From the psychedelic sounds of the '60s to the boundary . For example, as explained by their bass player, Mike Watt, South Californian 1980s punk/DIY band Minutemen in this way adapted the ideas of collaborative equality to their music practice and sound: D. Boon [Minutemen guitarist] played really heavily with trebly new power chords and left all this room for the bass guitar [], and then worked with Georgie [the drummer] to make sure he had all these fills and parts to jam to and add movement to the songs. Consequently, these communities keep their distinctive boundaries of belonging open and fluid.Footnote6 This liberal inclination is also related to the idea of general reciprocity as discussed in the beginning of this section. Band members often switch musical instruments and roles, and thus defy internal ensemble hierarchy (practiced already in the early 1980s by the Raincoats and Beat Happening see Baumgarten Citation2012: 78; Worley Citation2017: 188), and many foster collective group singing (following the example of Fugazi and similar bands). The San Francisco sound refers to rock music performed live and recorded by San Francisco-based rock groups of the mid-1960s to early 1970s. Some scholars have identified how the obligation to reciprocate (balanced reciprocity), can be perceived to constrain artistic freedom and creativity (Joseph Citation2002: 10311), however, it is notable that participants in the DIY scenes I studied favoured a general approach to reciprocity. Moreover, they are also seen to engage in rituals of decomoditization by diverting capitalist products into enclaved zones of DIY spaces and shows. He also gives advice about how to straddle both worlds, and how to pay up (reciprocally) for what bands owe to the community. The Dead Kennedys are often seen as one of the most influential hardcore punk bands of the 1980s, instrumental in the rebellion against the hippie movement of the preceding decades. Really thats just a fraction of why theyve been noticed. Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. (Richard the Roadie, in Biel Citation2012: 28, 29), Thus, many DIY participants accept the limits of DIY reciprocity and espouse a more independent and autonomous, small-time or ethical capitalism (Biel Citation2012: 28, 29). there is a diversity of possible cultural and aesthetic effects existing within DIY scenes, which are not necessarily derived from DIY material relations) while not all bad, weird, and different sounds necessarily result from DIY practices of reciprocity (i.e. You can request songs from a library card catalog system. The beatnik thing was black, cynical, and cold. [12] Among these British acts, according to music journalist Chris Smith, writing in his book on the most influential albums in American popular music, the Beatles inspired the emergence of the San Francisco psychedelic scene following their incorporation of folk rock on the 1965 album Rubber Soul, which reflected the reciprocal influences shared between the group and Bob Dylan. Merchandise sign at the Portlands Punx house show, 18 April 2012. 9 The idea of support aesthetics is similar to the notion of participatory aesthetics (Turino Citation2008: 335) or relational aesthetics (Bourriaud [1998] Citation2006), which find the value and quality of art not in art objects or music sounds themselves, but in the level of social participation/interaction that they generate. The early band venues, while the new SF scene was emerging from folk and folk-rock beginnings, were often places like the Matrix nightclub. The DIY scenes I studied were constituted materially through alternative economies of DIY practice, collective participation, and reciprocity. 12 I am referring here to Raymond Williamss theories of residual, emergent, and dominant practices (Citation1977: 1217). They contain freely available discarded items that DIY participants desire to redirect into reuse by other DIY participants, who visit or pass by their houses. However, not all DIY bands ascribe to the same idea of DIY while many see it as an ideological principle to live by, others regard it as a pragmatic strategy that enables them to acquire skill, shows, and social connections in the beginning stages of their musical careers.Footnote15 Nevertheless, not all independent cultural activities should be seen as proto-markets (Toynbee Citation2000: 2532), but instead, as heterogeneous assemblages of diverse, non-market and proto-market, possibilities. According to biography author Robert Greenfield, "Jon McIntire [manager of the Grateful Dead from the late sixties to the mid-eighties] points out that the great contribution of the hippie culture was this projection of joy. autonomy]. Its funny how people put on house shows and they do it because theyre compelled to create that space. underground market, co-op exchange, barter, informal economy (for alternative economies), and gift