Greensboro octet Israel Darling has given a lot in the pursuit of playing original live music.
They've rehearsed four hours a day, five to six days a week; spent $50 on gas to travel to non-paying gigs in Asheville and Boone; and lost a side window on their tour van while driving on the Jersey Highway.
"We don't have $300 to replace it, so it's gone," says Jacob Darden, singer and guitarist for the group. "We just put up some cardboard and keep going."
Combine the band's determination with the fact that they recently signed to an independent New York City record label (Engine Room Recordings), and one would think Israel Darling would have no problem finding a paying audience in their hometown.
This is not the case.
"If you literally put a three dollar cover charge on your flyer, the audience number gets cut in half," Darden says.
Other local musicians have echoed Israel Darling's concern.
"Pretty much everywhere else we play, we make money, and it's covered costs for traveling, for hotel or food," says Chris Jackson of Citified, a Greensboro band that's been playing locally for five years. "But playing in Greensboro, you don't see much money at all, and that's probably the most frustrating thing."
For musicians like Darden and Jackson, Greensboro can be a difficult place to call home because of the lack of live music venues and a local audience with a preference for cover bands.
The local music scene wasn't always so dire. Greensboro used to have several music clubs where local and regional artists could perform alongside up-and-coming touring acts such as Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers before either of these artists gained popularity.
Now with the recent closing of live music spaces Square One, the Green Burro and Solaris, Greensboro musicians worry they'll have fewer opportunities to perform in their hometown.
Some Greensboro nightlife and live entertainment promoters say such losses are inseparable from the Greensboro music scene, which runs in five-year cycles of promise and decline; the apex of the former being the 2006 opening of the Flying Anvil ---- an 11,477 square-foot club for local and touring artists that closed in less than one year.
In the wake of these closings, bands and live music aficionados are looking ahead and finding hope in new venues such as Aquarius Music Hall and Studio B as well as part-time music spaces such as Legitimate Business, CFBG's and Maya Art Gallery.
Several key players in the local music scene shared their thoughts on the contributing factors to Greensboro's cyclical music scene and what can be done to revive it.
When the Gate City rocked
Hearing about the glory days from veteran Greensboro rock group the OtherMothers, it's difficult to imagine the Greensboro they performed in during the '80s is the same place musicians struggle today.
This was a time when the drinking age was 18 and several live music venues thrived near UNCG's campus: Fridays, a primarily punk rock venue; Nightshade Cafe, a predominantly folk venue; and Jokers 3, a heavy metal bar.
"Back then, there were very few punk rock venues between Atlanta and DC, so any band that was on tour at the time stopped at Chapel Hill at the Cat's Cradle and Fridays," says Al Cowett, lead singer and bass player for the OtherMothers.
Cowett and OtherMothers' lead guitarist Randall McCorqodale saw such groups as R.E.M., Los Lobos, Black Flag, the Black Crows and GWAR perform near the UNCG campus, as well as local musicians Eugene Chadbourne and Bruce Piephoff. More importantly, these acts played to packed houses.
The venues near UNCG all took a major hit, however, when the legal drinking age was raised to 21 in 1984, losing the majority of college-aged patrons.
"They changed the law and cleared out the bars," McCorqodale says.
With fewer college students allowed to drink alcohol, the music clubs near UNCG soon folded. Music venues like the Secret Garden opened away from campus, but according to McCorqodale, without a university to serve as a center of gravity, the venues were nowhere near as crowded or diverse.
"If there was a music scene in Greensboro for a while it was Tate Street," Cowett says. "And now it hasn't been the same."
Jon McLean has watched the Greensboro music scene change since he became involved with it in 1986. A member of such disbanded local groups as Warehouse, Helmonica and Albina Savoy, he says that despite a brief expansion in the early to mid-'90s, the current market that musicians face today is smaller and more divided.
"They seem to have a few people trying to bring it back," McLean says. "I don't know if they can do it or not because it's so cliquish now."
According to McLean, the music cliques that follow local bands consist almost entirely of personal friends who aren't interested in seeing other bands perform live.
"If you go to a show now and you watch three bands playing, you'll watch a crowd come in for the first band, and then the crowd will almost completely change for the second band, and almost completely change for the third band," McLean says. "You pretty much go and see your friends play, and I think that's due to the fact that there's not a lot of camaraderie like there was in the '80s and the '90s."
Present Concerns
"There's no place for an original live music venue in Greensboro," say Audra Pascale, who co-founded Artistika Nightclub with her husband Hugo, nine years ago. "This town is driven on drink specials and cover bands, period."
Artistika learned this from experience. When the couple first opened the club, it was solely a live music venue, featuring touring rock and jazz groups. They charged a $5 cover at the door with most nights bringing in no more than five people. Attendance was so poor that the club almost went bankrupt.
So the Pascales switched formats and started offering what other music venues do to bring in a crowd: dance nights with a DJ who spins records. Now, with few exceptions, Artistika rarely hosts live music events.
Ask anyone in the local scene what Greensboro needs, and they will most likely say a consistent, medium-sized venue for original live music.
