The Pink section.
We were laying in bed reading the news like most Sunday mornings of our decades together. These days on tablet, laptop, or phone, which may lack charm, but you don’t end up with newsprint all over the bedding.
 
I had gone through the New York Times, taking in whatever I could stomach in the terrible news of the day, and turned to The Chronicle for whatever diversion I might get from the foibles of the town. Finding plenty of those, I then read the few comics I still follow, and finally the Datebook, which is now split into articles on “the arts” and a “events” calendar with a Datebook Picks landing page which is heavily slanted to theatre, classical, and the more “high culture” offerings.
 
As my primary focus in life is music, I first pursued such articles as could be found about concerts and such, finding a mishmash of Taylor Swift, Keanu Reeves, Dave Chapelle, Tori Amos, Sinead O’Connor (who was only mention having just died), big tours, big stars etc. The only local music mentioned was about our grand San Francisco legacy acts. The usual Dead, Janis, Journey fare. They did plug the San Francisco Free Folk Festival, and Hardly Strictly, but then those are institutional. Much for the mass, but really no news from “the underground”. Next I tried the Datebook Events search engine option. It is clearly garbage in garbage out, like any database its can only output whatever data has been input. Apparently your average band, art organization, or whomever is staying away in droves, for my search for live music in San Francisco for August 12th 2023 brought up only four options. Three of these were not only, not in San Francisco, but were sponsored events, meaning paid placement, with the only SF option also from the Datebook Picks landing page.
 
Now I do go out a good deal, and can readily tell all and sundry that just in a 3 block by 1 block stretch of the Mission, from The Chapel (including Curio) on Valencia just north of 19th, to The MakeOut Room on 22nd just west of Mission, there are at least 7 venues that will absolutely offer live music (and many more still with DJ dancing) Saturday August 12th. But good luck finding a resource for helping you plan your Saturday night out on the town in The Mission, or anywhere. The crazy thing is, none of the 7 options I could list off the top of my head were in any way “underground”, they were all fully functioning licensed businesses, with entertainment and liquor permits. They all had websites that to greater and lesser degrees indicated what one could enjoy from date to date. Apparently no one at our local paper of record, or really any paper anywhere has a job description of reporting on what is happening, when, by whom, where, and what when it comes to our food of the soul.
 
However if we do look at that food thing we see that The Chronicle has a “What to eat” section right along with Front Page, Weather, and Sports. This section is chockablock full of stories and reviews about our local restaurants large and small. Polls and list on the 25 best local eateries, or best local wine. So there must be an economic model for including so much “content” on what and where we eat, and to a lesser extent drink. Someone is being paid to keep us in the know on all matters gastronomic, but somehow our news organizations can barely register matters symphonic, much less the more Byronic forms of musical expression.
 
Similarly, we used to get a good amount of information from our local “alternative Weekly’s, but I fear even for the few remaining publications it’s hard times as well. SF Weekly’s Music page in it’s current issue (Aug 2nd) leads off with the wonderful news that Aerosmith is coming to town for a farewell tour (so long fellas), and does have articles on a local Dark Wave label (that like all good prophets, is not well regarded in there e home town), and another article on the SFPL launching a local music streaming platform Bay Beats. On closer inspection, the article on the record label was a from April, as was that article on Bay Beats, also from months ago, and was bereft of any sort of useful information for potential stakeholders. Ok….. but what about the task at hand, finding fun on a Saturday night.
 
I found the poorly named SFWeekly event calendar under “Tickets”, which for the most part one could not buy. I did find a much more well stocked calendar, with many more musical options. Unfortunately not much too indicate editorially the desirability or nature of what was on offer. When looking at that same 3 blocks by 1 block area of the mission on their handy dandy map interface, I only came up with a single option which must have been included by either the Noise Pop staff for their Summer of Music program, or by the talented Clementine Darling who was performing, and I know from experience as a very able self promoter.
 
Thus I conclude an only somewhat better garbage in garbage out system.
 
What about (you may ask) DoTheBay.com (a fine website in various locals under a variety of monikers that lists shows and events). They do have far more music listings than the poor showing at the Datebook and The somewhat better SFWeekly, but once again, If a venue or a band fails to list their show, no way for the rest of us to know.
 
Now looking back through those rose colored glasses of time (pink?), it did seem that for my twenty something limited range of tastes, that the old Pink Pages of the Chronicle, and the calendar listings in the Bay Guardian, and SF Calendar Magazine gave an affordable place for any “legitimate”? venue to ply their wares (and where’s). On a Wednesday lunch time, or Sunday bagel breakfast, one could plot one’s course to future adventures at The Ibeam, The Mab, or what/where have you. And as an independent promoter, which I occasionally was, one could buy a tiny tiny Ad in at least the SF Calendar or Bay Guardian and maybe even get a little blurb from the editorial staff. It’s not like everything was there, and the real underground was …. well … underground in someones basement room, or loft party. But at least for the licensed venues, there was a central clearing house of promotional information for the average punter to find a blues band, a new wave group, a dance club, or a woodwind quintet.
 
