This Is Not A CMJ 2007 Review
This is not a CMJ 2007 review.
Tuesday October 16th, 2007. I was excited to head into New York City for this year's CMJ Music Marathon. I had not looked over the schedule too much, but I knew there were a few things I wanted to catch on Tuesday, and I figured I'd figure out the rest of the week's schedule later.
Leaving my day job at 11:30am to catch an 11:36am train into NYC, I hit my first snag when the train was 25 minutes behind schedule. Hmmm...I want to catch a screening of, "I'm Not There", Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan film, where different actors and actresses portray Dylan. Let's see, even 20 minutes late, the train should arrive at Penn Station at 12:56, giving me an hour to hop the subway down to the Puck building to pick up my press badge, and then hop another subway back up to Union square where the movie theater was showing the movie at 2pm. It will be tight, but I can make it...I thought.
First, the signs in subway section of Penn Station suck! I followed a sign that said go up these stairs to the ACE downtown, so I go them to a platform that says ACE uptown. What? I walk back down and look at the sign at the bottom of the stairs and again it reads up to the ACE downtown. Back up I go, and I'm on the platform for the ACE uptown. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. So I went back down and found a sign for an elevator to the ACE downtown. I got on the elevator and it went up what felt like half the flight of stairs I had just walked, and let me out at the ACE train downtown. Weird...reminded me of Being John Malkovich and the 7 and 1/2 floor.
Finally I'm down in SoHo, outside the subway station, just a few blocks from the Puck building, the HQ for the CMJ Music Marathon this year. It's not 1:20, so I figure 5 minutes to get to the building, and last year it took about 10-15 minutes to get my press badge, so I can get back to the subway station hopefully by 1:45pm, and get to the movie theater in Union Square before 2pm.
I'm sure you figured out by now that I did not make the 2pm screening. Here's why.
Arriving at the Puck Building, I see a line of people waiting, but also that people are walking in and out of the narrow 1 door entry way, so I walk in...into a mess of crowds of people waiting on various lines to get their badges, and wouldn't you know, the longest line, the one that went out the door, down the steps and around to the side, was the one for the press badges. Fuck...
2pm rolls around, and I'm still outside the doorway to the building. meanwhile I'm seeing people that walked in 5-10 minutes ago, walking out with their passes. Are you kidding me? The press people...the ones who are going to be writing and reporting about how long they had to wait to get their press passes...had to wait the longest amount of time? Doesn't make much sense to me, and after about 45 minutes of waiting, (at this point I was inside the doorway, but still not around the bend to where I could get my badge), I decided to get a little bit vocal about it, expressing my thoughts to the other people on line waiting for their press passes. We were all joking around about how we were going to write negative reviews, but I guess we weren't really joking now, were we? At least I wasn't.
Finally around 2:30 I get up to the counter and get my press badge...only instead of it saying that I was associated with BlowUpRadio.com & Lazlo's Den, it said I was with Remix (which I've since done a web search and discovered that Remix focuses on artists, producers, engineers, bands, DJs and music gear in the rapidly growing culture of music production and performance). Apparently all of the press badges got fouled up (I wonder who the confused soul was who got a badge saying BlowUpRadio.com on it). In CMJ's defense, they did offer to reprint the badge for me to say BlowUpRadio.com, but after already waiting an hour just to get the misprinted badge, I had no interest in wasting anymore time so I took the badge, only realizing an hour later when I had gone far away from the Puck building, that they had not given me a photo pass. To say that CMJ did not have there shit together this year in dealing with the badges, is an under statement.
The gift bag situation wasn't any better, with me walking into the next room of the overly crowded building (they had much more space in previous year's then they did this year in the Puck building, where you could still smell the fresh paint on the walls), only to find that they had just run out of gift bags. While I waited, I was given an Ed Hardy energy drink, that the can said was "apple flavor". It may as well have said Robitussin flavored...it was really nasty. I also wandered around their little concourse of vendors, which was pretty sad, and short on good freebies. One rap label was giving out CDs, and thought they informed me it was new school and not old school rap (I generally prefer the latter), I promised to give it a listen. However, I discarded the CD when I saw it was snippets of tracks, and not full songs. What's the point really? Anyone that wants to play it on college or internet radio, or anywhere else is going to what, play a 30 second snippet. "Hey, that's 30 seconds of rap, (insert artist name here). I'd love to play you the whole track, but the label was too cheap to give me a whole song."
