Rock & roll and computers
– they would seem to go together as well the Grateful Dead and a
caffeine
injection! Both are the realms of outcasts, certainly, but out-
casts of two different stripes altogether. Just imagining a straw-maned
guitar
hero, clad in frayed jeans and a dirty M�t�rhead T-shirt,
slouching
at a desk and using his soloing fingers to tap commands into his PC, is
enough
to provoke a healthy chortle. The image of a bespectacled, well-coiffed
lad in
an Arrow shirt and a daringly bright-colored tie smashing a
Stratocaster for a
crowd of screaming fans, on the other hand, is downright unnerving. But
as
technology and time march on, it was inevitable that the two groups
would
eventually meet. And the point of intersection is the Internet – the
fabled
Information Superhighway – where words, pictures, and ideas can be
traded
across the planet with abandon. At present, perhaps not too many
musicians have
home computers, but they all know someone who does – otherwise
how would
they get their flyers made? And eventually a bass player trying to
figure out
how to play Doom on his cousin Ernie’s Mac was destined to
mistakenly
switch on Ern’s modem instead. Thus sprang forth the idea of promoting
bands on
the Net.
In case you’ve been encased in amber or hung over on Amstel for the
last few
years, the Internet is a planet-sprawling latticework of connections
between
computers, offering a number of different services. For the novice, the
simple
way of using the Net to try and hawk your band is through the Usenet
Newsgroups. This text-only resource consists of a daunting array of
discussion
groups where obsessos of all types get together and exchange
information about
their favorite TV shows (news:alt.tv.brady-bunch,
news:rec.arts.tv.mst3k),
interests (news:misc.survivalism, news:talk.politics.tibet), and yes,
even
bands (news:alt.music.monkees, news:alt.basement.graveyard – the latter
being a
group dedicated to the Cure, sort of).
Imagine being able to send and publicly display letters – without
ever paying
for a stamp or licking an envelope – to everyone you’d ever met or
overheard a
shred of conversation from, anonymously, and without thinking
particularly hard
about what you want to say or about the receivers’ feelings. Well,
that’s the
Usenet and what fun it is! (E-mail is the same thing, only done in
private so
you can get really nasty.) The only Austin band so far to
receive its
own personal newsgroup (they’re generally started by the fans
themselves) is
the Butthole Surfers, who actually have not one but two groups
dedicated
to them (news:alt.music.butthole.surfers and news:alt.music.
buthole.surfers).
In keeping with the twisted nature of the band, most Net readers choose
to post
their misinformation-packed messages (so who’s in “P” this week?) to the
one that’s spelled wrong.
Elsewhere are the surprisingly little-used news:alt.music.texas and
the
ever-busy news:austin.music, where the conversation ranges from guitar
junkies
wondering how much longer it’ll be ’til the next Eric Johnson album to
whether
“Gibby Hanes [sic] own[s] Emo’s” (SoftFX@aol.com) or if “Gibby is just
another
patron smoking crack in the women’s bathroom” (MDRubin@aol.com), and
back to
whether or not posting an open message to Eric Johnson threatening that
“I know
what your car looks like” was the best way to get him to hurry up with
that new
record. Other currently active series of messages, known as “threads,”
include
“Boycott Pearl Jam!,” “IS ERNIE GAMMAGE STILL ALIVE?,” and the
eternally-popular “What is `titty bingo’???????????”
Some musicians with access to a computer (often through their day
jobs) and
their wits about them actually attempt to use the newsgroups as a
promotional
tool, posting short messages about upcoming gigs and other
miscellaneous band
information. The question is, though, whether these posts are reaching
the
bands’ intended audience. Rich Malley of the Horsies regularly posts
information on news:austin.music about the group’s upcoming shows, as
well as
on changes in the lineup, and various members’ medical problems. He
says,
however, that so far most of the noticeable response to his postings
has been
from “friends who say, `I saw your post!'” and that he has accumulated
“maybe
five pieces of E-mail from people I didn’t know.” He has managed
to
renew an old friendship, since former Black Spring/Meat Joy member
Melissa
Cobb, currently living in California, saw one of his posts and sent him
a
“hello.” As far as continuing to promote the Horsies through the
Usenet, he
says without any great enthusiasm that he “can’t see any reason not
to.”
“Hugh Jass,” bass player for Tallboy, also posts information about
most of his
band’s shows and notes little response via the actual Net, but says he
has
spoken to a few people who had come to see the band after reading about
them on
the Net. And, he says, they were “real normal people, not really
computer geek
pocket protector types.” Still, as with Malley, Jass’ most notable gain
from
the newsgroups didn’t involve increasing his band’s audience; “I posted
that I
was looking for an amp, and a guy responded that he had one on
consignment at
Ray Hennig’s going for $350… I went by and checked it out, E-mailed
him that
I wanted it, and he took it out of consignment and sold it to me direct
for
$100.”