"We don't have that medium-sized venue," says Molly McGinn, a regular fixture in the Triad music scene since 1994, who recently co-founded the group Amelia's Mechanics. "If you want to do a show here, you either got to go to the Blind Tiger, which has a capacity of 200 at the most, or you got to do Carolina Theatre, which is like 1,000."
The longest-running live music venue in Greensboro is the Blind Tiger. Owned by Don "Doc" Beck, the 200-person-capacity venue has been hosting live bands at its Walker Avenue location for 21 years.
Because this venue is the only one in Greensboro booking live music shows daily, he's inundated with voice messages and e-mails from local and national acts eager to play the club.
"Every band and their brother from here to the East Coast calls me," says Beck, who mainly books jam and funk bands.
However, Beck is unable to book larger acts for fear that his club won't be able to accommodate their audience.
Greene Street Club, an established live music venue in Greensboro, consistently books mostly regional pop punk acts. Original live music shows don't happen on a daily or regular basis.
"The most consistent thing that happens at Greene Street is college night, which is just a DJ and a bunch of college kids coming out and dancing," says Rajesh Bandiwala, production manager at Greene Street Club.
Like the Blind Tiger, Greene Street Club also frequently hosts cover bands of popular musicians such as Michael Jackson, Guns N' Roses and KISS.
"The only way you can make a living playing music in Greensboro is to be in a cover band," Chris Jackson of Citified says. "Because places like Blind Tiger and Green Street, I like them and they're great places to play, but cover bands are actually the acts that fill those places, and that pays their bills as well."
"A lot of these people here in Greensboro want to hear cover songs," Beck says. "Songs they know from other artists, and they want to see bands they already know."
Finding Greensboro's preference for cover bands too strong to ignore, local guitarist Chris Micca recently left the touring band The Malamondos to focus on playing for the more cover song-friendly group the Raving Knaves.
"The good cover bands are making really good money," Micca says. "And they're not having to travel anywhere because Greensboro caters to cover music and DJ music in my opinion."
Possible Solutions
While musicians and concert promoters in Greensboro continue to wait for their medium-sized original live music club, Thomas Canoy helped to create one in High Point. Aquarius Music Hall is a 25,000-square-foot club with a 1,000-person capacity. It opened in late November last year.
Canoy believes attracting nationally touring acts to the venue could lead musicians to consider playing at other venues in Greensboro and Winston-Salem as well.
"I hope that it will at least cause them to even look at the market," says Canoy, Aquarius' artistic director. "And whether it's the Aquarius or some other club around here -- any of them are great -- if it entices them to give it a look and say, 'Well, there's a place that holds 600 (people), there's a place that holds 700 and there's a place that holds 1,000,' then that's a good thing."
Canoy's "what's good for the music scene is good for everyone" mentality is perhaps the one element the Triad can adopt from more prosperous music scenes in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. The Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, one of the best-known live music venues on the East Coast, will often host and promote shows at the neighboring club Local 506 in instances where they are overbooked, according to their production manager Doug Sutton. He adds that Cat's Cradle will program shows at other venues in Chapel Hill, Cary and the Carolina Theatre in Durham, when an act might attract a larger crowd than their venue might accommodate.
Music promoter John Fields of Greenfields Productions has coordinated successful musical events in Greensboro (including most recently Lucinda Williams and Loudon Wainwright III with Richard Thompson) as well as other parts of North Carolina. He says the willingness of Raleigh venues to work together makes booking shows in the state's capital much easier than in Greensboro.
"I work with the Lincoln Theatre out of Raleigh, and they have no problems working with other promoters or other clubs," Fields says. "If they get a call from another agent and their club is booked, they immediately call another club to see if they have an availability."
He later adds: "The venues here need to hope that each others' shows do well instead of hoping that each other does worse; that doesn't create a good market."
From a band standpoint, Citified's Chris Jackson says that groups need to reach out to other bands they've never met before, and even perform shows with groups who play different genres in order to expose their local audiences to different sounds.
"I think that would add more of a diverse crowd," Jackson says.
He says that community building programs like the dotmatrix project (www.dotmatrixproject.com, a collective that hosts and documents live music shows) and the fundraisers hosted by new media Web site Monkeywhale (www.monkeywhale.com) are giving local bands the opportunity to work with each other for the first time, and he hopes many will continue from there.
"The Greensboro music scene has a little bit of everything, but everything is separated," says Bandiwala from Greene Street Club. "And it would be better if everything is working together."
As far as audiences go, Amelia's Mechanics manager Neal Davis feels that if concert-goers want to see more original live music in the city, they should be more willing to attend shows that charge a cover price at the door.
"They have to understand their role, as a ticket buyer," Davis says. "They have to understand that this is how musicians make their money. This is how they eat. This is how they pay their rent.
"If you don't support them, then we're going to lose them, and we don't want to lose them."
McGinn adds, "There is a very vibrant community of people who are making really great things, and I think it's really going to start and show this year. It might not bust wide open where people are going to wake up and say 'Oh my god!' but it's happening."
Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com
