The Real Problem with the Chicago Music Scene

I hear a lot of complaining about the Chicago music scene.  How it's stale, how clubs and bars don't care about bands, how a few agents have a monopoly on all of the shows, etc.  A lot of it is true.  A lot of it is just whining.  In fact, part of the reason I'm doing this blog is because I want to help instill a sense of community among artists of this city.  Perhaps that will help.  Either way, here are my thoughts on the issue.

I lead a young band, we've been doing it since high school, we're all under 21. And we've been active in the Chicago music scene for a while.  Not just shitty shows at our school, mind you, the real Chicago scene.  We've played at 21+ clubs, and been asked back to several places. Even made money off of it occaisonally.

How do we do this? We agressively promote our shows physically and on the internet, all on our own time. And we still don't have that great of a draw, especially to bars. But we play a good show and scrape by, looking for shows in odd places and getting it done.  We play out several times a year, and get positive feedback every time. The problem isn't as much with clubs and bars as it is with the bands themselves. I've seen hundreds of bands play, and there is literally nothing about any of them that would make me want to see them again. That's why it's hard to develop a draw aside from family and friends. All of the songs sound the same, all of the influences are the same, that's all it is is the same bullshit almost everywhere you go. Yes, there are a few bands that are exceptions, but I stress "a few."

My band? We refuse to play more than one cover a show. We make sure to vary our set and write songs that sound different from one another. And we're young, and get screwed a lot, and don't make money, but things are happening. Labels have noticed, believe it or not. The elephant in the room is that bands are so obsessed with playing shows and developing draws, that they forget that before you can draw the big crowds and get paid, you need to spend countless hours in the basement, slamming on an acoustic guitar, writing song after song after song, and then even more hours playing them with your band so that you can develop them into something brilliant. The scene is full of countless shitty metal bands that are clones of each other, and almost as many mediocre rock bands. You want to "make it?" Don't rely on bars, or agents, or even shows in general. Make something new, something memorable, that somebody wants to see more than once. I don't care how much music theory you've mastered, how well you can shred or scream, how fast your drummer can play, or how much experimental bullshit you throw into your songs. I want something that I can connect with, something that I can feel proud of being one of the first people to see with my own two eyes and then when it gets huge say "I knew them before they were big" with a great big smile on my face.

The blues scene is the perfect example. Nothing new in decades. I've spent time in it, even though I'm a punk guy. I love the blues. I dated Eddie C. Campbell's daughter, for Christ's sake! And jamming with him and his buddies, playing with them and being touted to blues shows...it's stale. Buddy Guy's, Kingston Mines, all those clubs, they rely on what's tried-and-true, because there's nothing else. Do they book a good-sounding blues band that they KNOW will draw a large crowd because they've been around for 20 years? Or a band that sounds exactly the same, but has only been around for 2 years and will draw a quarter of the people? Sorry, but if you're a blues musician in this city, I already know that you're not doing anything different. Blues has been around for almost a hundred years, but I know that somebody good enough can still revolutionize it. Do that, and maybe you'll get noticed without slowly working your way up over the course of a decade. Otherwise, stop complaining.

Please, isn't there anyone out there who cares more about writing music than about getting paid? Yeah, the club circuit is shit. Deal. Adapt. If it's about the money for you, then kindly fuck off and leave the music scene to the music-lovers. If all of the jobbers, all of the bullshit blues "bands," the crappy legion of metal bands and metalcore bands, the whiny emos, and most of all, the bands that sound together but just stand there and play a mix of covers and originals without moving at all, would just go the hell away, things would improve drastically. Your success is not measured by how much money you make or what your draw is. It's those moments after a show when a complete stranger walks up to you and says "I loved that fourth song you played." Or, "Your guitar playing is very interesting." Or, "Do you have any other shows coming up?" It's also how long you're willing to stick with it, and how hard you try. If you're truly talented and unique, and if you stick with it long enough and work your ass off, YOU WILL achieve some measure of traditional success. It's just a matter of when.

Stay tuned.