If one follows the money…. There is no solution. If there is cold hard cash in the music business, it’s all being hovered up to the top of the pyramid, and like every facet of life starting even prior to Web 2.0, those who do, just have to do more (or all), and everyone else needs to just shut your trap, get in line, and pay to eat whatever makes someone up the chain the best ROI. We have proven to be such fine sheep to shear after all. Look at….. well almost every facet of our collective lives, the food on our shelves, that we San Franciscans who have decent mass transit and reside within only 7 square miles, mostly still drive private automobiles, our terribly ineffective or just outright corrupt civic leaders, the air the water the culture AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHH.
 
In the end, it is no ones job to make us happy. No one’s job to make our collective life as full and fulfilling as it could be. Our city government despite having over 6 Billion dollars in revenue has no department of collective joy. So like most solutions we are left to our own devices. Mine will be to invite all of you to whatever it is that I am doing, as Connie and I tend to do a lot. I am sure most of it will not be to your liking, like that Tuvan Throat Singing Tango band at that dive bar in the Tenderloin. But perhaps a something somewhere sometime might catch your attention, and as long as you are not a terrible audience member (braying loudly and drunkenly about nothing of consequence while I am trying to listen to the band, or standing like a boulder in the midst of the dance floor while some of us are using the space for what god intended), it’s always great to have some convivial company met in a public place.
 
So see you all about.
Let the market decide about the new emerging creative class.
Recently I was listening to Ari Herstand podcast with Alex Mitchell of #AI music Company “Boomy”. There was a moment early on in the show where Ari put forth the assertion that AI generated music would further lower what is already a seriously devalued form. That when anybody with no experience or clue can spend 5 minutes on Boomy to produce a song, what value can that possibly have.
 
To which Alex Mitchell replied that “we should let the market decide”. Meaning that if that is what the public is willing to pay for, then that is valid.
 
You can argue forever as to what actually might be construed as “art”. I have played with Boomy’s app, using the existing prompts (shitty and limited) which the algorithm transformed into a terrible piece of sound that might be considered music (there was a beat, and patterns of notes which repeated in various ways). My assumption is that with the time and effort that money might supply, the prompts will get more involved, and the end product will be more palatable. So some future Bob, Jane or Jesse may have the knack (I’m sure they will say skill set) to generate a catchy little ditty, or beautiful pastoral symphony, and garner their 15 minutes of fame. This new “emerging creative class” as Mr Mitchell called the users of these corporately funded AI tools, will become the new status quo.
 
And who, or what is the market referred to above. Did the market decide that children should eat Captain Crunch for breakfast. Or was that Quaker Oats using their wealth to pay designers of bright kid friendly packaging, and advertising firms to buy TV ad time on Saturday mornings.
 
So is that the market or the marketeer.
 
We can only interact with the part of the market that we are able to experience. If Boomy or something just like it, is acquired by Meta, or Google, and then the content created therein is served up to us by the algorithms that make the best economic decisions for Meta or Google (who are dominating our information feed), how then is the market deciding.
 
While I no longer eat Captain Crunch, Quake, Quisp, or even Lucky Charms as I chose not to be absolutely obese, it seems that this is not true for all 332 million Americans. We buy 2.7 billion boxes of cereal each year. And if you walk down the cereal aisle at Safeway, Krogers, or Piggly Wiggly you will realize it ain’t all Grapenuts and Cherios.
 
The point being that the majority of us have very little to say about what is available for us to choose in our physical, intellectual or esthetic diet. If they (the centralizing capitalist cabal) have made a fortune selling us plastic food, why would one suppose that what we hear, read, and see will fare any better.
 
AI is coming no matter what, and it will have many wonderful benefits to our lives. That said, we already see the pitfalls of algorithmically managed news feeds, playlists, and viewing choices. We can be so much more than the lie we are being sold.
 
Singer wanted, or perhaps a better system
While one should never admit it, especially as a performing artist, I hate my voice. Now before you say….”ah Jesse, it’s a fine voice”, or “well, you work so well with what you have”, know that I know that those are either the product of a tin ear (yours not mine), or the expected polite support of those with no dog in the fight (skin in the game? Money on the line?).
 
It’s not that I can’t sing, or make my notes (most of the time), but I know the quality of my instrument is closer to a #Honer than a #Stradivarius. And while I have been known to chew the scenery a bit in performance, I haven’t the charisma to elevate that beyond the bounds of a charade. I have a story to tell, but much like my joke telling, the crowd drifts away halfway to the punch line.
 
Thus, I have started the process of seeking a singer for The Caliopians. Someone with charisma, character, and creativity, as that is what the job demands if one wishes to rise above the level of the hackneyed fare that keeps a band from climbing up onto that bigger stage.
 
To that end, I cast my eyes and ears back to earlier times, to see what (if anything) worked better than whatever we have going at the moment. As it turned out I had to cast back 40 years to my time in the San Francisco post punk scene , and my first make a circus band “Jungle Dinner”. 
 
Now beside finding that Eda (the singer in the above video) had a beautiful voice, and an engaging presence, I was forced to recall what an interesting and melodic (almost pop) sound we made.  And further in that direction, how much more exciting and tuneful music was in general, in that brief flowering of 10,000 blooms.
 
I bring this up, as this very morning at Chez Walkershaw, we made an experimental foray into #Spotify’s  #NewMusicFridays, where we listen to the first several songs on various playlists. Beside the actual New Music Friday, there was #Are&Be, #AllNewRock, New Music Fridays Country, and more that we would have explored, but life is short, and the thrill was gone.
 