Anyway, I grabbed a copy of every magazine on the newsstand (I was in a bad mood at this point, having missed the movie and wasted a lot of time waiting for my badge and now for a gift bag, so I figured I'd take anything I could to make up for it...call it cheap if you must, I prefer to call it my protest), and I circled back to the gift bag area...just as they run out of the next batch of gift bags. Are you fucking kidding me??? It's several hours into the first day of the CMJ Music Marathon, and you're already running out of gift bags??? Yeesch, I've seen better planning at an anarchist's convention.
Finally, I get a gift bag, and sadly, it's filled with mostly rubbish. Let's see, in it was a Sandisk badge holder (lame), a Berklee College of Music earplug holder with earplugs (the coolest thing in the bag), various pins (none of which were interesting enough to make particular mention of), assorted CDs (which I have yet to thoroughly go through, so there may be some cool music there), and a bunch of flyers, the most amusing of which is for special CMJ screenings of the original Alien, and Predator films to promote the upcoming release, AVP-R (which they are quick to point out is rated R, which already makes it an improvement from the terrible AVP PG-13 film a few years ago), and some flyers telling me to go to their site to download free music (cheap bastards couldn't put a CD in like everyone else). Oh, and they threw in another one of those awful energy drinks (which I subsequently left in the break room at my day job, where anything not nailed to the ground is usually taken...it's been there over a day now with no takers). Overall, the gift bag was not worth the time I waited for it.
I put the gift bag, the CDs, magazines, everything I picked up into a backpack I was smart enough to bring. Well, it seemed like I was smart enough to bring the backpack, until Wednesday morning when I woke up...but I am getting ahead of myself....
As I was leaving the Puck building I asked 2 different CMJ employees where the panels were going on. Throughout the week CMJ had various panels going on and one was currently going on about the state of punk rock music that sounded interesting. Unfortunately, both people I asked seemed to have no idea where the panels where being held, and the CMJ guide only gave room names, not an address.
Can you sense the animosity I have at this point towards the whole festival?
The only good news was the Puck building was just a few blocks away from Two Boots Pizza, which is probably my second favorite pizza (after Mack & Manko's down in Ocean City, NJ). So I stopped by Two Boots for 2 slices of Tony Clifton (all the pies there are named after celebrities). The pizza turned out to be my highlight of CMJ...yes, that is sad, but it is really good pizza.
Finishing my slices, I decided to talk a nice leisurely walk through Manhattan to check out Banjo Jim's, a venue I was looking forward to hitting that evening for a set by the Future Kings Of Nowhere, an acousticore band that my friend Scruff (from the local band Kohuff), had recommended. It took a while to walk over to Banjo Jim's, which I discovered is way off the subway line grid, and actually as block away from what looked like a power plant. By the time I did get there I was tired, and my upper back was starting to feel a little pain. I don't normally wear a backpack, and apparently I was wearing it wrong, causing most of the weight to be carried by the upper back and not the entire back.
Being nowhere near a subway station, I started walking back towards Union Square. It was at this point that I realized that I was going to have to either take a cab or walk back to Banjo Jim's later that night , and being short on cash, and too tired to walk back, when I got to Union Square I said fuck it, and took the Subway back to Penn Station and caught the next train home. CMJ had put me in a foul mood, and I figured I'd be happier going home and watching the new episode of Reaper on TV (which I enjoyed immensely, in case you're wondering).
A little side note here, The Future Kings Of Nowhere, stopped by Lazlo's Den on Sunday to record an interview and in-studio performance, and not only are they cool guys, but the 2 songs they played live here in the studio were amazing! I'm listing to their self-titled debut album right now and it's really good. I'm kinda pissed I missed their set at CMJ. But I am hoping to get them back here to New Jersey to play a show at Buddie's Tavern.
Wednesday, as I alluded to before, I woke up with massive upper back pain from apparently wearing the backpack wrong the day before. D'oh! What really sucks was today was the one day I was really looking forward to, with showcases from Organic Entertainment that was going to have sets from Billy Harvey, and Second Dan (one of the best live bands I've seen this year), and Magnum PR, which included sets by The Red Romance, Foreign Born, and the Deadly Syndrome (all three of whom put out great albums I play regularly on Lazlo's Den). I rested most of the day in hopes of making it in for some of the showcases in the evening, but alas, between my back, and my wife's Anklyosing Spondylitis acting up, it was not to be.
