Birmingham music scene, part 1: Why we need festivals

Birmingham-based promoter and musician Brian Scott Teasley wrote a two-part essay about the city’s music scene. It is reprinted in full below with permission.

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By Brian Scott Teasley

I just read the Birmingham Weekly piece by Jon Poor about the Birmingham News piece by Mary Colurso about the Birmingham Arts and Music festival. This is my piece about the Birmingham Weekly piece by Jon Poor about the Birmingham News piece by Mary Colurso about the BAAM festival.

For three days in August, the first BAAM festival featured bands in a dozen venues across the city.

I just read the original article by Colurso, and it’s actually pretty mild and diplomatic. I think Mary is a nice, very well-meaning person who has to cover horrendous, breakfast-regurgitatingly bad records and concerts due to the conservative nature of the newspaper, and I empathize with her position to some small degree. I’m not necessarily giving her a pass, but as dumb as it is to say, it is what it is.

As far as Poor’s response column, though, I think Colurso was a real easy target, and the bravado was a little unnecessary. He’s probably a super-great guy who really believes in the Birmingham scene, so please don’t view this as a personal attack on him.

And I really don’t care about people criticizing other people within what goes down in Birmingham (it’s predominantly a healthy thing). But taking the side of the “local music scene” for people who are in bands who feel they should be covered in the Birmingham News, and don’t understand the editorial process she deals with, is misplaced criticism.

The vitriol isn’t about Colurso’s article that only ever so slightly pans the festival, because most of the responses I’ve read have been about how she doesn’t support the scene and not how BAAM really “brought it” when compared to other festivals, even embryonic ones.

I am so proud of BAAM’s efforts, because festival organizers displayed a level of care and love that I rarely see. Everyone I dealt with was incredibly cool and helpful, and I am so happy it was a success on many levels. If the festival was measured on heart, effort and a general desire to make something positive happen in Birmingham, then indeed it was a top-shelf showing. A-pluses and gold stars all around.

That said, the idea of any other similar-size city doing a festival of predominantly local and regional bands who already play locally often — I’m talking about double-digit often — is indeed somewhat amusing. And I don’t totally mean that negatively; it just seems like an odd concept to me.

It definitely got some over-the-mountain residents out to support music for a night or two. I guess bands won over some new fans in Birmingham that way, though I wonder if those people will really see Through the Sparks, or any other great local bands from BAAM, on a Tuesday night at a small club downtown outside of a special circumstance like the festival.

Maybe I’m wrong. I often am.

‘Birmingham may need a festival that
combines vital national acts with
a showcase for our best locals.’

City Stages finally did blow itself into oblivion in 2009, and it absolutely had been a tragic farce for many years, but all the comparisons of BAAM to City Stages is baffling to me. I’m starting to believe that Birmingham may actually really need a festival that combines vital, pertinent national acts with a showcase of our best locals.

A new festival should to be far more streamlined than what City Stages had become during its 20-year history, but it still would be a great thing for Birmingham for a myriad of reasons. This recent revelation of mine counters my previous opinions that Birmingham is best served without the headache of a festival.

BAAM is an absolutely excellent new idea, but it’s not going to be a national force on the festival circuit if it does not evolve into something almost entirely different than this year’s version. I think Colurso was trying to express that, and it just didn’t get stated very well in the space allocated to the article.

(One thing stated in Poor’s column is that only six bands are mentioned when more than 100 played. However, it fails itself to mention that Colurso had a 300-word piece to cover everything and to mention a large number of the bands would have taken up a third or more of her column.)

Maybe it doesn’t matter that BAAM isn’t, and won’t be, the next Coachella. Maybe we need a fun, rewarding local music festival in the vein of Artwalk for local visual. Maybe we do just need a simple antidote to City Stages, and not an actual cure.

As much as an all-around triumph as the festival was, I think it somewhat irrelevant, as stated by Poor, that BAAM was “in the black,” which obviously contrasts with City Stages. While it’s great that anyone can balance a checkbook for any sort of festival, BAAM didn’t have to pay $40,000 to the Flaming Lips.

(To compare the two festivals is so lucidly erroneous that it pains me to see other people do it, which basically means I’m in tremendous pain, as I do it here to address other people doing it. Damn you, Birmingham festival comparisons! No one wins in this crazy, serpentine game.)

You’re simply not going to have a Birmingham favorite like My Morning Jacket play for less than $35,000, and that’s definitely on the low side, in a festival situation. And where does that money come from? It’s not easy to keep a festival profitable, even with mid-scale national acts.

A festival with larger acts may lose money for years, or it may even need correctly allocated, honestly recorded subsidies. Heaven forbid a city government provide money for arts or even entertainment; that’d be like them red Commies in Europe!

Maybe a “locals only” festival is what we need right now, but BAAM has partially succeeded because it sidestepped a lot of the major logistical issues. To not call it out for having a limited scope, as Colurso sort of did, would be fawning at best and disingenuous at worst.

Brian Scott Teasley, who has played in more than 10 bands, most notably Man or Astro-Man? and the Polyphonic Spree, is a music promoter for Birmingham’s Bottletree Cafe and will even admit to working off and on in music journalism. He has played more than 2,600 shows in 36 countries.

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Part 2: How to build the scene, for real

What kind of music festival does Birmingham need, if any? Sound off in the comments.

Photo credits: mugshot by Wes Frazer; club scene by Science_Jerk, CC 2.0.

Posted: Tuesday, September 7, 2010, 10:44 am, in B'ham, Culture.
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