Starting with the generic New Music Fridays playlist, we had to fast forward through the first 4 songs before we came across anything we could take for more than 8 seconds. There was very little to recommend itself to us, as the monotony and mundanes of the fare was musical teflon. The Country playlist went a bit better, as one felt these numbers actually started out as songs written by someone prior to ending up in the clutches of a producer, unlike the generic list that had no discernible personal element, with the point of departure being a drum loop along with clumsily constructed matched sets of lyrical and melodic cliches. They were sold as songs, but….? Are & Be leaned towards the realm of songs, but still fell far too heavily in the produced by producer camp. Hoping for at least a taste of comfort food, we turned to All New Rock, but every song therein had been done long ago, and so much better by bands that moved on when even I was young.
 
So I was left to wonder.  I know that there are many many great bands and artist out there. I occasionally trip over them in our local San Francisco scene.  But unlike in Jungle Dinners day, there is now an all present uber culture which has no economic model that can utilize tiny subcultures. Rather than, as it was when the arts were run by people not machines, some brave soul might gamble on some super local phenomena, on hopes that it might be the next big thing, the algorithm does not work on hunches, or inspiration.
 
I love technology, but like #capitalism itself, uncontrolled, and unguided by we the people, it makes for a pretty shitty world.
 
Jungle Dinner was
Connie Walker Alto and Soprano Sax
Eda Maxine Vocals
Scott Free Drums
Alexandra Suh Tenor Sax
Jesse Shaw Bass
 
