Bands and Bikes Not Bombs

The Bands part is outside Lifelink Church (formerly Galloway Church), a favorite Memphis place for me.

Memphis Pops Tonight and Tomorrow

More details about the great lineup this week's Flyer.

Tomorrow night the Warble play. Until the ArtsMemphis Our Vibe, Our City, On Film competition I'd never heard of the Warble but ended up voting for their film, the Warble Atelier,


which came in second. Along the way, I also discovered this video.


Showmen.

Progress of the Shell

A few shots taken over the past 2 months.

Early March:



Early April:



Early May:

Music and Protest May 3rd

At 2:00 p.m. Saturday May 3, Dan Montgomery (singer/songwriter), Antique Curtains (punk), Giant Bear (roots rock), and The Third Man (post-rock) will all take part in a free outdoor music event near the grounds of the National Civil Rights Museum in downtown Memphis to commemorate the fifth anniversary of George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" event on the USS Abraham Lincoln.

Each band will be mixing their own original material--including some songs written specifically for this occasion!--with "classic" protest songs (Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger, even some Springsteen, et al.)

The event is be co-promoted by our friends at the Midsouth Peace and Justice Center (midsouthpeace.org.) This event is FREE and open to the public, so please join us.

Drum Circle of Overton Park

Part of the vitality of Overton Park noted by John Branston. Part of the Creator Class noted by John Seely Brown.

Crossing

Is Gonerfest the creative intersection of networks and place?

The Conversation Has (Long) Begun

In their series of articles about Memphis music, Smart City Memphis stated that we need "a new conversation about our music future".

How's this for a conversation? Or the conversation, What (if anything) can local government do to improve the local arts scene?, which included these words from Col Bat Guano:

First of all, and more important than anything, make sure there's good music and art instruction in the public schools.

The city should make it attractive for artists to live here. It's already cheap to live here, mostly because no one wants to live here. This is usually good for artist types, who tend to be either very poor or very rich. The fashionable way for governments to encourage businesses to locate in a city is tax breaks. If you want to encourage musicians to live here, why not waive sales tax on musical instruments bought within the city limits? As part of their downtown revitalization project, Knoxville renovated an old building and made very cheap studio space available. Why not do something similar here, and include band practice space, too? Didn't there used to be a concert series in Court Square? Bring that back, and make sure it pays the bands. Have weekly shows in the Overton Park Shell and other parks around town. And we should have three times as many local acts at the Beale Street Music Festival. None of this sounds very expensive to me, in the big picture of city funding.

Since the problem cited in the study on Smart City Memphis study was that we had practically no music industry, the city should offer the same kinds of economic incentives they would offer, say, the worst professional basketball team in the Western Hemisphere. Since the music industry is currently pretty broken, I don't really know how to do that and make it work. But my guess is that labels will be smaller and cater to more and more specific niches. And, of course, promote themselves on the internet. This also has the advantage of promoting entrepreneurship and all that other free market claptrap that opens the public purse like a prostitute's pubis. Maybe FedEx could be convinced, with the help of city, to offer free or greatly-discounted shipping to record labels and distributors. It would actually be pretty good PR for FedEx if hip young people got FedEx packages full of music.

And decriminalize marijuana.

A good example of the Goner message boards' honest quality. The intelligence, irreverence and give and take are the equal of Slashdot, as good as it gets, imho.

Memphis Music Turned On

Sometime in the past week, the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission website came back on line. It's new and very simple: a great new logo that links to their myspace presence.

Very simple is very good -- it will probably be easier to maintain and to have dynamic and inclusive content using myspace than by building a massive website upfront. Later they can move to a more completely branded site (which they can probably start doing now in myspace). In the meantime, their present setup gives them the power to easily communicate the breadth of Memphis Music stories without overwhelming them in geekery and costing them much/anything.

They'll still need content, but honoring King Content should be much easier now.

As for the old site, I'm still not sure why it was down -- perhaps it was due to the parting of the Commission and the Memphis Music Foundation.

Moving forward, it's a good yet simple step from the original site. And much, much better than dead air.

Someone turn on Memphis Music!

The web presence for the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission and Memphis Music Foundation has been down for over a week. A week!

I called them a week ago to tell them it was down. There was nobody there No one answered, so I left a message.

Big friggin' deal, you say. I say, yes, big friggin' deal.

Do a web search for "Memphis music".

• If you search Google, the first hit you get is that website (the second is Live from Memphis).
• If you search Yahoo, it's the third hit (behind 2 pages of the CVB).

If organizations that have financial support from the City, the County and Memphis Tomorrow can't keep a simple website running, all the press releases and fundraising and branding and marketing in the world will not make them even a local player in a digital, connected world. And they make Memphis laughable if we ordain them leaders.

Often missed as we dash between the brother poles of press release hype and disfunked reality -- Memphis' creativity.

Update: Slight correction. When I called the Foundation/Commission, I got their voice mail. They may have been there. I don't know.

Sam Phillips Center for Independent Music: Where?

I don't know how far they have gotten with the Sam Phillips Center for Independent Music, but my hope is that they will put it in a storefront in a busy and diverse part of Memphis. The website mentions that the Center will be in partnership with the University of Memphis, which is great, as long as they don't bury it on the campus somewhere.

The Highland Strip would be good. It's near the campus but still part of the greater community with lots of foot traffic. If Newby's hadn't expanded into it, the neighborhood movie house would have been an excellent location, since converted neighborhood movie houses have a great history in Memphis music. But certainly there's a place that the Center could use very well on the Strip.

The talented children of Memphis should see the Center, so they can dream. And they should walk in, so they can begin the dream.

It shouldn't be an institution that exists to fundraise and issue press releases. It should be a Center of creation.

Update: cannot establish a connection to Memphis Music! As fearlessvk comments, the links above, which point to the Memphis Music Foundation/Music Commission's website http://www.memphismusic.org, are unavailable. Their website has been unreachable for 2 days. I called them yesterday to let them know, if they didn't already know, and got an an answering machine. Left a message "uh, your website is down".

A day and a half later it still is. 'Til it becomes available, here's the Google cached copy of the page.

Memphis Music Commission Meets Media 2.0 (Maybe)

The Memphis Flyer reports that the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission has joined MySpace. A small thing, but a good thing.

A Memphis Music Foundation¹ project mentioned last year was a digital music initiative. They had budgeted it at $750,000. $750,000! They could host an mp3 by every man, woman and child in Tennessee for that much money. There's no reason to spend that much on a website. The software's cheap if not free and you can use the branding from your existing website on your digital music website. This will cost money, but not $750,000.

Luckily, the thing that prevented them from spending that much money was the lack of that much money.

MySpace and its Web 2.0 brethren don't cost, or cost much. And they're easy to use -- you don't need staff to do it unless you can't write.

We might be poor but we're not stupid.

¹Frankly, I can't tell the difference between the Music Commission and the Music Foundation. I might be unfairly commingling them here.