Promotions Confidential
Posted by Michael P. on June 10, 2008 around 3pm
Show business is a strange business, and music is probably the strangest of them all. From working in college radio, to becoming a promoter and talent buyer (jargon for booking agent lackey) for a recognized music venue, I’ve had the fortune of witness some truly astrophysical phenomena. As a quick bio, I spent close to five years heavily involved in the music scene of my old stomping ground, a quaint college town in the south, before uprooting to the city with broad shoulders.
I’ve always felt I could write a sitcom around these experiences, and I might just fax over my pilot to Lorne Michaels in the next couple of business days. The owner of the club where I once worked and played also had this idea, and he wanted to consolidate his thoughts into a book called, get this, “Bar World.” Yep. I think this avenue is better.
Anyway, most of following instances occurred at a 400+ capacity music venue and bar that shall not be specifically named to protect the innocent and to protect me from defamation claims. Not that any of this counts as defamation because it’s all true, but I have no way to prove it. The people that were there could certainly provide expert testimony to every detail, but since most people who work in music are invariably drunk half the time, I’m sure you start getting into witness credibility issues. Undoubtedly there are more bizarre stories that exist in the Chicago market, especially with the amount of music festivals held here. I think I can speak for CHIRP when saying that we’d love to hear your experiences as well!
So without further ado, here are some nuggets from the other side…..Rock stars rule.
(more…)
The Black Angels’ latest, Directions to See a Ghost, a poignant title encapsulating their increasingly distinct desert-noir dusty psych grooves, picks up right where 2006’s Passover left off. The Black Angels are neither original nor inventive. But in this case, it’s a-okay, and I’m gonna do something that rarely happens in a world of snarky blogs: make an argument for why derivative can be sometimes a preferred position and why the Black Angels are, in fact, the bee’s knees.