There are 67 bands listed representing western swing, honky-tonk, alt-country and rockabilly, and almost all are within the Sonoma, East Bay, Santa Cruz triangle.  The greater SF Bay Area is second only to Austin in the number of these bands.

Updating the Bands page is never done, and there are still a few more links and bands to add, and to delete since a few of these bands haven’t been playing nor have they officially broken up.  In future we’ll add HWS reviews of their CDs and links to the bands’ Facebook pages.  Fortunately, we got around a bug that had been preventing the Bands page from being updated, but unfortunately we had to get to work and actually update it.  Now band browsing fans can burn some hours getting to know who’s who.

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.

SFGFTA granted $3.5 million to 50 music organizations in 2008-’09.  Of those 50, the opera and the symphony devoured 51% of the budget, so for practical purposes SFGFTA gave $1.7 million to 48 organizations, averaging $35,000 per grant.

Considering the quantity of music-related endeavors in SF, SFGFTA is putting great sums on tax dollars into a narrow group of organizations that artlessly repeat the same-old, same-old year-after-year.  Imagine dividing $1.7 million among 500 songwriters, composers, mixmasters, small stages and nonprofits.  $3400 in each of those 500 hands would make San Francisco the creative music capital of the world, but that’s not the way SFGFTA thinks.

Their list of grant recipients reads like a who’s who of classical music snobbery with chamber orchestras aplenty, mid-summer Mozart (like the world really needs another one of those), and choral groups up the proverbial wazoo.  90% of the grantees are classicists and the rest are ever-so-PC ethnic and G/L/B/T groups of which the majority of them are both PC and classicist.  A grant hopeful who walked into SFGFTA with a Telecaster, twin turntables or a banjo could expect little more than a lash or two from Michael Tilson Thomas’ baton.

A Citizen’s Advisory Committee (CAC) is responsible for grant decision making, but they are merely acting on the will of those who appointed them.  The key to this unfortunate situation lies in the control of the San Francisco Arts Commission, which is over-populated with social and political hobnobbers.  It is their members’ tastes that ultimately determine what deserves a music grant and what does not.  Hoi polloi pack SF’s Art Commission, place their proxies in the CAC, and group-think their social agendas into art.  Thus it becomes more important to spend $1,800,000 to assure opening night galas at the opera and symphony than to put $3500 into the hands of someone who might create something more than a musical retread.