Micro dosing Micro Genres
Let us think about micro genres for a few minutes. Some of you may not be familiar with this term, but its quite in vogue with all the cognoscenti in the music marketing world. Especially for those of us involved in what they used to call baby bands. Not a very accurate or flattering term for bands of some maturity that just have yet to gain visibility in the larger market.
These micro genres while touted as a way to serve the consumer more #vanilla, for those who would rather not taste #strawberry, are purely for the purpose of maximizing the utility of each piece of content, in order to keep each user engaged for the longest possible time, to allow for more advertising revenue for the service. But SURPRISE SURPRISE for content producers like a baby band it theoretically allows you (and algorithms across the web) to identify, in this case my band #TheCaliopians with a potential small market that is larger than the drummers 3 drinking buddies, and someones Aunt Miriam. Therefore giving me (and those algorithms) a target set of strangers to base efforts in attracting fresh fans who might be interested in what ever it is that our band actually does.
This plays out, for instance, while using a hashtag in a social media posting, such as #Coltrane or even possibly #Bebop (debatable) for the fine pianist Harold Mabern in hustling sales or listens for his latest LP” Mabern Plays Coltrane”. An algorithm at Spotify, or Apple music, can then learn that Mr Mabern is a candidate whose content the algorithm might deliver to people that it has identified as previously showing an interest in either #JohnColtrane, #Bebop, or a host of ancillary people/ideas/products.
But those terms will do very little if used by We Are The Willows, as that band has been been defined (by who or what?) as belonging to the micro genres of #StompPop. Thus those various algorithms may or may not deliver #WearetheWillows social media posts utilizing #bebop or #johncoltrane to the best potential fan, and instead said content could be steadily ignored by Bebop fans the world over. The poorer the response to #WearetheWillows content, the lower they will be ranked by an algorithm, and down down down they may go into the depths of obscurity.
Hopefully Dear Reader, you do see how ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT this identifying of the proper micro genre is, as it allows for the harvesting of proper hashtags (more on that later) to facilitate the distribution of knowledge about a given artist or creation, and thus it’s subsequent effects on economic factors to the artists ability to participate significantly in the world.
So where do these mandatory for marketing micro genres come from. A question I have no coherent answer for. It could all be the machinations of Glen Mcdonald and his very interesting EveryNoise.com site. It may be a cabal of evil music journalists meeting at a small deli in Cleveland (site of so much odd musical partitioning and reduction). Whoever is inventing this aid to music marketing, one would think they must have some sort of handle on the variety of characteristics involved to make the decision of who fits where, based on a confluence of either regional or common influences.
At times regional scenes (like in the distant past before the internet, and even before #MTV,) produce some similar music, such as Washington DC’s #Go-Go (#GoGo) #70’s, or Seattles raft of #Grunge bands #90s. These days this seems the exception rather than the rule. While searching for my #microgenre, I found that the various bands lumped into contemporary #microgenre scene’s were often from a very wide dispersal of locals, as music flows freely simultaneously all over the #worldwideweb, and mass culture is playing an ever increasing dominant and granular role in what takes up our time.
In my imagination I see that we are all walking around with both different percentages of exactly the same thing in all our heads, and then some varying percentage of completely random assortments of what scratches our specific itch. So if you follow the money, there is no economic model for serving up content to the eventual 1 or perhaps no other person in the world with the same crazy mix. It’s not like these companies and their tools sets are in operation for altruistic reasons. How can the end game be mass customization (giving each of us exactly what we want), if the majority of the content delights and satisfies no one beyond the creator? It may be that machine learning can jump ahead, and actually define from the ever increasing mass of content, that which to distribute to each separate individual, but at the moment, that is not the case, and money is primarily changing hands serving up content that is widely palatable, while hoodwinking us all into believing we are receiving goods of infinite possibility.
So getting back to marketing via micro genre in order to serve up your particular mix of vanilla mixed whatever particular set of flavors to random strangers somewhere in the world, one must wonder how diverse a palette will that eventually be. Instead it may be a terribly limiting factor moving forward.
To illustrate this point, let us hop into the #waybackmachine. One of #rockmusics most famous tiny scenes was #NewYorkmid70’sPunk (with a very capital P) centered at #CBGBs and #MaxKansasCity. Listening to the music of it’s most well known participants such as #Suicide, #TheRamones, #Television, #PattiSmithGroup, #Blondie, #TheCramps and #TalkingHeads, one can hear any number of common influences (#TheVelvetUnderground and #60’sGirlGroups), but instead of a united signature sound, several of these bands spawned entire sub genres of their own.
You could imagine that #70’sNewYorkPunk was a micro Genre uniting #LouReed and #themarvelettes, but not only will it not hold water, but the specificity of New York 70’s punk has such varied meanings in #thepopularimagination, to be far too broad for the algorithmic use, and #LouReed or #themarvelettes being perhaps too specific, as they fail to meet the criteria the machinery needs for informing potential audiences demands, for what ever #70’sNewYorkPunk might signify to most people. As we move into this mechanize future, we may be missing out on so much substantial wonderment. After all, if that dam tree falls in the forrest, no one knows that the download even exists.
So why am I bothering about all this stuff that I can do nothing to change?
Ha ha… I am a hypocrite. Just another punter out to make a buck. Living in a world that requires of me today, as on many other days, to attempt to “do the work”, “climb the ladder”, “make IT happen”, despite being dashed against the rocks of either my failure to grasp some inherent truth, or perhaps far worse, come to grips with the possibility that my truth is just not in harmony with the prevailing dictates of the entire infrastructure of modern life (I suspect the latter).
The task of the day was posed to me via YouTube by #IndieMusic Marketing Guru Jesse Cannon. Now maybe by even uttering the words #IndieMusic, I have invalidated any hope of participating in this process. The term #IndieMusic having taken on such a slim meaning, unless married too a qualifier (#altindiecountry, or #Indieshoe-gazerflutepunk, both of which qualify as micro genres). Yet one must do something beyond moaning, crying, and tearing ones hair out at the roots.
So Mr Cannon asked me (as part of the larger us of subscribers to his feed) to find 20 artists who inhabit the same #microgenre as myself. Then look on those groups social media posts (specifically #TikTok, as that is the Big Kahuna of the moment), and come up with a minimum of three potent #hashtags, that will assist the algorithms in delivering your content to those strangers who might most likely respond to it with a like, a reply, or some other interaction.
GREAT…. We are off and run……. Oh …. First one must chose a micro genre to be part of. Hmmmm, well….. I feel great resonance and kinship with …… Ah HAZMAT MODINE, ….. love them…., #TheCaliopians share some edges with them in our #Americanroots, with a #retrobluesrock flare, and a bit of #international spice……….Now what micro genre are they associated with?
#WORLDFUSION !!!! Fuck Me!!!
Well that seems a bit broad and dated, including not only #KarshKale (who I always associated with electronic dance music), the #DesertDwellers who have plenty of bounce, but are almost #ambient, and #BombayDubOrchestra who I do enjoy, yet would not be likely to be booked to open for at #TheFillmore.
From what I can glean, much of what’s lumped into #WorldFusion has a few percent of what’s in our mix, but not sufficient to be of any use as part of our micro genres, as #TheCaliopian’s #altcountrylatinsurfpunkklezmerjazz melange seems a very far cry.
OK, what does the pundit of record say for discerning your micro genre?? Consulting further Youtube fare in the Jesse Cannon playlist I come across the following method. On #Spotify, once you click on an artist, there is a section if you scroll down the page where you can find artist who are also liked by the fans of whomever. So that ever helpful algorithm has looked at all the users who have played tracks by one artist, and then extrapolates per what ever other artist that artist listeners also listen too utilizing a formula where X % of Artist A’s users also listened to artist B’s music Y% of the time, and thus now belongs on a list of Artist A’s also liked artists.
WOW… wonderful, super useful
So I looked at what/whom #HazmatModine fans also liked artists, and got a similar list of great bands, many of whom I enjoy. Now having narrowed down the list to bands that we shared a few more points of connection, I finally had something to work with. Perhaps not a function micro genres, but distant relatives,(like a distant cousin of a great great grand parent who stayed behind in the old country, whose progeny moved to Australia) but close enough to do the job of extraction that hashtag keyword data I need in order to make effective algorithmic training via social media post, to push my rating higher, build my fan base, sell tickets, trigger song streams, and RULE THE WORLD!!!!!!!.
Hurray!!…. now we really are off and run………………… oh…. Going through the #Instagram, and #TikTok posts (if they have them) of this sampling of my musically scattered kin, it seem that almost all of them have less internet savvy than we adherents to the Mr Cannon’s cannon, with almost no hashtags to speak of, or all so mundane, like #TheFeltonMusicHall if they happen to be playing at The Felton Music Hall, or @spoonerband if they are sharing a bill with #TheSpoonerBand, or #cincodemayo if … well you get it. And those were the better ones. The other possibility is that many of these bands, despite not being household names, are already so big and famous algorithmically speaking, that they have no need to play in the same pool as little baby bands like mine.
So……….. what’s a band to do. Only .0001% of musicians are preternaturally talented as a player or writer, or have more charisma than the next 5 folks. We all notice them, and flock to their banners, but really, that is not even the majority of music that you and I have shoved down our throats by the great big mean culture machine. 99.999 of everything else is somewhere on the talent spectrum (upper end for sure) and you have got to have plenty of moxey, along with the recognizable hook you can sling into the beast to try and get your ride.
While IMHO we The Caliopians have everything but that hook to sling. But I don’t seem capable of finding my way into the game to play by the rules. I suppose I could just say OK today I am this existing popular micro genre, along with this set of useful hashtags for that genre. But somehow muddying the water by pissing the stream just seems foolish and unproductive.
Or perhaps you have a micro genre suggestion with 3 accompanying #hashtags to replace these #ska #klezmer #americana #rootsrock #jazz #cumbia #balkan #twang #ethiopique #soul #california #janglepop
Adult behavior
 
