CLUB-HUNGRY LOCALS INVITE TRAVELING PLAYERS HOME
About 50 or 60 other music lovers and listen to a couple of sets by Slaid Cleaves or Greg Trooper or Fred Eaglesmith or Hazel Dickens, would you buy a ticket?
Dave Tilley and Steve Gardner figured a lot of people would be attracted to such a concert idea. Both of them sponsor house concerts in Durham on a regular basis, offering a semi-acoustic setting for singer/songwriters and their fans. These gigs are staged in the most intimate of all music environments—the living room of someone’s home—and the artists perform without mics, for audiences that range in size from 50 to 70 people.
The house concert idea has taken root in the Triangle. The response in Durham alone has been particularly positive, possibly because Durham is the most club-impaired city in the Triangle. There’s not a single credible music club in the Bull City, so anyone who wants to catch a band in a bar has to head for Chapel Hill, Raleigh or Cary.
Tilley and Gardner come from distinctly different backgrounds, but they share a love of roots music and a passion for doing radio. Both have their own shows on Duke University’s superb student-run radio station, WXDU.
Dave Tilley was born and raised in Durham. A past president of the Triangle Blues Society, Tilley works as a freelance software developer and consultant for “Web-based stuff,” i.e., Web development, e-commerce, networking, and so on. Steve Gardner, a California native, is promotions manager for the bluegrass/Americana label Sugar Hill Records, which is based in Durham.
Tilley has been doing radio at WXDU for about 11 years, and he’s responsible for giving Gardner his first show on the station. Their radio shows have kept both of them very much on top of what’s happening in the various roots, country and Americana genres, as well as making them anxious to showcase some of their favorite artists.
“There are many places in the Triangle where we see
different types of music,” Tilley noted. “Small clubs, big clubs, auditoriums, but there were lots of people I was playing on my show who weren’t getting a chance to perform in the Triangle. They were artists that nobody knew about, or people who’d self-released a record, and I kept thinking, ‘how are we ever gonna get these artists to play here.’”
The house concert idea came to life as a result of this frustration. Gardner was the first to try it, though Tilley had been booking music in the Triangle for much longer than Gardner had. “I’d been organizing concerts for about 0 years in various capacities, through the Triangle Blues Society, for instance, and through WXDU. But Steve is the first one I know of in the area who was actually doing house concerts in an organized fashion. I don’t really know how long this idea has been around, however.”
Of course, there are any number of precedents for staging a concert in someone’s home. Bluegrass and mountain music pickers have been gathering on front porches and in people’s homes for centuries, and musicians have entertained royalty in their living spaces for even longer. In recent times, the rent party was a common occurrence in African American neighborhoods from Durham’s Hayti area to Chicago, Detroit and Harlem, and an awful lot of legendary bluesmen played these gigs.
“And we all know about house parties, with bands,” Gardner remarked. “House parties are usually ended by the police,” Tilley added. “Yeah,” Gardner replied. “I think of a house party as a party in someone’s house with a punk rock band in the basement and a keg and the police showing up to disperse the partygoers.”
“Maybe the distinguishing difference between house parties and house concerts is a police presence versus no police presence,” Tilley laughed. “That’s what we’d like to point out about our house concerts: No police.”
Tilley and Gardner agreed that once their decision to stage house concerts was made, the biggest hurdle was getting people to buy into the idea. “It seems hard to believe now,” Gardner remarked, considering the speed with which house concerts sell out in Durham, “but it took awhile to get people interested. You see, you don’t have any money, so you can’t advertise. You’ve got to do it by word-of-mouth, e-mail, the Internet—like posting to local music boards.”
“I was used to having more resources to promote concerts,” Tilley added. “I’d print a lot of posters and maybe even take out an ad in a weekly, but I had to go into the house concerts with almost no resources, so I didn’t know how it was gonna turn out.”
“And it’s taken some time for people to feel comfortable going into a stranger’s living room,” Gardner said. “That’s a big step for a lot of people. They hear about the concerts and think they’re private functions, because they can’t imagine that they can just go to this gig in someone’s home.”
Indeed, a lot more people in the Triangle are comfortable with the idea of house concerts now than, say, four years ago. Tilley and Gardner have both experienced ticket sales increases for their shows that are dramatic, to say the least.
Artists are pleased with the shows as well. “It’s not uncommon for an artist to say it was the best show of their tour,” Gardner noted. “I just got an e-mail from the band Frog Holler. They did a house concert with me and they said it was the best show they’d ever done.”
Both Tilley and Gardner talked about artists who were somewhat alarmed to learn that they were expected to work without a P.A. Usually they had been misinformed by their booking agents as to the exact nature of the gig. They always find, however, that they sound great in the living room settings. “I’ve had experiences with large bands who were worried about what it was gonna sound like,” Tilley said. “I tell them, ‘don’t worry. It’s a great room; the acoustics are good. We’ll just noodle some with the amps and it’ll come out great.’ And everybody loved it.”
The house concerts have also provided artists with valuable exposure in the Triangle market. “Dave did a show with Stacey Earle,” Gardner said, “and then, like six months later, ArtsCenter booked her. I don’t know that ArtsCenter would’ve taken that chance if she hadn’t been in town before. We can give these performers an entre into our market and once they’ve played here and proved that people are interested in their music, sometimes it leads to bookings in larger concert venues.”
Finding a house in which to do house concerts is an obvious hurdle, but neither Tilley nor Gardner had much trouble securing a place. Gardner now is using two houses, as well as booking some shows in the Skylight Exchange in Chapel Hill. A bigger problem has been the growing popularity of the house concerts, which has sent them looking for additional homeowners who are willing to lend their living rooms to the cause.
Both have made good use of e-mail to promote their house concerts. They’ve created mailing lists that they use to inform interested fans of upcoming concerts, and both have created Web sites, allied with their WXDU radio shows, which promote the house concerts as well as their radio programming. Gardner has also started a non-profit corporation called Forty Acres to promote and produce house concerts.
Tilley and Gardner would be happy to help anyone who’s interested start their own house concert scene. They don’t see it as creating competition. Rather, they see it as a potential network connection. And they don’t think it’s possible to offer too much music in any market. “Don’t let anyone tell you that there’s not gonna be enough room for more music in the Triangle or anywhere else,” Tilley said. “The more the merrier.”
Dave Tilley can be reached at either:
dave@hoedown.org
or
dave@headspin.com
. Steve Gardner resides at
steve@fortyacres.org
or
steve@topsoil.net
. Gardner’s Forty Acres house concert listings are available on the Internet at:
www.fortyacres.org