Thursday I looked over the schedule and didn't see anything that made me want to rush into the City. I think I've just become a bit jaded...I mean is it really fun to have to sit on the train for a hour, then a subway, and then walk a number of blocks, to then have to stand in a (likely) crowded bar, just to watch a band that may be good? I love going to see live bands, but it's nice when I can take a 30 minute or less drive to the venue, park within a block of the place, and maybe even find a place to sit while watching the show. At what point did many venues forget that people want to be comfortable while watching a band play? I know a lot of people who refuse to go to shows anymore because they are tired of standing for hours in an overcrowded bar. I can't say I blame them.
So anyway, I spent Thursday working on the new BlowUpRadio.com webcast, which hopefully will be ready to be brought to the airwaves (webwaves?) soon. I'll talk more about that when it's ready to go live.
Friday I had every intention of going in to see Warm In The Wake open for Counting Crows at the Gramercy. Earlier in the week Warm In The Wake's label had contacted me offering me guestlist for the show. Knowing full well that any show with a name band like Counting Crows was going to only let in limited CMJ badges, I jumped at the opportunity. Warm In The Wake's album, "American prehistoric", is a great disc, as I had said in a previous review. Of course I've been a longtime fan of Counting Crows also, so I could get to see two (hopefully) great performances. Well as it turns out either Livewire Records (Warm In The Wake's label), didn't get guest list privileges, or I wasn't important enough to get on to the short list. Deciding that it wasn't worth the long trip into NYC to maybe get into the show with my CMJ badge, I opted to spend some quality time with my wife. If a band wants me to review their live show the least they could do is put me on the guest list. I don't think that's a lot to ask.
Saturday rolled around and while I thought about going in to try to get into the Spoon show at Roseland, I realized several things.
1. It was going to be another limited badge acceptance thing, so the odds of getting in were sketchy.
2. Spoon's label has time and time again, ignored my e-mail requests for albums to play on Lazlo's Den, and blocked me from doing a phone interview with Spoon for a previous area show, that the show promoter was trying to set up.
3. Roseland Ballroom, does not have great sound. It's high ceiling causes a lot of echo, and most shows I've seen there suffer soundwise, as a result.
So there you have it, this is not a CMJ review.
I'm sure some will complain that this is an overly negative review, but hopefully you found my tale and sacrasm to be amusing, as ultimately that was the intent. But yeah, I did bitch a little more than usual :)
This is not a CMJ 2007 review.
Tuesday October 16th, 2007. I was excited to head into New York City for this year's CMJ Music Marathon. I had not looked over the schedule too much, but I knew there were a few things I wanted to catch on Tuesday, and I figured I'd figure out the rest of the week's schedule later.
Leaving my day job at 11:30am to catch an 11:36am train into NYC, I hit my first snag when the train was 25 minutes behind schedule. Hmmm...I want to catch a screening of, "I'm Not There", Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan film, where different actors and actresses portray Dylan. Let's see, even 20 minutes late, the train should arrive at Penn Station at 12:56, giving me an hour to hop the subway down to the Puck building to pick up my press badge, and then hop another subway back up to Union square where the movie theater was showing the movie at 2pm. It will be tight, but I can make it...I thought.
First, the signs in subway section of Penn Station suck! I followed a sign that said go up these stairs to the ACE downtown, so I go them to a platform that says ACE uptown. What? I walk back down and look at the sign at the bottom of the stairs and again it reads up to the ACE downtown. Back up I go, and I'm on the platform for the ACE uptown. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. So I went back down and found a sign for an elevator to the ACE downtown. I got on the elevator and it went up what felt like half the flight of stairs I had just walked, and let me out at the ACE train downtown. Weird...reminded me of Being John Malkovich and the 7 and 1/2 floor.
Finally I'm down in SoHo, outside the subway station, just a few blocks from the Puck building, the HQ for the CMJ Music Marathon this year. It's not 1:20, so I figure 5 minutes to get to the building, and last year it took about 10-15 minutes to get my press badge, so I can get back to the subway station hopefully by 1:45pm, and get to the movie theater in Union Square before 2pm.
I'm sure you figured out by now that I did not make the 2pm screening. Here's why.
Arriving at the Puck Building, I see a line of people waiting, but also that people are walking in and out of the narrow 1 door entry way, so I walk in...into a mess of crowds of people waiting on various lines to get their badges, and wouldn't you know, the longest line, the one that went out the door, down the steps and around to the side, was the one for the press badges. Fuck...