Over 40 years ago I was in a band called The Neasden Knights. It was the vehicle for @RayBird (2nd from left), and @JanHewison (far right) who had grown tired of the “working mans clubs circuit” in England, and decided to pick up stakes and move to San Francisco, where I collided with them in late summer/early fall of 1979.
 
Jan and Ray were each song writers of considerable ability, so besides the one cover (Stand by me), our very speedily rendered 25-45 minute set (dosage dependent) was alternating Jan songs, Ray songs. Not unlike a TheCaliopians gig, where it’s one of Connie’s, then one of mine (just that our gigs are generally 3 hours long).
 
The NK’s billed itself any number of ways, depending on what Jan and Ray thought they were doing that week, and being the worst or perhaps best sorts of snobs, rejecting any label they found distasteful. So rather than say #Rockabilly, or #Punk Rock, they would just make stuff up like “Pop Modern” (say it like your Parisian).
 
In actuality we did favor the classic #Ska, 50’s rock side of the equation, but at times the writing was quite complicated, with many chord changes, especially on Jan’s tunes. In point of fact, The Caliopians tune “Chasing Jan” (in our current repertoire, but to be released sometime in June) is directly influenced by Jan’s compositional style.
 
The picture shown here is @KaetheZemach noted children’s book author, but then our Saxophonist, Ray is the tieless fellow, then the late Michael (Big Mick) Smith our drummer (who wanted to be our guitarist, but that was ever going to happen), Jan with her head on Mick’s shoulder, and of course me as the younger cuter fellow in a white drape coat, and extra skinny tie.
 
While The Neasden Knights were not my first band, they were my first band of adults, and adult they did. We could have had our very own day time soap, or at least a lifetime network movie. I learned so much about song writing, bad English diet, sexual mores, perseverance in the face of chemical limitation, and the ambition to go your own way, especially in the face of catastrophic odds.
 
And that was just the fun part.
 
Certainly the Neasden Knights finishing school finished several of the participants, but it has informed much of my ability to move ahead over and over again, year after year, fielding band after band.
 
So bless them all, the living and the dead. I still love each and every one of them.
 
 
A tale of the past
 

Last weekend an old friend of Connies (@BillBurgess) was putting on a flamenco concert out at @OceanAleHouse.  We were seated near a fellow who looked familiar, though I could not place him. Luckily he was a friendly outgoing sort, and we soon fell into conversation trying to figure out our connection. When he gave his name @AlexJackson, I was instantly transported back to the early 80’s, when he and we were creative participants of the San Francisco post punk art and music scene. 

 

Alex was with an early noise outfit named “The 12 Year Olds”, that Connie and my band “Jungle Dinner” played some shows with.  At least on of which would have been part of the ’The Horn Reborn” series that we put on in late 1983 at the SF Art Institute, and then 2 more at The On Broadway.

 
Alex, was then, and is now a visual artist currently teaching graphic design to college students. He asked if I had any posters from those shows I might send him, which I did not, but I do have a number of photos from a publicity shoot we arranged of the horn players from some of the bands involved. 
 
I went home, and dug out my archive from deep in a closet, where much of my past languishes. While going through the box of photos from our pre Go Van Gogh musical life, I was reminded (not without a bit of nostalgia) of a feeling of possibility many of us shared in that time.  This was in the heady start of DIY culture, but a very different approach than todays  where DIY has come to mean “really, just you, and the corporations you pay for the tool set you use”.  At least for us, instead of needing to be all things to all people,  DIY was just as likely to mean you, your friends and colleagues all working together to create something of interest and quality.
 
In the specific example of staging The Horn Reborn” series, the idea may have originally been mine, but the planning, and execution included a core of 10 people, and the additional labor of another 40 folks.  Not just in the bands that played, but also friends who might have a skill to lend, or work in the case of the third show, be able to donate some window real estate in a storefront, and creating a display to advertise the events.  The obvious advantages of many hands making better work seems to have drifted away with the twin engines of corporate consolidation, and cultural fragmentation.  That and not being out in bars and nightclubs every night, due to aging and responsibilities to the next generation, may have separated me from that sort of scene.
 
