What’s the Fuzzstival?
Night Two of Fuzzstival 2024
Greg Freeman closes out a doozy at the Amory on Saturday, 19 October 2024.
Paper Lady, Doug Tuttle, Latrell James, Francie Medosch, Prewn, Clifford, Warmachine, Corporeal, and Pew Pew sing the song of Baldurun in the opening slots.
It was Night Number Two of the two-day underground music fest, Fuzzstival, which you can now research all the way back to the first edition in 2013, thanks to the Archives. Also check out our preview for a peak at who played Friday night.
What sound, what fury, what controversy unfolded beneath the steel ductwork of Somerville’s favorite army barracks? Read on, gentle grasshopper.
Saturday
DOUG TUTTLE / GREG FREEMAN / LATRELL JAMES / FRANCIE MEDOSCH (of FLORRY) / PAPER LADY / PREWN / CLIFFORD / WARMACHINE / CORPOREAL / PEW PEW
Pew Pew performed as a four-piece, with new bassist Tania (Tonya, Tanya, Tonia, Ton’ya?) playing her first gig with the group. Artcore, with some post punk/hardcore riffery and the occasional whiffery of Confusion Is Sex.
A slow to medium tempo neo grunge grind from the three-piece Corporeal. The sort of pace designed to let the pathos sink in. A dissonant tang.
The four-piece Warmachine are artcore grinders that trade vocal duties and rock a ripping drummer who uses the full percussive spectrum beyond snare & hi-hat hijinx. What are those things called? Toms?
A heavy, medium tempo post punk four-piece. It’s Clifford! Not the metal band, the other one! Whimsy in the trenches, inviting the crowd “move around” and “bump each other” and “shit.” What’s the difference between “punk” and “post punk”? Post punk comes after.
West Mass is the best Mass. Prewn out of Northampton, sporting a six-person lineup, which felt too big and muddy and washed out at first. But then the troupe hit their stride, and the songs started to zip. Lead vocalist Izzy Hagerup is a standout every time she takes the stage.
Francie Medosch (of Florry). You sometimes get the “of a different band” tag when everyone knows you’re going to love the act, but you might not have heard of them, so here’s a related project that you have heard. Yadda yadda. Florry has a kind of alt country energy, and so does Francie Medosch, performing along with a fellow on steel pedal guitar.
Bonus points to Latrell James for trying to stir a little extra life into the room. A mostly post punk bill drew a mostly post punk crowd, trending into middle age, which is not a demographic known for cutting loose. Kinda stiff – not in a bad way, but kinda stiff. James did what he could, having fun with the stage banter while performing songs off his latest album Running In Place. The kind of hip hop that comes with a full band and killer rhythm section instead of just one dude with a laptop turntable.
At some point, maybe it was before or after Doug Tuttle’s set (which comprises most of the history of time, if you think about it), Jason Trefts got on stage to speak. He’s the guy behind Illegally Blind, which has been putting on the Fuzzstival for about a decade.
The speech was the usual thank yous, expressions of gratitude, pitch to spend money at the merch table, etc. But he also included a little philippic directed at exploitive booking practices in the local music scene. Which, you know, is also par for the course, but it caught my attention because he gave a specific example in which he named names and cited contract terms.
If I heard correctly, the example ran as follows. Illegally Blind was trying to bring an artist from Sweden (?) to perform at the Rockwell. That’s a long, expensive trip, so you hope to recoup some of those expenses with ticket revenue. So what’s it cost to book the room for a performance?
The initial terms proposed, I think, were the first $500 in ticket revenue goes to the house, then the house gets 60% of whatever ticket revenue gets generated after the first $500. To Trefts, that was an outrageous proposal. By his reckoning, he’d have to sell out the show in order for the artist to make more money than the venue, and that looks like a deal designed to exploit artists.
When he said as much to the venue, it sounds like (according to the story being told) they softened the offer to more favorable terms to the artist/promoter. But the relationship had soured to the extent that the whole thing fell through.