giving, state appropriations, gleaning, and poaching (for non-market economies). Reciprocally, these local participants (i.e. (Jonathan Lee, originally published in HeartattaCk zine, quoted in Makagon Citation2015: 57; cf. And it might be to somebody else, but just to sort of keep the energy moving. Nevertheless, the system of general reciprocity also keeps these DIY boundaries open, as it works in a seemingly non-obligatory way, in which DIY individuals themselves decide how and when these debts should be reciprocated. However, in a seemingly contradictory way, this system possessively binds an individual to the scene, in turn creating social boundaries for DIY membership and belonging through the reciprocal expectation of active DIY participation (cf. 17 See also Ryan Citation1992: 53; Holtzman, Hughes, and Van Meter Citation2007; Taylor Citation2016: 155, 173. Jai Milx performing at her house, Glitterdome, in Portland, 4 February 2012. Its [also] like that for fans, you know. Here, Scott describes the basic theory of reciprocity, as outlined by anthropologist Marcel Mauss in his classic study The Gift ([Citation1925] Citation1990). I show in this article how American DIY participants establish a whole alternative and parallel society with its own economic model, but which also reveals itself as very heterogeneous and in different ways interconnected with the dominant capitalist one. I certainly played far more shows that Ive put on, and Ive put on a great number of shows over the past 10, 15 years, but I felt like I owed, not necessarily [to] anybody in person, but just [as a] sort of a mentality of hosting people who are traveling. When I asked Rick Ele, who used to be one of the most active DIY organisers in Davis and Sacramento between late 1990s, and early 2010s, about the perception of making it within the DIY scenes in the US, he replied: I mean, a lot of people that don't know about underground music, they just think that every band is trying to make it. Furthermore, DIY performers also usually reject the notion of making it, which is a concept that refers to musicians efforts to succeed in the competitive capitalist music market. San Francisco's dearly departed nightclubs and music venues - SFGATE Reviews on 80'S Music Clubs in San Francisco, CA - Barracuda '80's Decade Dance Party, Cat Club, Monroe, Bootie Mashup: SF, Butter, New Wave City, Bimbo's 365 Club, Club Gossip, Raven Bar, Oasis (Personal communication, 28 February 2012). I start with a quote by a well-known American DIY zine writer Aaron Cometbus, who articulates some of the main issues and concerns regarding the alternative economic practices of American DIY communities: Bands [] when they are successful, its because of how talented they are, how much they care, how hard theyve worked. For Teague and many other DIY participants in the US, music and other forms of reciprocity go hand in hand, each one engendering the other. However, the above examples demonstrate that at least some DIY participants in the US do not so much contradict themselves as consciously embrace their material condition, often working or negotiating with it creatively, in order to achieve and optimise their ideological and political goals. For instance, group solidarity, as a socio-musical pattern, is also manifested in blues, 1960s psychedelic rock, heavy metal, and other popular music genres that are not necessarily rooted in the ideas and practices of American DIY communities.Footnote11 Thus, DIY notions and approaches to musical group solidarity might partially be understood in terms of residualFootnote12 practices from 1960s counterculture (folk, folk-rock, psychedelic rock, jam rock), to which punk and DIY culture, while discursively often rejecting it, owe many of their stylistic and socio-cultural traits.Footnote13. The bohemian predecessor of the hippie culture in San Francisco was the "Beat Generation" style of coffee houses and bars, whose clientele appreciated literature, a game of chess, music (in the forms of jazz and folk style), modern dance, and traditional crafts and arts like pottery and painting. A whole society, with its own economic system even. DIY shows and records, bartering, borrowing, and DIY production of goods). I still, I am returning the favour. The new music was loud and community-connected: bands sometimes presented free concerts in Golden Gate Park and "happenings" at the city's several psychedelic clubs and ballrooms. Appadurai uses the term tournaments of value to refer to those, often calculative, movements of paths and diversions that actors instigate in order to negotiate the value of circulating commodities (Citation1986: 20, 21). However, on the other, various DIY participants also often advocate for a more balanced strategy that acknowledges the impossibility of completely rejecting capitalist logic within American DIY scenes: The whole world runs on business, exchanging