A few days later I sent Alex a few photos taken by my late friend David Alfaya, at that time the primary visual documentarian of Jungle Dinner. A photographer with a keen eye, and not unskilled with his tools who went on to become a prominent photo muralist.  The shoot was backstage at The On Broadway, my assumption is at the 2nd show in the series, but drug abuse, and the intervening years have robbed me of the specifics.  Beside the fact that we were all young and as Connie put it this morning “Hotties”, consider that these are not photos of a band. We see a variety of people from many groups, who know each other anywhere from biblically to not at all.  Yet there is a coherence, and an aspect that draws you in far more than the paltry excuse of so may band photos that litter the internet today.
 
There we all were, being us, in all our odd ways.  I miss those odd ways, and collective days.
Catalog
 
Catalog 1 : list, register a catalog of the band’s songs. 2a : a complete enumeration of items arranged systematically with descriptive details a catalog of the company’s products. b : a pamphlet or book that contains such a list a mail-order catalog a university catalog. c : material in such a list. catalog.

 
I was not intending in this very first posting to speak of my own music at all. Instead my intent was to lay out a few of my ideas of where things have gone in the larger “cultural” realm. How through the auspice of technology we have become a backward looking society endlessly cycling through an ever decreasing set of ideas even as a wider and wider array of “new to us” options have come within our reach.

 
That may be deemed boring to bother with by most readers who after all “like what they like” happy to be scarfing down the Oreo cookies of life when tiramisu is also on the menu. So being surprised at the 1st option in whatever dictionary google offers up “list, register a catalog of the band’s songs.” I am moved by the muse to shift gears entirely, and delve into the more personal matter of my own catalog.

 
Due to the brevity of time I have to devote to this little missive to an imagined reader, I will breeze through the very beginnings of my musical output, and skip ahead to where and when I first encountered Connie Walker, soon to become my main partner in crime (and by uniting our names into Walkershaw, partner in life).

 
Twas, a cold dark October in 1982, I had grown weary of the standard fare I was being fed in our own little San Francisco post punk scene, steeping a reduction of hardcore, and brit flavor of the month. Seemed that the major rebellion from this musical glue factory was the equally uninspiring amerindie that was just beginning to push up it’s green hippie retro shoots. I had just quit a band of some economic, but not esthetic promise, which as we all know will only take one so far, as you need both ingredients, plus a bit of luck to truly make your mark, and I was casting about for something better, something new.

 
Back in the wayback, one mostly found bandmates through your mates, or bulletin boards in music stores. I had been auditioning and being auditioned by quite a cross section of lunatics, and drug problems to be, when I happened upon drummer Scott Free, who played in a very hard rocking melodic style. She was a lover of history books, strong coffee, and lipstick lesbians (although not in that order), and much the same as I, felt a bit adrift in what had wound down into a balkanized sets of normalcy, normal being dependent on you tribal affiliation. After bashing away at her rehearsal room down on Moss Street (back when SOMA was an affordable area of town) we discovered a strong connection as an inventive rhythm section of bass and drums. Feeling this was a gift of the gods, we retired to a cafe elsewhere to discuss our hopes, and dreams, and began to forge a page we might both be able to be on.
 
We were both “kind of over” the electric guitar, and this was also a terrible period of keys (hard to find a keyboardist, and they all wanted to be either Gary Nueman, or Rick Wakeman). I had recently discovered the genius of John Coltrane (Giant Steps being steadily on my turntable, along with Mile’s Kind of Blue), and while I had no inclination nor skill to play jazz, really loved the sound of the horn, and especially more than a single horn, which opens up so many variants of ideas into the mix.
 
 
We each put the word out amongst our different circles, and through a happy coincidence, a Roomate, worked with a fellow, whose wife worked with a gal named Connie, who happened to play the sax, and was absolutely looking for something fun and promising to do. A phone number was secured, a call and brief conversation transpired, and within days, Connie arrived at Scott’s studio for what would be the beginning of a remarkable meeting of musical worlds.
 
NEXT WEEK. Building a repertoire 
Building a repetoir 
 
In a creative community, where everyone wishes to pitch in, especially if the participants are not so hung up on rules, it is actually quite easy to produce a large body of work in remarkably little time.  When the 3 of us (Scott, Connie, and I) first started meeting, we each had some sort of ideas already to throw into the pot. But even more fruitful was just having at it, where someone would start, and the others would chime in, whether it be a groove, or a melody, or even just an idea.
That the 3 of us existed in a somewhat common milieu, or at least had absorbed much of the same culture while growing up, was certainly helpful, but not as essential as the spirit of everyone throwing ingredients into our 3 stone musical soup with an open mind and glad heart.
 
Within a few rehearsals we had the better part of a set in some sort of shape, and had through casting about located Alexandra Suh, a five foot one, sixteen year old gal still in high school, but a wild cat on the tenor sax, Alex supplied a fine response to Connie’s call on Alto and Soprano. Thus a coherent sound was forged out of a mixture of melodic yet propulsive bass and drums, and the moving interplay between sax harmonies, and the call and response lines alluded to above. 
 
