my trio (they don't pay enough, frankly), but I sub on lead or bass w/ several other bands and essentially in the FW/D area, you've got your C&W bars where everybody is expected to sound like the flavor-of-the-month and blues bars where everyone wants to be Stevie Ray Vaughn so bad that they just can't stand it!

 

Very few straight-ahead rock clubs anymore, even less jazz clubs...but Karaoke still reigns supreme!

 

Oh, and hip-hop/rap is still doing as well as can be expected.

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Northern Michigan's music scene is limping along. Enough dedicated live music venues to keep a variety of bands working, but lots of competition between bnds for those venues. Lots of places turning to DJ / karaoke because the cost is less.

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It easy to be a big fish in a small pond out here. There's only about a half million people in the whole state so you will have to travel a lot. Compt rooms are a must for most gigs. Before my heart surgery we were hustling up between 80 and 90 a year, covering Wyoming and parts of Montana. That

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Only one actual nightclub in town that does live music, except you can't get in to play there unless you're from Minneapolis (over 250 miles away). The owner makes a big deal in his advertising about "Band X from Minneapolis!" which sucks for the local scrappers.

 

Other than that:

 

Four or five local bar/restaraunts (family type) that have 2-3 local acts a week - mainly college rock, jazz, blues.

 

A few "blue-collar" bars that have music (hard rock/cover bands) every weekend.

 

Two coffee shops that host the ocassional acoustic duo/trio

 

Three karaoke nights per week at three different places.

 

Really there's not a lot of competition from DJ's unless you're looking to book private gigs. There has been a welcome trend around here going toward live music, but most of the live bands are self-proclaimed emo/screamo and their audience is of the non-paying type (read: teenagers) so they play the free weekend hey-let's-book-seven-bands-tonight gigs at the local VFW.

 

I'm booked at least 2-3 nights a week with 2 different bands until the end of September - this isn't counting the music directing at the local theatre company. The competition is stiff, but it mainly comes in the form of price undercutting, you know - the "we'll play for exposure" types. The good news is that the one solid jazz venue we had has been supplemented by another and the owner may not get away with paying us beans anymore.

 

For a town of 50,000 that is eseentially an island for 70 miles in any direction (in a state that's shrinking) it's not too bad here... for now.

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The Boston area is pretty good. It's got almost as much variety as NYC...classical, jazz, reggae, folk, rock, blues...C&W is the only thing that's weak around here (though once you get into more rural areas of New England there's some). This is real good news if you have diverse tastes like I do.

 

The scenes for each genre are constantly changing, I've seen plenty of up and down cycles over the 25 years I've been here.

 

The city itself is a good hub for working throughout the Northeast. You can be in Portland, ME in under 2 hours, Hartford , CT in 90 minutes, Providence RI in an hour and NYC itself is only 4 hours away.

 

Club pay is lousy for most original rock and jazz gigs, cover bands can do well and out of town gigs often pay more. I've played gigs in town for $30 a man and taken the exact same band to a club in the burbs for $100 a man. The real money as always is in what they call GB (general business) up here...weddings, functions, private parties.

 

There's a good support system here for musicians...lots of music stores, recording studios, public/college radio airplay, newspaper coverage, etc.

 

I actually moved here from CT for the music scene and am glad I did.

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Bellingham is in the crapper right now. By the end of the year, both of the good rock clubs will have shut down. You can play Tool and Sublime covers at the frat bar, or you can play at one of the blues clubs, or I suppose if you're a cover band, you can still do okay.

 

I just moved to Seattle, and you can see a great band any night of the week. Good luck trying to get a show, though.

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I'm up in Northern Los Angeles County and have been working steady for the last couple of years. I play in a bunch of differnt bands in the area, mostly at bars, clubs, and service organiztions (Moose lodges, VFW's, etc.) The money is not great (usually anywhere from $50 to $100/man depending on the venue and size of the band), but it's pretty consistent. Every once in a while I'll pick up a private party paying some real money ($250+/man), but those are few and far between.

 

Every band I'm in is a cover band, whether it's covering oldies, classic rock, C & W, or German polkas. I don't have time to go out and hear many other bands since I'm always working, but I don't think there's too much in the way of original music in my area.

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