Sounding like the name of a comic book international espionage
ring,
the World
Wide Web is the next plateau a band may consider scaling in their
search for a
following, but it’s a giant step up from the simplicity of the Usenet.
For one
thing, building a Web page involves a lot of work. A simple one
generally
includes a bio of the band (easy), at least one photo (tougher, and
requiring
more hardware, like a scanner), and possibly audio samples of the
group’s music
(Whoa! More software, more hardware, and competence in using
them). As
such, most bands usually have someone else create their pages for them.
Secondly, Web space, though it’s not yet prohibitively high-priced,
isn’t free
– usually. Malley says he has received offers for both cheap and free
Web space
and figures he’s going to pursue the free offer, though it’s not a
“burning
issue” with him. The Rudy Schwartz Project’s Joe Newman, who’s recently
been
offered a free Web page as well, observes that “it seems there’s these
people
out there that just like making Web pages.”
Malley, like many others familiar with the quirks of the castaways
on Internet
Island, says he doesn’t see a “clear link between the Web page and the
record
store.” In fact, he points to recent events involving policing or
censoring the
Net as indicating “there’s very little evidence that Internet geeks can
be
influenced into doing anything but surf.” He supposes that the
situation will
improve as a greater cross-section of people connect to the net. Danny
Barnes
of the Bad Livers (http://www.southern.com/southern/band/BADLI/) warns
that his
opinion on the usefulness of the Internet wavers from day to day with
each new
innovation, but speaking as a user, he says that the Net has yet to
draw him to
any new bands. “I never hear of any cool music on the Net really,” he
says.
“Some guy ranting about the latest corporate rebellion, maybe. I think
all that
stuff is really boring. Who cares what all these people think?”
Less cynical is Dave Prewitt, producer
of locally-based music
television
show CapZeyeZ (http://www.eden.com/capzeyez/capzeyez.html),
who
doesn’t concur with the all-geek theory. While he admits that the
amount of
reaction to his Net activities (Web and Usenet) has been “somewhat
weak,” he
asserts that “save for one `hair-farmer’ letter, all of the people who
have
contacted me seem to be genuine Austin/Texas music fans.”
Now, before I go any further, I should admit that in my own
dealings
with the
World Wide Web, I’ve been the fly rather than the spider. My wings are
slowly
shrinking and becoming vestigial though, and that fourth pair of legs
is
starting to sprout. Even so, like most people, I find it nearly
impossible to
avoid succumbing to the multitude of distractions a Web crawler
encounters on
the often tangled trail to the site they are seeking: Wait! Here’s a
collection of 30,000 drawings of Franklin Delano Roosevelt! Hey!
There’s an
entry form for the Oscar Meyer Wiener contest! Wow! Over here’s Mr.
Smarty
Pants’ new “Facts About Flan” Fun Page!
Eventually, though, I tend to find what I’m looking for, usually
discovering
in the process that the journey was more exciting than the destination.
A
typical band Web page, as I said above, generally includes a few photos
of the
members, a brief bio, maybe some sam-ples of songs or a video clip that
will
take you a half-hour to download. Sure, the first time you spotted that
pic of
the members of Sincola sitting in a field of pink flamingos you were
vaguely
amused, but then that’s probably because you already knew someone in
the band.
That said, there’s no question that if anyone – from fan to a record
company
president – hears good things about a band through the usual channels,
he or
she would be only too happy to find that information already waiting at
their
fingertips on the Net.
Wilson Jones, designer for Monsterbit Media
(http://monsterbit.com/mb.html ) –
the Internet site that Sincola and a number of other local bands call
“home
page” – finds himself frustrated with the limits of today’s technology,
and of
the Net surfers’ attention spans. Since the Web was created, the number
of what
he calls “cardboard postcards in space” has multiplied far beyond the
point
where a band can simply have such a page available and expect people to
“ooh”
and “aah” at it. Jones has dreams of creating more elaborate and yes,
more
interactive works, but has to face the fact that when someone
does go to extra efforts on the Web, what he comes up with is
liable to
take a good long time to download – more time than the average
Net-surfer is
interested in spending. “For the first time, we have a medium you can
play in,” he laments, “and unfortunately, people treat it like a
five-minute job break.” He finds the word “interactive” to be a sad
misnomer,
and waxes philosophical on how the Net of 1995 possesses all the
humanity of a
“cold, empty cavern.”