With the impetuousness of our youth, we moved things along quickly, throwing our first show in an empty apartment that a friend had a key for.  60 or so of our friends showed up, a great time was had by all, and we were a smash. A mutual friend brought Eda Maxine, a little lady with a big voice, to this first performance.  WE soon found that she not only had a beautiful voice, but was a natural performer, and willing collaborator,  and lyrics and song fragments started jumping from each of our heads into the ever expanding pot.
 
Within mere months of our first meeting we had forged a sound, a compositional style all our own, a visual esthetic, and became a tight team with a blazing hot set of original material.
 
NEXT WEEK.  Life as a shooting star
Let us think about micro genres for a few minutes. Some of you may not be familiar with this term, but its quite in vogue with all the cognoscenti in the music marketing world. Especially for those of us involved in what they used to call baby bands. Not a very accurate or flattering term for bands of some maturity that just have yet to gain visibility in the larger market.
These micro genres while touted as a way to serve the consumer more #vanilla, for those who would rather not taste #strawberry, are purely for the purpose of maximizing the utility of each piece of content, in order to keep each user engaged for the longest possible time, to allow for more advertising revenue for the service. But SURPRISE SURPRISE for content producers like a baby band it theoretically allows you (and algorithms across the web) to identify, in this case my band #TheCaliopians with a potential small market that is larger than the drummers 3 drinking buddies, and someones Aunt Miriam. Therefore giving me (and those algorithms) a target set of strangers to base efforts in attracting fresh fans who might be interested in what ever it is that our band actually does.
This plays out, for instance, while using a hashtag in a social media posting, such as #Coltrane or even possibly #Bebop (debatable) for the fine pianist Harold Mabern in hustling sales or listens for his latest LP” Mabern Plays Coltrane”. An algorithm at Spotify, or Apple music, can then learn that Mr Mabern is a candidate whose content the algorithm might deliver to people that it has identified as previously showing an interest in either #JohnColtrane, #Bebop, or a host of ancillary people/ideas/products.
But those terms will do very little if used by We Are The Willows, as that band has been been defined (by who or what?) as belonging to the micro genres of #StompPop. Thus those various algorithms may or may not deliver #WearetheWillows social media posts utilizing #bebop or #johncoltrane to the best potential fan, and instead said content could be steadily ignored by Bebop fans the world over. The poorer the response to #WearetheWillows content, the lower they will be ranked by an algorithm, and down down down they may go into the depths of obscurity.
Hopefully Dear Reader, you do see how ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT this identifying of the proper micro genre is, as it allows for the harvesting of proper hashtags (more on that later) to facilitate the distribution of knowledge about a given artist or creation, and thus it’s subsequent effects on economic factors to the artists ability to participate significantly in the world.
So where do these mandatory for marketing micro genres come from. A question I have no coherent answer for. It could all be the machinations of Glen Mcdonald and his very interesting EveryNoise.com site. It may be a cabal of evil music journalists meeting at a small deli in Cleveland (site of so much odd musical partitioning and reduction). Whoever is inventing this aid to music marketing, one would think they must have some sort of handle on the variety of characteristics involved to make the decision of who fits where, based on a confluence of either regional or common influences.
At times regional scenes (like in the distant past before the internet, and even before #MTV,) produce some similar music, such as Washington DC’s #Go-Go (#GoGo) #70’s, or Seattles raft of #Grunge bands #90s. These days this seems the exception rather than the rule. While searching for my #microgenre, I found that the various bands lumped into contemporary #microgenre scene’s were often from a very wide dispersal of locals, as music flows freely simultaneously all over the #worldwideweb, and mass culture is playing an ever increasing dominant and granular role in what takes up our time.
In my imagination I see that we are all walking around with both different percentages of exactly the same thing in all our heads, and then some varying percentage of completely random assortments of what scratches our specific itch. So if you follow the money, there is no economic model for serving up content to the eventual 1 or perhaps no other person in the world with the same crazy mix. It’s not like these companies and their tools sets are in operation for altruistic reasons. How can the end game be mass customization (giving each of us exactly what we want), if the majority of the content delights and satisfies no one beyond the creator? It may be that machine learning can jump ahead, and actually define from the ever increasing mass of content, that which to distribute to each separate individual, but at the moment, that is not the case, and money is primarily changing hands serving up content that is widely palatable, while hoodwinking us all into believing we are receiving goods of infinite possibility.
So getting back to marketing via micro genre in order to serve up your particular mix of vanilla mixed whatever particular set of flavors to random strangers somewhere in the world, one must wonder how diverse a palette will that eventually be. Instead it may be a terribly limiting factor moving forward.
To illustrate this point, let us hop into the #waybackmachine. One of #rockmusics most famous tiny scenes was #NewYorkmid70’sPunk (with a very capital P) centered at #CBGBs and #MaxKansasCity. Listening to the music of it’s most well known participants such as #Suicide, #TheRamones, #Television, #PattiSmithGroup, #Blondie, #TheCramps and #TalkingHeads, one can hear any number of common influences (#TheVelvetUnderground and #60’sGirlGroups), but instead of a united signature sound, several of these bands spawned entire sub genres of their own.
