No License, No Music

UPDATE 5/20: According to Knockout partner dX the former Friday night Jay ‘n Bee Club record hop will be moving there on Sundays.  The Knockout already has two related shows: “Lonely Teardrops” every second Sunday which features vinyl-spinning DJ’s and live bands, and the all-vinyl “Shuckin’ & Jivin’” every fourth Sunday which features DJ Dr. Scott and Jay & Bee DJ Okie Oran, so it will be easy to roll everything into regular Sunday shows.  The good news is that this opens the door to live music along with the DJs.  The bad news is that, being a school night, it will be missed by those who were coming to Jay ‘n Bee from as far as San Jose and Santa Cruz.

ORIGINAL POST 5/9: DJs Tanoa “Samoa Boy,” Okie Oran, Sergio Inglesias and Rockin’ Raul Castro had a good thing going with their Friday night rotation at the Jay ‘n Bee Club on the Potrero side of SF’s Mission district, but all that has changed as of Friday, May 7th after The City’s music police dropped by to remind the club that it needed a cabaret license for DJed events.   The club is in a quiet neighborhood and a window rattling birthday bash held the weekend before likely prompted complaints to City Hall.

Knowing they’re onto a good thing, the DJs are looking to set up shop elsewhere.  Places like Club Waziema, near The Independent on Divisadero; or Homestead, formerly the Welsh bar Dylan’s, at 19th and Folsom are about the size and environment they want.

Turning to radio news, Hicks with Sticks and KALX are looking into another Why Baby, Why local music showcase in June.  Why Baby, Why is the station’s weekly Americana show that doesn’t have a regular DJ.  KALX’s twang-friendly Meaty Paws reserves a Why Baby, Why slot for new, local releases about once each year.  Airplay for any band isn’t guaranteed and HWS has most of the current releases, but one guarantee is that we can’t play what we don’t have, so if a band has something that HWS doesn’t then it is welcome to get in touch.

Whiskey, Sun Records and “good things come in threes” are American icons (or clichés) so imagine the Whiskey Richards, Real Sippin’ Whiskeys and Whiskey Pills Fiasco, playing at an alcohol recovery center near you.  As for Sun, artwork from recent releases by Porkchop Express, The B Stars and the Whiskey Richards (scoring a double!) tells the story.

At issue is the concept of secondary liability for enabling copyright infringement.   Sites like IsoHunt do not store files, copyrighted or otherwise, but they do provide connectivity between strangers who share copyrighted movies, music, software applications  as well as non-copyrighted information.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which is the guardian of copyrights for the movie industry, and IsoHunt are at the center of the fray.  The party of the first part has sued the party of the second part for being enablers of a world-wide file sharing party among parties of the third part.  The MPAA won but exactly what they won isn’t very clear because our court system needs to split hairs into tinier parts.

Part one, which IsoHunt is appealing, was a shut down order to disconnect the site’s p2p connections (trackers) as of April 5th.  Now IsoHunt is just like Google except that when a search points to a Torrent portal that hasn’t been sued by the MPAA, and there are several dozen of them, IsoHunt adds extra information about the download.

If the MPAA drove tanks he'd be roadkill.

And here is where the censorship factor enters the ring.  If a user searches a movie name like “Avatar” the MPAA doesn’t want any download source to appear.  Rather than sue every p2p into the ground where like weeds they are sure to reappear, the MPAA is also asking the court to order the censorship of keywords just like China does with searches like “Tiananmen Square.”  Except that where China’s censorship amounts to a few hundred keywords, the USA’s would extend to thousands that describe movies and songs.  Forget that “avatar” refers to more than the movie; it will be one of the many forbidden search terms in the brave new world of the copyright police.  At this writing IsoHunt.com has redirected itself to IsoHunt.hk as in Hong Kong to protest the keyword censorship proposal.