The point of telling a story like that is to generate a bit of moral outrage. That’s like shooting fish in a barrel though with the Fuzzstival crowd, which was full of a lot of people who came up as musicians themselves, playing house shows, with all the quasi non-existent financials of house shows. Things are a lot different for licensed, bonded, insured, up-to-code, fireproofed, taxed, yadda, yadda, yadda, official music venues with salaried and hourly workers to pay, and a facility full of equipment to maintain.
Still, the deal Trefts quoted might have been a stinker. Let’s look at it closer (I’m going to cancel out whatever results this analysis yields due to lack of critical information, but play along for now).
The capacity of The Rockwell, as far as Google tells me, is 203.
I don’t know what they might have charged for tickets. Let’s say $15? You’ll get to $500 by selling about 34 tickets (500/15=33.333). So that’s $500 for the house.
Now let’s suppose there is a sell out, selling the remaining 169 tickets. That produces $2,535 (169x15=) in additional ticket revenue, which, at a 60/40 split, results in $1,521 (2535x.6=) more money for the house and $1,014 in ticket sales for the artist/promoter.
The final breakdown is $2,021 for the house and $1,014 for the artist/promoter.
That doesn’t seem to gel with the story that Trefts was telling. In fact, it’s worse than his account, because if I heard him right he suggested that the artist’s take would inch out the house’s take if there was a sellout, but this scenario is not even close to that. So maybe I misheard Trefts.
[Maybe it was 40/60 instead of 60/40. In that case the artist/promoter gets the additional $2,535 ticket revenue after the initial $500. Which would out the final split at: house gets $1,514, and artist/promoter gets $2,535. That’s a lot closer to scenario Trefts seemed to be describing.]
But even if I had heard him, there’s so much we don’t know about this scenario. Is there a basic rental fee for the room? Any extra tech costs? Are there fees embedded in the face value of the ticket, unbeknownst to us, that would diminish the artist’s take of ticket revenue? Is the promoter taking any cut? Any profit-sharing stuff like share of bar sales?
There are a lot of factors to consider before drawing a conclusion about the moral defensibility of the proposed deal. Not trying to complicate the issue with a “both sides” maneuver, because exploitation definitely happens, but deals like these are drawn up in all sorts of ways to make everyone involved – the venue and the artist/promoter – feel like they’re going to come out on the other side not financially ruined.
Putting on a show is like making a bet that enough ticket revenue is going to come through the door to cover the cost of making the bet, and maybe more if you’re lucky. (Does not apply to DIY venues, obviously.) Part of the explanation behind the Rockwell anecdote might simply be that the house booker didn’t think this Swedish act was going to draw enough to cover the cost of making the bet, so they slanted the deal to protect themselves.
Any venue would do that, even non-profit outfits, as long as they depend on ticket revenue to stay afloat. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is what happened, but again, more information is needed about the terms of the deal to know what was really going on.
Additional takeaway point: this is why DIY venues are important. Because putting on a show shouldn’t always be tied to making a financial bet. You could have staged Doug Tuttle’s show in a living room, if you wanted to. He performed solo with an acoustic guitar. Not much more to it than that. But if you want to scale up and let more people than a handful of your friend’s hear Tuttle’s gig, then you need a real venue to do that.
And a real venue, like everything else right now, is fucking expensive.
The five-piece Paper Lady delivered heavy pop with grungy, gazy textures and polished execution. The dusky vocals of fronter Alli Raina are a standout. Extra points, as always, for the stage banter.
Mix one part War On Drugs with one part Tom Petty. Maybe a dash of Sunburned Hand of Man? That’s the Greg Freeman vibe, straight outta Burlington, “mostly.” It was at least the second act of the night with a steel pedal guitar, which is more country flair than you might expect from an artcore bill. Shout out to the saxophones, painting big sounds across the airy upper reaches of the Armory. Freeman and Company were prepared for the closer role.