You could imagine that #70’sNewYorkPunk was a micro Genre uniting #LouReed and #themarvelettes, but not only will it not hold water, but the specificity of New York 70’s punk has such varied meanings in #thepopularimagination, to be far too broad for the algorithmic use, and #LouReed or #themarvelettes being perhaps too specific, as they fail to meet the criteria the machinery needs for informing potential audiences demands, for what ever #70’sNewYorkPunk might signify to most people. As we move into this mechanize future, we may be missing out on so much substantial wonderment. After all, if that dam tree falls in the forrest, no one knows that the download even exists.
So why am I bothering about all this stuff that I can do nothing to change?
Ha ha… I am a hypocrite. Just another punter out to make a buck. Living in a world that requires of me today, as on many other days, to attempt to “do the work”, “climb the ladder”, “make IT happen”, despite being dashed against the rocks of either my failure to grasp some inherent truth, or perhaps far worse, come to grips with the possibility that my truth is just not in harmony with the prevailing dictates of the entire infrastructure of modern life (I suspect the latter).
The task of the day was posed to me via YouTube by #IndieMusic Marketing Guru Jesse Cannon. Now maybe by even uttering the words #IndieMusic, I have invalidated any hope of participating in this process. The term #IndieMusic having taken on such a slim meaning, unless married too a qualifier (#altindiecountry, or #Indieshoe-gazerflutepunk, both of which qualify as micro genres). Yet one must do something beyond moaning, crying, and tearing ones hair out at the roots.
So Mr Cannon asked me (as part of the larger us of subscribers to his feed) to find 20 artists who inhabit the same #microgenre as myself. Then look on those groups social media posts (specifically #TikTok, as that is the Big Kahuna of the moment), and come up with a minimum of three potent #hashtags, that will assist the algorithms in delivering your content to those strangers who might most likely respond to it with a like, a reply, or some other interaction.
GREAT…. We are off and run……. Oh …. First one must chose a micro genre to be part of. Hmmmm, well….. I feel great resonance and kinship with …… Ah HAZMAT MODINE, ….. love them…., #TheCaliopians share some edges with them in our #Americanroots, with a #retrobluesrock flare, and a bit of #international spice……….Now what micro genre are they associated with?
#WORLDFUSION !!!! Fuck Me!!!
Well that seems a bit broad and dated, including not only #KarshKale (who I always associated with electronic dance music), the #DesertDwellers who have plenty of bounce, but are almost #ambient, and #BombayDubOrchestra who I do enjoy, yet would not be likely to be booked to open for at #TheFillmore.
From what I can glean, much of what’s lumped into #WorldFusion has a few percent of what’s in our mix, but not sufficient to be of any use as part of our micro genres, as #TheCaliopian’s #altcountrylatinsurfpunkklezmerjazz melange seems a very far cry.
OK, what does the pundit of record say for discerning your micro genre?? Consulting further Youtube fare in the Jesse Cannon playlist I come across the following method. On #Spotify, once you click on an artist, there is a section if you scroll down the page where you can find artist who are also liked by the fans of whomever. So that ever helpful algorithm has looked at all the users who have played tracks by one artist, and then extrapolates per what ever other artist that artist listeners also listen too utilizing a formula where X % of Artist A’s users also listened to artist B’s music Y% of the time, and thus now belongs on a list of Artist A’s also liked artists.
WOW… wonderful, super useful
So I looked at what/whom #HazmatModine fans also liked artists, and got a similar list of great bands, many of whom I enjoy. Now having narrowed down the list to bands that we shared a few more points of connection, I finally had something to work with. Perhaps not a function micro genres, but distant relatives,(like a distant cousin of a great great grand parent who stayed behind in the old country, whose progeny moved to Australia) but close enough to do the job of extraction that hashtag keyword data I need in order to make effective algorithmic training via social media post, to push my rating higher, build my fan base, sell tickets, trigger song streams, and RULE THE WORLD!!!!!!!.
Hurray!!…. now we really are off and run………………… oh…. Going through the #Instagram, and #TikTok posts (if they have them) of this sampling of my musically scattered kin, it seem that almost all of them have less internet savvy than we adherents to the Mr Cannon’s cannon, with almost no hashtags to speak of, or all so mundane, like #TheFeltonMusicHall if they happen to be playing at The Felton Music Hall, or @spoonerband if they are sharing a bill with #TheSpoonerBand, or #cincodemayo if … well you get it. And those were the better ones. The other possibility is that many of these bands, despite not being household names, are already so big and famous algorithmically speaking, that they have no need to play in the same pool as little baby bands like mine.
So……….. what’s a band to do. Only .0001% of musicians are preternaturally talented as a player or writer, or have more charisma than the next 5 folks. We all notice them, and flock to their banners, but really, that is not even the majority of music that you and I have shoved down our throats by the great big mean culture machine. 99.999 of everything else is somewhere on the talent spectrum (upper end for sure) and you have got to have plenty of moxey, along with the recognizable hook you can sling into the beast to try and get your ride.
While IMHO we The Caliopians have everything but that hook to sling. But I don’t seem capable of finding my way into the game to play by the rules. I suppose I could just say OK today I am this existing popular micro genre, along with this set of useful hashtags for that genre. But somehow muddying the water by pissing the stream just seems foolish and unproductive.
Or perhaps you have a micro genre suggestion with 3 accompanying #hashtags to replace these #ska #klezmer #americana #rootsrock #jazz #cumbia #balkan #twang #ethiopique #soul #california #janglepop