2pm rolls around, and I'm still outside the doorway to the building. meanwhile I'm seeing people that walked in 5-10 minutes ago, walking out with their passes. Are you kidding me? The press people...the ones who are going to be writing and reporting about how long they had to wait to get their press passes...had to wait the longest amount of time? Doesn't make much sense to me, and after about 45 minutes of waiting, (at this point I was inside the doorway, but still not around the bend to where I could get my badge), I decided to get a little bit vocal about it, expressing my thoughts to the other people on line waiting for their press passes. We were all joking around about how we were going to write negative reviews, but I guess we weren't really joking now, were we? At least I wasn't.
Finally around 2:30 I get up to the counter and get my press badge...only instead of it saying that I was associated with BlowUpRadio.com & Lazlo's Den, it said I was with Remix (which I've since done a web search and discovered that Remix focuses on artists, producers, engineers, bands, DJs and music gear in the rapidly growing culture of music production and performance). Apparently all of the press badges got fouled up (I wonder who the confused soul was who got a badge saying BlowUpRadio.com on it). In CMJ's defense, they did offer to reprint the badge for me to say BlowUpRadio.com, but after already waiting an hour just to get the misprinted badge, I had no interest in wasting anymore time so I took the badge, only realizing an hour later when I had gone far away from the Puck building, that they had not given me a photo pass. To say that CMJ did not have there shit together this year in dealing with the badges, is an under statement.
The gift bag situation wasn't any better, with me walking into the next room of the overly crowded building (they had much more space in previous year's then they did this year in the Puck building, where you could still smell the fresh paint on the walls), only to find that they had just run out of gift bags. While I waited, I was given an Ed Hardy energy drink, that the can said was "apple flavor". It may as well have said Robitussin flavored...it was really nasty. I also wandered around their little concourse of vendors, which was pretty sad, and short on good freebies. One rap label was giving out CDs, and thought they informed me it was new school and not old school rap (I generally prefer the latter), I promised to give it a listen. However, I discarded the CD when I saw it was snippets of tracks, and not full songs. What's the point really? Anyone that wants to play it on college or internet radio, or anywhere else is going to what, play a 30 second snippet. "Hey, that's 30 seconds of rap, (insert artist name here). I'd love to play you the whole track, but the label was too cheap to give me a whole song."
Anyway, I grabbed a copy of every magazine on the newsstand (I was in a bad mood at this point, having missed the movie and wasted a lot of time waiting for my badge and now for a gift bag, so I figured I'd take anything I could to make up for it...call it cheap if you must, I prefer to call it my protest), and I circled back to the gift bag area...just as they run out of the next batch of gift bags. Are you fucking kidding me??? It's several hours into the first day of the CMJ Music Marathon, and you're already running out of gift bags??? Yeesch, I've seen better planning at an anarchist's convention.
Finally, I get a gift bag, and sadly, it's filled with mostly rubbish. Let's see, in it was a Sandisk badge holder (lame), a Berklee College of Music earplug holder with earplugs (the coolest thing in the bag), various pins (none of which were interesting enough to make particular mention of), assorted CDs (which I have yet to thoroughly go through, so there may be some cool music there), and a bunch of flyers, the most amusing of which is for special CMJ screenings of the original Alien, and Predator films to promote the upcoming release, AVP-R (which they are quick to point out is rated R, which already makes it an improvement from the terrible AVP PG-13 film a few years ago), and some flyers telling me to go to their site to download free music (cheap bastards couldn't put a CD in like everyone else). Oh, and they threw in another one of those awful energy drinks (which I subsequently left in the break room at my day job, where anything not nailed to the ground is usually taken...it's been there over a day now with no takers). Overall, the gift bag was not worth the time I waited for it.
I put the gift bag, the CDs, magazines, everything I picked up into a backpack I was smart enough to bring. Well, it seemed like I was smart enough to bring the backpack, until Wednesday morning when I woke up...but I am getting ahead of myself....
As I was leaving the Puck building I asked 2 different CMJ employees where the panels were going on. Throughout the week CMJ had various panels going on and one was currently going on about the state of punk rock music that sounded interesting. Unfortunately, both people I asked seemed to have no idea where the panels where being held, and the CMJ guide only gave room names, not an address.
Can you sense the animosity I have at this point towards the whole festival?
The only good news was the Puck building was just a few blocks away from Two Boots Pizza, which is probably my second favorite pizza (after Mack & Manko's down in Ocean City, NJ). So I stopped by Two Boots for 2 slices of Tony Clifton (all the pies there are named after celebrities). The pizza turned out to be my highlight of CMJ...yes, that is sad, but it is really good pizza.
