Ever heard of a “radius clause”?
A radius clause is an agreement, struck between an artist and whoever is booking them to perform, stipulating that the artist must not perform within a certain geographical area and time proximate to the date of contracted performance.
These agreements can be more or less formal. If there’s a contract, the clause is written into the contract. If you’re getting paid big bucks to headline a pricey festival in Boston, for example, the organizers will freak out if you book an intimate gig at a local Cambridge club.
The way the organizers see it, the band’s double-dipping is stealing money directly out of their pocket, because the fans who would’ve paid the full festival price to see Band X instead pay less to see the same band at a local club. Financial and reputational costs can be incurred if you break these agreements.
Otherwise, and especially when it comes to small clubs and underground artists, these agreements are unwritten, and variously taken with a grain of salt, fudged (Apollo Sunshine used to play incognito gigs as Electric Zeus), or outright ignored. There’s not enough money at stake in workaday gigging on the local music scene for anyone to get truly huffy about bands with 500 to 1,500 monthly Spotify listeners playing out “too often.”
And yet some people do get huffy. There’s a manager at one local venue who wants me to write an article about how terrible it is when local bands play out “too often,” presumably reducing the draw for their show at his venue.
I’m just not feeling it. I want local music venues with strong bottom lines, but telling garage bands not to play too many garages feels misguided. Put me in the “more is more” camp. Let’s build a show-going culture where music fans hit more gigs per week instead of starving bands out of opportunities to hone their craft in a live music setting.
“A rising tide lifts all boats,” as the saying goes.
Hit this
Let’s check in with the summer fest guide … The Rat City Arts Festival is happening Saturday, which I’m grading as an “off the grid” offering based on its countercultural celebration of our much maligned local pest, the rat. Do other towns have such an intense, colorful, bipartisan hatred for these animals? You start to feel sorry for them. They’re just trying to survive like you and me.
Sunday: Dinos, Free Rock, Modern Ego and Roaches (The Cantab, Cambridge)
Two DIY booking outfits are combining forces, like the powerful super robot Voltron, to throw a party in the basement of the Cantab Lounge. That’s the Cantab Underground to you and me. The Hoff is Western Mass-based, and Dud’s Dungeon calls the South Shore home. What’s cooking? A four-stack bill of psych rawk, including mellow jammers Free Rock, a band that figures on approximately 63 percent of all Dud’s Dungeon-hosted lineups. If you miss them at the Cantab, catch them on Sept. 13 at the fifth (the fifth!) Dud’s Dungeon Fest, a DIY fest-o-palooza held annually at a disclosable location somewhere near Stockholders steak house.
Monday: Midrift (The Sinclair, Cambridge)
San Francisco’s Midrift is in the middle of a brisk transcontinental tour that plays dates on both coasts, including a stop in Harvard Square. The shoegazey alt-rock trio dropped the new EP “Safe and Sound” in July, and sold out their Wednesday Chicago gig at Subterranean, so maybe they’re coming into town with a little wind beneath their wings. And they’re not coming alone. Nevada’s Febuary [sic], Texas’ I Promised the World (formerly Sinema) and locals Gollylagging open. This bill covers more geography than the Trump-defunded National Geodetic Survey. Shout out to the kids’ networking skills.
Wednesday: Gary Air (The Rockwell, Somerville)
Boston indie rockers Gary Air brings their vintage psych sound to the black box theatre in the bottom floor of Davis Square. Shades of British Invasion in the pert and perky melodies of their recent self-titled full length album. A little Pink Floyd, a little CSNY, a little ’70s AM radio and a touch of neo-psych trippers like Doug Tuttle. Guitarist and vocalist Cole Guerriere sings a loving ode to bicycles on “Riding My Bike.” Bicycles have long been the counterculture’s preferred mode of transportation. But are massive, over-powered e-bikes irreparably harshing the vibes on local bike paths? Vetyver opens.
Live: Somergloom
Somergloom celebrated its fifth anniversary Thursday through Saturday with music in the key of melancholy. If there was a gargoyle-shaped birthday cake floating around, as I previously wish-casted, nobody offered me a slice. But the $4 Gloomdogs pair much better with my frosty ’Gansetts, thank you very much.
The much anticipated Sumac headlined the third and final night. As the “free metal” trio took the stage, the bassist ushered the ornamental, faux-stone, gargoyle-capped columns offstage and out of sight. The festival both treasures and toys with the visual symbology of heavy music, with a sly smile behind its mask of gloom and doom. But Sumac appeared to be all business, settling in for a set of moody, expressionistic, “thinking person’s” metal without the kitsch. The slam dancers in the pit, waiting patiently for the sonic cue to unleash hell, were kept waiting.
Other bands on the bill scratched the headbanging itch gladly. Among those who delivered the destruction: the art goth punkery of Guhts; the slow-paced demolition of Tears From a Grieving Heart; the fire-breathing doom of Body Void; the gut-wrenching black metal abstractions of A Monolithic Dome; the bluesy metal explosion of Moths; and the pit-jacking heroics of “immigrindcore” band Chepang.
Alternately, bands such as Vudu Sister, The Keening and Chainlacing dialed back the gnash and froth of heavy music’s wild side to focus on more introspective spiritual and emotional vistas. The aesthetic of Somergloom has always drawn power from the dynamics of duality: light/dark, fire/ice, love/hate. Over three days of music, the bill ebbed and flowed between sounds that soared the transcendent heights and mucked around the regrettable depths of our human experience.
And photographers were there to shoot every inch of it. Every. Inch. Of. It. Can we talk about the camera platoon for a second? I’ll have to measure my words, because I also like to snap the occasional picture at concerts, but the density of professional and quasiprofessional rigs at the lip of the stage during the festival was starting to feel excessive. It’s a vibe killer to have a permanent buffer of photo hounds between the band and the audience. The Chepang set, for example, which should have been wall-to-wall slam dancing, had trouble getting off the ground because the pit was full of people there for photos instead of music.
It might be time to revive the tried-and-true “three songs and out” standard?
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
A stronger
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