Back in the day (1975, to be exact), Warner Bros. Records put out a trade paperback tome called The Book of the Road. It was a compendium of information about significant venues across the U.S., collected by Jo Berger in Warners’ artist relations department, offering information like stage plots, PA types, FOH and monitor console types with I/O counts, and relevant contact info for stage managers. It grew out of an in-house project for use by the label’s own artists when on tour, and while it never became a best-seller in book form, it caught the fancy of musicians and live-sound techs alike as a kind of Fodor’s for roadies.
The Book of the Road, which came out of a time when the Armadillo World Headquarters was still the locus of live music in Texas, is long out of print and generations out of date; it’s a bit of a time capsule, actually, allowing you to peer back into an era before line arrays, in-ear monitors and digital anything. That is, if you can find a copy — there are zero on eBay, and my copy is buried in a box in the attic. But it may now have a successor. Danny Garcia, a live-sound mixer in New York City, who regularly works with world-music artists Bebel Gilberto and Angelique Kidjo, has been quietly expanding his project called FirstLive, A Guide To Live Music Venues (firstliveguide.com). To date, there are two books in the line, guides to clubs, halls, theatres and arenas in New York City and Austin. The New York edition lists venues ranging from Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall to indie favorites like Arlene’s Grocery, where Garcia also set up a small studio that records many of the shows there. It’s a template for a larger business he hopes to establish this year, creating small café-type music outlets with integrated recording capabilities — a kind of Starbucks/Pro Tools mash-up. (He’s not without experience as an impresario — Garcia once owned The Attic, a small music venue in Austin.
» Perfect Timing for a Comeback
But his field guides might be coming along at just the right time. They’re less Dragnet-just-the-facts-ma’am than the original Warner’s manual was, and they attempt to capture what Garcia says is “the vibe, the soul of the city and the venue.” They combine information about a venue’s consoles and sound system in the Tech Check sections with anecdotes about the club or musicians who’ve played there from its owners or managers and those musicians, a range of voices that remind us that these days the stage manager, sound guy and bassist might be the same person on different nights. Garcia seems equally curious about both a venue’s technology infrastructure and its history, and the fact that they may well be intertwined. It’s an indie take on an old problem: What the hell are we walking into tonight? You’ll find out from the various types of info that Garcia has packed into the guides, along with color photos that highlight PA systems and lighting trusses.
Garcia’s guides are a good idea, but at a time when there are more venues than ever, the notion of cataloging them in print seems quaint. Garcia says he’s working on online versions of them, as well as investigating mobile iterations, perhaps the format best suited to the subject. On the other hand, though, he notes that, in the year and a half that the guides have been around, the individual clubs he includes are, for the most part, still there, even in New York, which is historically brutal on music-venue life spans. “Since I started collecting this information three years ago, we’ve only seen one club close and two or three new ones surface,” he says. “The guides are still 80 percent up-to-date.”
And the gear doesn’t seem to change that much, either. Garcia says he’s seen little change in smaller venues, where analog equipment still dominates. That may change, he says, with the arrival of a new generation of small-format digital mixers, like Behringer’s X32 and PreSonus’ StudioLive desks. But he wonders if the digital divide between the little rooms and the larger ones that have largely moved to line arrays (big and small) and digital desks might be more of a cultural phenomenon.
“I still see the old Midas and Allen & Heath analog mixers in a lot of small clubs, but that’s where a lot of young mixers cut their teeth, learning on analog boards with knobs instead of layers, and that represents a leap that everyone has to make,” he suggests. “Analog is more forgiving when you’re just starting out.”
» A Curious Business Model
Back to the FirstLive guides. Garcia’s business model is curious. They’re priced at $9.95, but he’s given most of the New York edition ones away, part of his strategy to promote his larger ambitions for the club/studio hybrids. Some 1,500 copies of the Austin edition’s initial run of 2,000 were financed by the city of Austin, part of its ongoing crusade to promote itself as a live-music center, and distributed to hotels, clubs and taxi drivers.
Perhaps the FirstLive guides are little more than Garcia’s own marketing tools, as he plots the first of his cafes, probably for the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, where much of the Williamsburg music scene is shifting as the rents in trendy Billyburg continue to soar. Yet the guides may have a life of their own — Garcia is planning one that will cover what he estimates are over 120 venues in the Nashville area in late 2014, and he plans to offer updates to the New York and Austin editions later this year.
But what purpose do these serve other than as branding for Garcia’s own future plans, or as Lonely Planet-style guides for itinerant musicians and mixers? According to Garcia, he sees the stages and the consoles and the lighting trusses as the same kind of materials that might make up a museum or a landmarked battlefield — they’re little history books about what the music universe was like in a certain city at a certain time. “A snapshot of the musical landscape,” he says. Someday, they might be the kind of curiosities that Warner’s Book of the Road is today — a look back at the way we were. In the meantime, at least you’ll know where to go for a pack of strings at the last minute if you’re playing City Winery.
