A Conversation with Jack Williams (continued)
PM: And conversely, the people who are quiet in their homes, the people who are birders or outdoor people, some of them may never be in the loop, so to speak, enough to hear about house concerts. How will those people find out about the possibility?
JW: The finding out about is it a very difficult thing. And I can tell you a couple of cities where it's an epidemic of a problem, Tampa and Orlando. If you saw the size of the crowds that show up at the Tampa folk shows--our friend Gloria Holloway is just this tireless busy bee of a worker trying to constantly drum up audiences in a town the size of Tampa. For God's sake, Tampa is huge. Orlando is enormous. But here's the deal: There are no publications that will reach the people who are back there in the woodwork, people who don't care for the Mickey Mouse hype in Orlando.
PM: People who don't read the lifestyle magazine of that town.
JW: Why would you read it? There's nothing in it except tourist-oriented, glitzy, over-the-top or I-can-top-this kinds of things--you know, this is the best in town, the nakedest naked women. And there won't be a big half-page in there on "We have a house concert here." It's just not going to happen. And so what happens is that these people--and yeah, I lived in Florida, I lived in Ft. Lauderdale as a kid, and I hated it. And it wasn't until I came back to Broward County about 10 years ago that I found out that there were some great people back there, just living quiet normal lives while all this other Ft. Lauderdale/Miami glitz business flies by them on the outside. And they go about their business talking with each other, actually having conversations and being interested in things other than fast moving, brightly colored. And they present house concerts that have, now, seventy, eighty, ninety people showing up at them.
And those people have found out that that's what they want. They've found their community. But how do you reach those people in the first place, if apparently Gloria in Tampa just can't find them. She doesn't know how to get to them because the entertainment rags are not what they would choose to read. And so, what do you do--short of flying over the city with an airplane dragging an announcement behind it.
But now you come down to where you said, "I wish more people knew about it." Well, of course I do too. But I don't think it will ever become an enormous phenomenon, a thing where millions and millions of house concerts are happening. I do wish that those folks back there in the woodwork, people like the ones who have made that discovery in the Ft. Lauderdale and Dade area, I wish Tampa and Orlando could find out about it, because I have a feeling there are lots of folks back there who would love do it. But I've played to so many empty rooms in those enormous cities that it's pretty shocking.
PM: And although, on the one hand, it's true that it may never be a huge phenomenon, to make it hugely successful in its own terms, we're really only talking about the country needing, say, 500 house concert venues that can draw 100 people.
JW: That might be how many there are.
PM: You think there are that many already?
JW: Hold on a second. [to Judy: If you had to make just a wild ass guess, how many house concerts you figure there are now?] Judy thinks a couple hundred.
PM: It seems to me that there's probably between 200 and 300. You'd really need 500 or 600, and they'd have to be able to draw 100 people.
JW: Yeah.
PM: And that seems a readily achievable thing. I'm very late to the party, but the more we talk about it today, the more I move to thinking, well, somebody has to write more stories about the house concert phenomenon, and find new places to have them run.
JW: Well, almost everywhere I go I see articles being written. There was a huge article in Texas Monthly about the house concert phenomenon. And that's been a nice little hook for some young journalists. Unfortunately, the young journalists writing the stories are woefully uneducated in noncommercial music.
PM: Ahh. Actually, I should write it.
JW: That's exactly right. Someone needs to write it from the point of view that, number one, knows how to talk to the audience that's unaware of it, someone who can say "By the way, here's an alternative" in terms that would be appealing to them.
PM: You know, yesterday or the day before I went to a website that is kind of a house concert resource, and as far as I could tell, there was no such thing in Nashville, Tennessee.
JW: I think you're probably right. But that makes perfect sense to me.
PM: Someone could make it happen here, and there is a crowd that would come, as long it was musicians who were coming through and not people who live here.
JW: Yeah?
PM: People who'd want to be there if someone said, "Hey, you won't see Jack Williams unless you come to this house concert." But I'm not only moved to write this article, I'm moved to wonder if I could start a house concert in Nashville.
JW: Well, now we have something else you've got to face. To do a house concert, if you are going to do one in Nashville, you're going to find an uphill battle about one thing in particular, and that is: audiences are all trained, as a group. This is not a callous statement, it's just really true, that people who attend a certain venue where they get their music, if it's folk or commercial, whatever, they learn the style of that venue. They learn to expect that style. I quit playing in Nashville, because I saw audiences where members who were just listeners, they weren't musicians but they had been there long enough and they'd learned some of the jargon, they'd met some of the people, and they knew about plugging, they'd found out about pitching. And they'd come up to me and say, "Man, I don't know nothing about it, but that song right there, if you maybe cut a couple of them verses, I know somebody who'd cut that song."
PM: [laughs]
JW: These are people who've heard these conversations, and they have been trained in the way of their venue. They have had their Bluebird schooling. Unfortunately, these people have had their focus moved. And I'm afraid that the audiences in Nashville have been attuned to a lot of this thinking. When someone is listening to me, once their focus is on a song getting cut, how in the world do I get people like that to listen to me in an open-minded way? It's not about pitching anything to anybody else, it's just kind of like this: "Here's a guy who's writing songs, and he just hopes you'll like them." continue
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