Finishing my slices, I decided to talk a nice leisurely walk through Manhattan to check out Banjo Jim's, a venue I was looking forward to hitting that evening for a set by the Future Kings Of Nowhere, an acousticore band that my friend Scruff (from the local band Kohuff), had recommended. It took a while to walk over to Banjo Jim's, which I discovered is way off the subway line grid, and actually as block away from what looked like a power plant. By the time I did get there I was tired, and my upper back was starting to feel a little pain. I don't normally wear a backpack, and apparently I was wearing it wrong, causing most of the weight to be carried by the upper back and not the entire back.
Being nowhere near a subway station, I started walking back towards Union Square. It was at this point that I realized that I was going to have to either take a cab or walk back to Banjo Jim's later that night , and being short on cash, and too tired to walk back, when I got to Union Square I said fuck it, and took the Subway back to Penn Station and caught the next train home. CMJ had put me in a foul mood, and I figured I'd be happier going home and watching the new episode of Reaper on TV (which I enjoyed immensely, in case you're wondering).
A little side note here, The Future Kings Of Nowhere, stopped by Lazlo's Den on Sunday to record an interview and in-studio performance, and not only are they cool guys, but the 2 songs they played live here in the studio were amazing! I'm listing to their self-titled debut album right now and it's really good. I'm kinda pissed I missed their set at CMJ. But I am hoping to get them back here to New Jersey to play a show at Buddie's Tavern.
Wednesday, as I alluded to before, I woke up with massive upper back pain from apparently wearing the backpack wrong the day before. D'oh! What really sucks was today was the one day I was really looking forward to, with showcases from Organic Entertainment that was going to have sets from Billy Harvey, and Second Dan (one of the best live bands I've seen this year), and Magnum PR, which included sets by The Red Romance, Foreign Born, and the Deadly Syndrome (all three of whom put out great albums I play regularly on Lazlo's Den). I rested most of the day in hopes of making it in for some of the showcases in the evening, but alas, between my back, and my wife's Anklyosing Spondylitis acting up, it was not to be.
Thursday I looked over the schedule and didn't see anything that made me want to rush into the City. I think I've just become a bit jaded...I mean is it really fun to have to sit on the train for a hour, then a subway, and then walk a number of blocks, to then have to stand in a (likely) crowded bar, just to watch a band that may be good? I love going to see live bands, but it's nice when I can take a 30 minute or less drive to the venue, park within a block of the place, and maybe even find a place to sit while watching the show. At what point did many venues forget that people want to be comfortable while watching a band play? I know a lot of people who refuse to go to shows anymore because they are tired of standing for hours in an overcrowded bar. I can't say I blame them.
So anyway, I spent Thursday working on the new BlowUpRadio.com webcast, which hopefully will be ready to be brought to the airwaves (webwaves?) soon. I'll talk more about that when it's ready to go live.
Friday I had every intention of going in to see Warm In The Wake open for Counting Crows at the Gramercy. Earlier in the week Warm In The Wake's label had contacted me offering me guestlist for the show. Knowing full well that any show with a name band like Counting Crows was going to only let in limited CMJ badges, I jumped at the opportunity. Warm In The Wake's album, "American prehistoric", is a great disc, as I had said in a previous review. Of course I've been a longtime fan of Counting Crows also, so I could get to see two (hopefully) great performances. Well as it turns out either Livewire Records (Warm In The Wake's label), didn't get guest list privileges, or I wasn't important enough to get on to the short list. Deciding that it wasn't worth the long trip into NYC to maybe get into the show with my CMJ badge, I opted to spend some quality time with my wife. If a band wants me to review their live show the least they could do is put me on the guest list. I don't think that's a lot to ask.
Saturday rolled around and while I thought about going in to try to get into the Spoon show at Roseland, I realized several things.
1. It was going to be another limited badge acceptance thing, so the odds of getting in were sketchy.
2. Spoon's label has time and time again, ignored my e-mail requests for albums to play on Lazlo's Den, and blocked me from doing a phone interview with Spoon for a previous area show, that the show promoter was trying to set up.
3. Roseland Ballroom, does not have great sound. It's high ceiling causes a lot of echo, and most shows I've seen there suffer soundwise, as a result.
So there you have it, this is not a CMJ review.
I'm sure some will complain that this is an overly negative review, but hopefully you found my tale and sacrasm to be amusing, as ultimately that was the intent. But yeah, I did bitch a little more than usual :)