money for goods and services and a lot of people are going to try to sell and buy a lot of everything. For example, there is no expectation that all musicians will organise shows, or that all audience members will demonstrate their commitment to the scene by intensely moshing to punk bands in front of the stage or by singing along with indie-folk singers (cf. 3099067 Free box at the show at Grandmaz house, Olympia, 7 August 2012. Powered by hocalwire.com, We use cookies for analytics, advertising and to improve our site. In this way, they consciously acknowledge that DIY shows can exist both outside the capitalist system (as temporarily enclaved rituals of decomoditization), and at the same time, within the larger capitalist regime of value.Footnote19 DIY shows thus simultaneously counter as well as co-constitute a capitalist economic system.Footnote20. On the one hand, the ideological objective to reject the capitalist mode of organising cultural and social practices (individualism, consumerism, and profit- and success-oriented approaches). Named in honor of cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and located off an alley near Jackson Square, BIX has been described as a civilized speakeasy, a supper club, and an elegant saloon, offering modern American cuisine served in a soaring two-story dining room to the strains of live jazz nightly. A modern take on the vintage supper club, Black Cat is located in the heart of San Franciscos Tenderloin neighborhood, the historic arts and entertainment district once home to fabled jazz venues such as The Blackhawk. (Josh Taylor from a band Friends Forever, personal communication, 27 September 2012; see also Chippendale Citation2016). For instance, Johanna from the Box Candy Mountain house in Bellingham told me that when they lost a good venue [show house] in their town, it all fell back on us (personal communication, 14 April 2012). Some of the country's biggest entertainers credit The Fillmore with launching their careers, including the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Santana. Some of the most important black artists of the 20th century have played on this stage, including jazz legends Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan. Cited by lists all citing articles based on Crossref citations.Articles with the Crossref icon will open in a new tab. Apart from the discursive dimensions embedded in Cometbus quote, I have observed how the notion of collective reciprocity has materially permeated both cultural and economic aspects of American DIY communities. First, engagement with DIY practices and worlds often results in value and status assertions that are employed by DIY participants to establish their cultural authenticity and social distinctions within their scenes and in relation to outsiders. Moreover, some houses were more oriented towards drinking and partying than the needs of hosted performers, and sometimes the provision of meals, event promotion, or collection of donations were neglected (see also Makagon Citation2015: 13741). Select a holiday type to discover more or call us on 0161 888 5630 Offers; About Us; Brochures; Contact While it is possible to see a connection in given examples between the DIY socio-economic relations of reciprocity and the DIY ideas and aesthetics of support that reject the dominant values of quality (good vs bad performers), it is also important to extend the analysis beyond the simplistic (homologic) interpretations of the cause-and-effect links between material (socio-economic) and cultural (aesthetic) levels (cf., Hesmondhalgh Citation1999: 36; Toynbee Citation2000: 1105). The Warfield brings in all kinds of performers and every style of music. Thornton Citation1996). Founded by the Ambassador of the American Songbook, Michael Feinstein, Feinsteins at the Nikko presents top Broadway artists, cabaret singers, and todays best interpreters of the Great American Songbook. Both Grace Slick (singing with Jefferson Airplane) and Joplin (singing initially with Big Brother & the Holding Company) gained a substantial following locally and, before long, across the country.[17]. McKay Citation1998. Its really, its hard for a lot of people to understand it, but these bands are really satisfied just by people hearing their music. Enjoy a day trip to Angel Island and learn about its history as the Ellis Island of the West at Immigration Station, as well as take in the islands stunning views on numerous nature trails. Moreover, he demonstrates the self-critical nature of this discourse, and the tendency among some American DIY participants to verbalise and theorise the specifics of this alternative (own) economic system. It is important to note here that any act of gift-giving (for instance, organising shows) is always also an act that ties individuals to community. [1] San Francisco is a westward-looking port city, a city that at the time was 