Those who think keyword censorship is beyond the absurd will do well to remember how good the MPAA and it’s music-minding cousin, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), are at getting their way.  If the same judge who ruled against IsoHunt doesn’t grant their wish, they can always turn to their campaign donation-lovin’ pals in Congress as they did in 1995 with the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which the MPAA and RIAA literally wrote for themselves.

Sam’s joins a growing trend in full-service restaurants that support roots, often early on week-nights.  Others include Speisekammer in Alameda, Little Switzerland in Santa Rosa, and Iron Springs Brewery in Fairfax.

SF Dept. of Over-Regulation

The agenda was about some rule changes relating to permits for one-time events and minor strengthening of the notoriously weak, though club-friendly, Entertainment Commission.  This was not what the audience came for.   They came for a football toss between the pro-club and anti-club teams.  The meeting started benignly enough with Chairman Dufty providing some background, a statement that enhancing public safety was the goal of the committee, and then a few functionaries who weighed in with fairly benign comments.  Then came time for audience comments, the whistle blew and the gamesmanship began.

Neighborhood activists weighed in on the evils of clubs: noisy drunks, urine-soaked doorways and violence, violence, and more violence.  They showed a five-minute video purporting to be about the violence associated with clubs.  It started off with a fairly decent fight — a few roundhouse punches, but no weapons, no blood, nothing broken and the combatants were soon pulled apart.  The next cut showed a rather sorry fight, a shoving match really, then came four and a half minutes of people milling around outside a few venues.  Oh yes, and a pack of loud motorcycles roared by.

The pro-club forces weighed in with the economic benefits of nightlife, cultural and artistic diversity, and their fear of having San Francisco turn into its suburbs.  One speaker concluded her praise of SF’s nightlife saying, “That’s why I live here!”  This drew another round of applause from the pro-club side which seemed to out-number the anti-club side by about 4-1.

The three Supervisors listened politely and held their judgments in reserve as is their wont during factious meetings.  They’d seen the pro-club versus anti-club football tossed around enough to know that what the people needed to say would have little to do with the meeting’s specific agenda.

“What if club life really isn’t so violent after all?”

The bigger question is whether the public safety issue that is motivating the committee’s agenda is misguided.  What if club life really isn’t so violent after all?  Of course violence sometimes breaks out at a club, but it is actually quite rare, usually confined to two individuals and bloodless.  The over-all risk to violence upon one’s own person is quite modest when compared to the risk of violence at, say, schools, sporting events, public housing or MUNI.

The neighbors’ video reinforces this point. It was prepared to highlight club violence, but the best they could come up with was one quick-ending fist fight, one push-and-shove, and four and a half minutes of people milling around outside clubs behaving perfectly peacefully.  And what about those thuggish looking brutes pounding by on their motorcycles in the wee hours?  As creepy and annoying as they are, they had absolutely nothing to do with the clubs they were driving past.

The Supervisors and the club debate itself seem to have been hijacked by a handful of neighbors who do not want noisy drunks waking them up or urinating in their doorways.  These are fair and honest concerns.  But the neighbors also know that the forces of law and order aren’t going to react to that, so they’ve taken relatively infrequent and minor incidents of club violence and stoked them into an epic myth.

The pro-club forces need to change their tactics and deflate the hot-air balloon around club violence.  The Supervisors need to change their focus from legislation driven by public safety to real concerns, such as how to keep clubs and the arts they support thriving.  As for the few bad apples, the City Attorney already has the power to shut them down just as he’s done this week to the Pink Diamonds.

“The last thing San Francisco’s clubs need is more pointless bureaucratic initiatives emanating from City Hall.”

Clubs are regulated beyond what most types of business must endure.  The Entertainment Commission and the Supervisors need to make cutting the red tape around club management their priority, and there’s no better place to start than to send a strong message to the State Alcoholic Beverage Control.  ABC regulates things like the menus at clubs serving food, it mandates what tables need candles, and it regulates the type of dancing that can be done.  The last thing  San Francisco’s clubs need is more pointless bureaucratic initiatives such as these emanating from City Hall.

