Good book for inexperienced gigging band?

June 17, 2005 9:14 AM

I'm looking for a good book (or alternative resource) full of guidance/advice/caveats for a green rock band getting into the shiny world of regular original-music gigging.

The notion is to supplement, rather than replace, the punch-in-the-nose real world experience that we have already started to acquire.

Divergent, tangential, and contrapuntal suggestions entirely welcome as well.

posted by cortex to media & arts (9 comments total)

I Hate the Man Who Runs This Bar!
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:26 AM on June 17, 2005

What do you mean by 'green' rock band?

Are you looking to book regular, local (where?) gigs, or are you looking to tour (where?) outside your town?

What do all those long words mean in the last sentence?

As a promoter who books bands at a large music venue in the midwest for a living, I feel I can offer up some personal advice (in a less public way. read: email) if that's something you think would be beneficial. For example, what promoters are and aren't looking for, what flags a demo/band as someone they will or will not book in the future, etc. Hit me up if you're interested.
posted by nitsuj at 9:28 AM on June 17, 2005

Here's a list of tips I put together in response to a previous AskMe question. The specific clubs are Minneapolicentric, but the general principles are pretty universal.
posted by COBRA! at 9:33 AM on June 17, 2005

Our Band Could Be Your Life
posted by mike_bling at 9:35 AM on June 17, 2005

Pick up the muscian's atlas and "Everything you wanted to know about the music business"
posted by drezdn at 10:40 AM on June 17, 2005

Didn't Punk Planet put out a guide of some sort, or maybe they publish it annually? (If annual, I guess it's more of resource guide, and perhaps less useful to you)
posted by Jack Karaoke at 11:27 AM on June 17, 2005

The who and where and such: we're in Portland, OR. We've been playing together as a unit for a bit more than a year now, and are feeling pretty solid and consistent in our performance and gear. We've started chasing down a few gigs (using what friends/contacts we have) and are basically just breaking into playing locally. Alt-ish rock originals.

We'd like to be gigging more regularly than we have been -- we had a show in early March, another in mid-April; this month we've had one on the 10th and another tomorrow night and that's it for the month, with a couple possibilities on the horizon for July. The earlier gigs were at Ash Street, who seem to like us well enough; we played last week at the revamped Tiger Bar, co-owned by a coworker of our lead singer; tomorrow we play Porky's thanks to another band who is friends with a friend. The next month stuff is via a band who is, again, friends with a friend.

So that's basically our entire resume. We have a mediocre demo at the moment; we're going to focus on some more careful home-brew recording for the next month and a half to get out a much better demo (and have a short disc to sell at shows).

None of us, essentially, has any idea what we're doing, but all of us have notions and ideas and instincts and preferences, and those, as in all bands, tend to collide and make things more complicated.

What I'm looking for in book/reference/resource/advice form is a view (or preferably multiple views) from an experienced, realistic position on what can and ought to be done to move toward making this sort of thing work more consistently. Asking questions is hard in part because the key thing is knowing what to ask questions about, neh?
posted by cortex at 11:31 AM on June 17, 2005

Email sent. ;)
posted by nitsuj at 12:09 PM on June 17, 2005

The Creepy Crawl, a small punk club in St. Louis, MO has a list of 39 Annoying Things That Bands Do. It's a great rundown of what not to do, check it out.
posted by nitsuj at 12:22 PM on June 17, 2005