'big enough' but not manic like New York City or spread out like Los Angeles. For example, Gilman incorporates all-ages, non-alcohol, and safer space policiesFootnote5 alongside volunteer, collective, and consensus-based approaches to organisation. Whether you're in a seat on the balcony or dancing on the main floor, you'll have a great concert experience. For more information please visit our Permissions help page. Named for legendary saxophonist Charlie Bird Parker and Irish novelist Samuel Beckett, Bird & Beckett in Glen Park is a true neighborhood hotspot that features weekly jazz concerts, allowing you to hear and read about jazz at the same time. These included sharing of food and equipment among DIY houses, local and translocal exchange of venues, the system of free boxes (see Figure 1),Footnote1 donations at shows, and participatory organiser-performer-audience interactions practices that enabled the creation of alternative cultural DIY worlds, and which in turn informed DIY sounds and aesthetics. From the psychedelic sounds of the '60s to the boundary-breaking DJs of today, the City by the Bay has a treasured history of performances with a significant lineage to black influences. (Jennings Citation1998; see Figure 5)Footnote17, Figure 5. Registered in England & Wales No. [9] This questing bass quality has been wryly characterized as a "roving" (rather than the conventional "stay-at-home") style. At the June 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, Bay Area groups performed from the same stage as established and fast-rising musical groups and well-known individual artists from the U.S., the UK, and even India. [19] An important departure in this new era of "album oriented radio" (AOR) was that show hosts felt free to play lengthy tracks or two or more tracks at a stretch from a good record album. All rights reserved. In this excerpt, Cometbus outlines the central discursive tension existing within American DIY scenes. DIY performers therefore usually approach and sustain the DIY scenes through the practice of communal reciprocity, by playing for their own fun, and for the interests of the DIY community (horizontal approach), and not for their own individual interests in financial gain and mainstream success (vertical approach). American DIY shows similarly function as enclaved zones and rituals of decomoditization. Local DIY scenes often work as collective efforts, achieved through reciprocal relations between the venues, houses and organisers that sustain them. Beyond preserving the history of this musical form so tied to the African-American experience, SFJAZZ now blazes a trail for the artists of the future in its permanent home on Franklin St. Few performance venues in the city have the sound quality of the SFJAZZ Center. Hence, it could support a 'scene'. A combination of commercial, second-hand, and scrap materials and tools were used in this DIY process. In this way, they create alternative DIY systems that co-constitute capitalist ones, while simultaneously being co-constituted by them. This logic of capitalist subsumption also relates to other types of DIY tactics of diversion, from dumpsterdiving, to renting of houses in cheap and lower-income neighbourhoods, through which DIYers participate in gradual maximisation of market values of these commodities (Horton Citation1997; Giles Citation2014; Graham Citation2016: 559; Farrow Citation2020: 13); or by volunteering in a variety of cultural and charitable projects (for example, helping with the organisation of cultural and musical events, or participating in food distribution projects, e.g. The people who opened their homes to me, honestly, I guarantee, some people [] didnt like the music we played, [] I mean it helps [], if they like the music you play, but [thats not the main reason]. With their aggressive, politically charged style of music, the Dead Kennedys were a giant middle finger to the status quo that many young punks learned to despise. However, the present tense will be used when considering certain general specifics of the American DIY scenes. 3 The research included several years of fieldwork in Davis, CA; nine months in Portland, OR; five days in Washington, DC; and 14 days each in Olympia, WA, Los Angeles, and Oakland, CA. For example, in the Glitterdome house in NE Portland, these included sharing, borrowing, and exchanging items, goods and even spaces between houses and participants, be it food, free box items (clothes, shoes, books), tapes, or music equipment. