Hicks with Sticks » musician

BAY AREA MUSICIANS LOOK ELSEWHERE FOR CAREERS

admin — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:42:46 +0000

The recession has accelerated the flight of musicians from the Bay Area. Austin seems to be the destination of choice with Dallas Wayne, Rockin’ Lloyd Tripp and the Mother Truckers already there and others to follow. Nashville and New York are claiming their share as well.

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.

SF’S MUSICIANS CATCH A BREAK ON HEALTH CARE

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:58:38 +0000

San Francisco, like any complex organization, is going to get some things wrong and some things right. Providing health care on a musician’s budget is something The City does right. The program is called Healthy San Francisco and all that’s needed to qualify is proof of SF residency and three months worth of moderately low bank statements. At this point, half of the musicians reading this are thinking, correctly, that this is a good deal. The other half are wondering, “What’s a bank account?” Co-payments go up the more one makes, but for most the coverage is only $20/month, $10-20 co-pay to see a doctor, and $5 co-payments for medicines. Test and lab visits do not require any co-payments.

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

MOOD SWINGS AND MUSIC

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:28:40 +0000

The last HWS issue’s story about pointless divisiveness in the Bay Area’s zydeco and roots music communities drew some interesting responses. The better news is that zydeco’s battling bookers have decided against going head-to-head on Fridays in Alameda. They’ve still gone their separate ways, but have decided to run their own shows every other week, without each others company, at the Eagle’s Hall in Alameda. The good news is that this compromise will keep the audience intact and save pitting bands against one another. The bad news is that the bitterness, which was accumulating long before the split, remains. Could this compromise be a step toward reconciliation? Nutty Buddy, a licensed counselor (MFCC), emailed to point out the role of alcohol in the rare but troublesome rockabilly rumbles, and then went on to sympathize with clinical depression’s role in divisive behavior. Referring to the “rock stars” who poison their own wells, Buddy wrote that, “Depression causes those who have it to act against their interests to avoid meeting the unreasonable standards they set for themselves. The low self-esteem that accompanies [untreated depression] makes it necessary [for them to portray themselves] as perpetual victims and to bring their environments down to their level… They are not mean-spirited, they are ill… [and] because [depression] is very good at protecting itself, they shy away from treatment, which makes their lives worse.”

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.