Derek: Taking HWS to a New Level

Welcome to the new Hicks with Sticks site.  The archives and photos still need to be loaded, along with a few other tweeks, but here’s what’s new.

• The newsletter has been broken down into individual blog posts that accept comments, use tags and are searchable.
• The posts are in categories so, for example, fans will be able to sort for the CD reviews (once the archives have been loaded.)
• Sound files can be added to the posts; again a work in progress.
• Subsubscribing and unsubscribing has been automated.
• Feeds lead to MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
• The new column at the right summarizes the latest calendar entries and othe useful information.
• There’s a new easy-to-navigate photo gallery that will be loaded soon.
• And the archives have a master index to make browsing easier.
• Notice too the snazzy new HWS icon on your browser tab.

Many thanks to Derek the Scot for the invaluable help with WordPress.

Rumors were circulating that Johnny Dilks was Austin-bound, but J.D. confirmed that he is in Louisiana on a long-term work-related stint.  He hasn’t made a decision about what’s after Louisiana, but he sees Austin as higher than the Bay Area on his priority list.  Johnny lost a big part of what he was trying to accomplish musically when Dave Gleason of D.G.’s Wasted Days, who was also JD’s guitarist, moved from the Bay Area to Ventura.

Mike Therieau, who played with Gleason in DGWG, got more involved with his own band and East Bay Grease but those bands also came up against the Bay Area “wall” and now he’s moved to Austin.  Nik Edwards of the California country roots band The Robber Barons is planning an immediate move to Austin; so immediate that he might be there as you read this.

Two of the Bay Area’s best twanger-songwriters had to give up on the Bay Area.   There’ve been welconed all over the world including other parts of the US, but Audrey Auld Mazzera moved to Nashville in 2007 and shitkicker poet A.J. Roach moved to New York this year; both to further their music careers.

Johnny Dilks sees money as a driving force.  Seasoned bands want $100/member for playing a club, but it’s a struggle to get half that in the Bay Area.  Teal Collins of the Mother Truckers sees audience appreciation as another factor.  She found that the Trucker’s Austin audiences show more appreciation and fan loyalty than the Truckers experienced here.  Bay Area bands that tour Europe echo this sentiment.

The general reaction in Europe and most of the US is, “Wow, you’re in a band,” where here audiences come to a show, have a good time, then seem to forget about the band as soon as their heads hit their pillows.  This is a concern expressed my musicians across the spectrum of Bay Area music, not just the roots bands.  Sadly, it comes down to the Bay Area being saturated with music.  Pick up a Bay Area weekly and there will be page after page of music.  Go to larger California urban areas like Sacramento, San Jose or San Diego and there will be barely a third of the music that’s available here.  Bay Area audiences are fortunate to have so much to choose from, but the careers of Bay Area musicians are paying a price for it.  It’s hard to be a hero in your own home town.

And, unlike private health insurance, SF’s “socialist menace” health care doesn’t jerk people around about previously existing conditions, deny services or try to foist people off on low-cost, ineffective alternative placebos.  Healthy SF provides real care at neighborhood clinics around SF, and at SF General Hospital.  Quality of care is high and reasonably timely because SFGH is a teaching hospital for UCSF’s highly regarded medical school.  On rare occasions a person might have to share the waiting room with a guy in an orange jumpsuit, but that’s no big deal.  He’ll be handcuffed to the gurney.  Besides, any working musician would have shared a stage with worse at one time or another and that person wasn’t handcuffed to anything.  www.healthysanfrancisco.org

Music actually attracts people with untreated depression according to The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluated five research reports on music and depression.  Four of these studies connected music with mild, temporary depression relief.  “Music therapy techniques can involve making music, listening to music, writing songs, and talking about lyrics,” wrote Nancy Schimelpfening, commenting on these studies in her About.com depression blog. If music can lift the spirits of the depressed, imagine what it does for those with relative peace of mind.  Apparently acting like a rock star isn’t a behavior, it’s a syndrome.  More.