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Pacific Coast Music Trail | America | First Class Holidays "[8] The Beats tended to be cagey, keeping their lives discreet (save for the few who published, in literary bursts, about their perceptions, enthusiasms, and activities); in a word, they generally kept cool. The young hippies were far more numerous, less wary, and had scarcely any inclination to keep their lifestyles concealed. Sly & the Family Stone, a San Francisco-based group that got its start in the late 1960s, was an exception, being a racially integrated hippie band with a hefty influence from soul music, hence making use of brass instrumentation. Therefore, both the side of socio-economic factors, and the side of cultural practices and aesthetic expressions in this equation should be seen as diverse and multidimensional. Coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area, famed singer/songwriter Stevie Nicks gained her first performing experience there in the 1960s with Lindsey Buckingham and his band. "[16] Women, in a few cases, enjoyed an equal status with men as stars in the San Francisco rock scenebut these few instances signaled a shift that has continued in the U.S. music scene. The journalist Ed Vulliamy wrote: "The Summer of Love had an empress, and her name was Janis Joplin. DIY reciprocal economic relations described above not only materially support DIY communities and scenes, but also inform alternative types of culture, music, and aesthetics (Rice Citation1994). I am also thankful to both anonymous reviewers for their astute comments, as well as to Henry Stobart for his generous help with the editing process. The strong reciprocal relations between different houses of the DIY community was emphasised to me in an interview with Jai and Dylan from Glitterdome house, who explained that they had friends visit pretty constantly. The downstairs music space features live music nightly from a wide variety of local and touring artists. Established in 1986, it has served as a template and inspiration for many other DIY venues across the US and internationally (Hannon Citation2010: 37). How much would you pay to hop into a time machine and visit San Francisco's long-gone Winterland Ballroom on Jan. 14, 1978, the night . These kinds of ideological tensions therefore often also serve as a form of micro-power to establish internal boundaries along the lines of ideological purity within the DIY communities and scenes (cf. For several years now, Teague and his wife Melissa have run a small grassroots local urban farm business from their house, named Winslow Food Forest. Permission will be required if your reuse is not covered by the terms of the License. The house also incorporated four additional makeshift living spaces in the form of liveable rooms, three in the basement, and one in the garage. Off the beaten path in the Outer Richmond and only a few blocks from Lands End, saxophonist Danny Brown and his family operate one of the citys best record stores and art galleries that features live jazz and jam sessions every Sunday afternoon. DIY zines, comic books, and blogs from the whole US).Footnote3 This particular DIY culture is an outgrowth of late 1970s British and US punk culture, which later expanded into more transnational and heterogeneous scenes that today also encompass aspects of indie rock, experimental music and certain singer-songwriters.Footnote4 It also has ties to other similar formations, most particularly 1960s counterculture, and various historical and contemporary anarchist, feminist, and sustainability movements (cf. A louder, more prominent role for the electric basstypically with a melodic or semi-melodic approach, and using a plush, pervasive tonewas another feature. It is true that many of the San Francisco bands did record "three-minute" tracks when they desired pop-music station airplay for a song. Due to the gradual musical and social diversification of punk and post-punk scenes in the last 40 years, and the redirection of attention from genre and sound to particular (DIY) ethos within these scenes, the DIY label started to be more commonly used as a synonym or a substitute for the term punk in reference to these scenes (ibid.). He is usually exploring the Bay Area hunting for that new and unique experience and good food too! With the musicians perched high above the bar, you can hear live jazz nightly as you sip specialty cocktails along the 20-foot mahogany bar from 1907. 6 For further discussion of the practices and ideologies of audience participation within American DIY scenes, see Verbu Citation2018. Some DIY participants live in collective houses and engage in everyday sustainable and alternative economies, others open collectively run businesses, stores, coffee shops, and restaurants, and/or take part in collective grassroots political organising (Wehr Citation2012). San Francisco has a long history with jazz music. Therefore, these scenes have to consequently be understood as both challenging and co-constituting the dominant capitalist regime, and at the same time, being challenged and co-constituted by it. Here are a dozen things to experience at Fort Mason Center right now. Moreover, some venues and houses often collectively organised festivals and larger multi-venue events. But maybe