Monsterbit owner Melinda Price is more grounded (and
surge-protected
as well,
no doubt), and deals with the Net strictly in the present. She sees the
Web’s
potential realized best as a tool to “stretch the limits” of
traditional
marketing strategies, and not just as an alternative to those
strategies
(though she says that thinking too much like a marketing/promotions
guru
“grosses me out”). She finds that the Net works its wonders best as a
supplement for bands who already have solid promotion of the
pre-computer-age
variety, meaning that for a fledgling local band with little previous
notoriety, the benefits of a Web page may be nominal. For the
above-mentioned
Sincola, however, the Web page can include tour dates that actually
provide
useful information on a national level. Coupled with advance electronic
mailings and old fashioned phone calls, the Web page becomes a
practical point
of potential publicity (now I’m getting grossed out).
Surely the most ambitious of all Internet/band activity,
inaugurated last year by the Eden Matrix
(http://www.-eden.com/html/eden.html),
is the actual placing of a band on the Net – broadcasting a live
performance by a group to a World Wide audience. It’s said that as technology
grows, the world shrinks, but in the case of Internet broadcast the
opposite is
unfortunately true. Picture this: The Killer Bees are pumping out
furious
reggae rhythms to a beyond-capacity crowd of sweaty, dance-crazy
patrons of a
small Sixth Street club. The music blares, the beer flows, and the
heat, both
physical and emotional, is overwhelming. Now envision all that reduced
to a
muddy gray blur, more or less three inches square, sputtering along at
four or
five frames a second. The accompanying sound is buzzing tinnily from a
minuscule speaker on the side of your computer, one suited more for
making
warning beeps and the occasional soundbyte from the Simpsons (even
though you
could wire it up to your hi-fi easily enough). That is
the
current state of Internet broadcast.
Price, whose Monsterbit has also dabbled in this patchwork art,
compares its
extant state to its optimum “as Pong is to Nintendo” (or should that be
to
3DO?). Keep in mind that the Killer Bees broadcast programming was
designed to
give the audio priority over video, and the live performance was shot
with an
old junker of a black and white camera with no special lighting (like
the
computer experts have always said: Garbage in equals garbage
out).
According to Aubrey McCauley at Eden Matrix, the recent reggae shows
originating from the White Rabbit were potentially viewable by 14
million
people worldwide simply by downloading a free program called CU See
Me from a Web-friendly university. Of course, only those with Macintosh
computers,
which account for 10-15 percent of home PCs, could get the audio
portion of the
show, since the equivalent software for Windows is still under
development.
That brings us down to only around two million potential viewers.
In the end, the size of the actual viewing audience, according to
McCauley,
was a “pretty good” turnout of 326 people or rather 326
computer-equipped
locations, most likely including a klatch of buddies in a bar in
Istanbul, who
had previously communicated that they were eagerly anticipating the
show.
That’s up from 275 for a previous Black Pearl show, which did better
numbers
locally due to plugging by KLBJ radio, and the fact that Black Pearl is
a band
that isn’t afraid of self-promotion, with or without a Net. Keep in
mind that a
Rolling Stones broadcast that was proudly – though falsely – billed as
the
first such event (Eden Matrix had already been broadcasting
performances by New
Orleans-based Machine Screw) couldn’t have reached an audience of more
that
100, according to McCauley, due to the more demanding logistics of the
set-up
the Stones were using.
McCauley’s glasses bear far rosier lenses than those of
Monsterbit’s
Jones;
far from frustration, he buzzes with excitement over the next Matrix
project –
the first regularly appearing “TV show” on the net. The as-yet-untitled
show
will most likely take the form of a weekly interview program
originating in
California, and featuring the creators of the science fiction
television series
Babylon 5. McCauley says that future plans call for Matrix to
grow into
a full-time broadcast channel within the year, with emphasis placed on
avoiding
upgrades that will require more hardware on the viewers’ end. Still,
the days
of sending high-resolution live concerts in superphonic stereo from the
Blue
Flamingo to Istanbul or vice versa are a ways down the pike –
especially with
the Net growing ever more crowded with both commercial and artistic
attempts to
grab your attention.
The Bad Livers’ Barnes seems to have the right attitude about the
Internet of
the present, keeping himself satisfied with the bills that the
technology
currently fills. “I like to download software, get new games to play,
talk to
business associates, and send E-mail to friends,” he says. “It’s also a
good
way to talk to tech support for software you might be having trouble
with.” But
on the matter of the poor musician’s future with the Net as a means of
achieving fame and fortune, he cautions “I hate to sound fatalistic,
but as
soon as someone starts making any real money off of it, Big Brother
will suck
it up so fast it’ll make your head spin.” n
This article appears in July 14 • 1995 and July 14 • 1995 (Cover).