they are that way, and they will remain that way, because we havent set examples for them to see, examples that we saw in others before us and followed. This kind of diversion from the capitalist market economy and experience is vividly expressed by DIY participant James from Davis, California: [at DIY house shows] we are experiencing music outside of the [dominant] modes of exchange that we are used to, even if we still pay donation money [] For me, something that exists outside the normal form of exchange you go to a venue, bar making money, going buying drinks; this [DIY show] is much more visceral, conducive to real interchange between people. Verbu Citation2018). [5] According to writer Douglas Brinkley, celebrated author Hunter S. Thompson, one of the Bay Area cultural-scene boosters, was a big early fan of the group: "Thompson extolled the sonic energy of the Jefferson Airplane as it pulsed around the California locales that nursed the psychedelic era"[6]. Figure 4. Yet I also highlight how these alternative economic systems of reciprocity coexist with capitalist ones. They not only organised house concerts, but also recorded their music projects in their own bedrooms, and organised art shows for the local DIY community on their premises. Therefore, to end this section I wish to highlight one more contradiction regarding the coexistence of DIY and capitalist economic systems, as it relates to practices that seemingly reject capitalism, while simultaneously and tacitly reinforcing it. A few blocks from Union Square, Le Colonial serves French-inspired Vietnamese cuisine against the backdrop of live jazz, Monday to Friday, featuring music from the Django Reinhardt-influenced group, Le Jazz Hot, and the sultry soul sounds of Lavay Smith & Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers. Live music performances and music records/cassettes as standardised commodities are in this way diverted from their regular paths in the market economy to an alternative economic regime of value, often through the incorporation of alternative exchange systems (cf. Learn the dynamic history of San Francisco's Angel Island, the gateway for approximately 175,000 Chinese immigrants in the 1900s. This is how Teague from Waffle house in NE Portland explained DIY reciprocity and communal living: Its about applying that kind of attitude to your whole lifesome people dont, some people are just like yeah, we have shows here but we dont apply that attitude toward anything else in our lives [], and sometimes you will play somewhere and its like really far-out neo-hippy communitywe have lands, and we grow our own foods, and have a lot of other community projects going on in [our] housea lot of houses that we played at [with his band] were really inspiring [in that sense] [] There would be people canning and processing food, making kombucha, making their own alcohol, [and having] screen printing shops, photo labs, art studio spaces built in the houses[there] would just be a house in a neighbourhood but there would be like nine people living there, and people [living] in the backyardjust every inch of house is utilized in a productive waylike in New York, it was like just a community living to an extreme in a couple of places I went to. Until a few years ago no bands sold T-shirts, people would just make their own. Black History Month at the best music venues in San Francisco (Personal communication, 29 December, 2010; see Figure 2), House shows are better. "[4] And its time to show that creativity is still valued over money. Waffle house residents therefore engaged in collective gardening, and collective use of the various spaces of their compound (comprising a house and large separate garage) as a wood shop, art studio, welding area, bike shop, music rehearsal space, small greenhouse, and screen-printing area. However, Scott also clarifies that DIY reciprocity is not about direct one-for-one reciprocation but can apply to anybody (somebody else), as long as participants are dedicated to sustaining the scene (keep the energy moving). This is not only when they refer to the practices of DIY local participants helping touring bands with venues, accommodation, company, and food, or to the system of donations for music performances at DIY shows, but also in relation to everyday musical and non-musical collaborations among the DIY participants. Accordingly, my central question in this article is: how do American DIY participants manage the tensions and transitions between reciprocal and capitalist systems and worlds? Donations of money for live performances at DIY shows (a form of balanced gift economy) might be seen to function in a similar way, where a marketable exchange commodity (the live performance) is transformed into a DIY commodity with symbolic and material use value through a process of diversion and enclaving.
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