Tacoma music stalwarts chime in on new trend that provides bands an audience for a price / by Matt Driscoll

On Saturday, Oct. 21, the greatest band in the history of Tacoma (in my humble opinion) â€" Girl Trouble â€" was supposed to play the Eagles Hall in Olympia. For fans of the band living in Oly, it was going to be a good day.

It’s not going to happen. 

For a number of reasons, Girl Trouble is no longer on the bill. Down With People, a supergroup of sorts (Young Pioneers, Room Nine, Love Battery), will still take the stage as planned, but there’ll be no GT.

It’s a sad development.

There’s a big dry erase calendar that sits above my desk. At the beginning of each month I fill it with shows.  I use it to plan out what I’ll be writing about and when. From the get-go I’ve had Girl Trouble in big red letters scheduled for this week. It wasn’t until days before deadline that I learned GT would no longer be playing. I faced a dilemma. I could do what my editors would probably prefer â€" pick another show and do my typical snarky, borderline arrogant preview. Or I could write the story I’ve been itching to put in print for months now, say to hell with the fact that I’m not previewing a damn thing this week, and write about Girl Trouble.
Guess which one I chose?

GIRL TROUBLE. In big red letters.

Why would I be so interested in writing about Girl Trouble, a band that’s seemingly been part of Tacoma since wooly mammoths sold crack on Yakima Avenue? What could I write about GT that hasn’t already been covered?

Three words: pay to play.

Six months ago, Bon Von Wheelie, GT’s drummer and a member of Tacoma’s scene for whom I have the utmost respect, drew my attention to Big Time Entertainment and a practice she considers a scam. She alleged BTE was duping many of the area’s young bands into, basically, paying to play.  Within the fraternity of musicians and artists, pay to play is about as big of a sin as there is.   

I don’t pretend the Weekly Volcano is an investigative magazine or that the people who sign my checks care to ruffle many feathers, but I thought the story deserved ink, and perhaps by offering the facts and a couple of opinions, I could shed light on the issue.

Unfortunately BTE did not return my calls. I’ve had to refer to the company’s Web site, and e-mails they’ve sent.

The facts: BTE rents well-known clubs in the area to put on shows, Hell’s Kitchen and Studio 7 for example. It finds bands to play these shows â€" usually young ones and usually through Myspace, and the bands are required to sell their own tickets. Tickets run $7 a pop. BTE asks that each band bring in at least 20 people. This figure was recently lowered from 35. According to an official BTE e-mail, bands are paid according to how many tickets they pre-sell. “25-35 is $1 a ticket, 36-49 is $1.50 a ticket, 50+ is $2 a ticket, 73+ is $3.50 a ticket, and 86+ is $4 a ticket.” According to this e-mail, theoretically, your band could sell $164 worth of tickets and not get paid. If your band sells 25 tickets at $7 each, you get $25, and BTE gets $150. BTE bills usually have five bands.  The order the bands play is determined by which band sells the most tickets.

Those are facts. The question becomes is this wrong?

“(Young bands) see this ‘booker’ asking them to ‘sell tickets’ to play, and they think that’s how it’s done. They think it’s Hell’s Kitchen, but it’s actually Big Time Entertainment contacting them,” vents Von Wheelie.

“Whether you’re actually paying or pre-selling tickets, if you’re handing any money over to anyone before you get on stage, you’re paying to play.

“It’s not the job of the band to pre-sell tickets and get maybe 10 percent back while the ‘booking’ company takes the rest. The bands are the artists. They are in charge of putting on a good show, dealing with clubs, keeping the van running, and creating the music. Bands are up against enough without being conned by some company that’s going to take most of the money. Bands starting out need to start small.  They need to learn how to promote themselves. They will appreciate the big shows when they’ve done the little ones first.  All you learn through Big Time is how to con your family and friends into buying expensive tickets.

“In their promotional contract, Big Time writes a big paragraph to these kids about how making flyers, handbills or taking out print ads doesn’t work.  Girl Trouble says bulls@#%. This is absolutely the way it’s done. Big Time is trying to eliminate what is good about music scenes. Name any scene you can think of â€" San Francisco in the ‘60s, the L.A. punk scene, the grunge scene. Can you imagine those scenes without posters and flyers?  It’s not just the bands that make a scene; it’s artists, writers, fanzines, fans â€" everybody working together in the same area. Big Time is suggesting that all be cut out.”

Flash, Hell’s Kitchen’s booking agent, has a slightly different perspective.

“Yes. It’s pay to play, but there will always be bands out there willing to do it. At least (BTE) is very up front about it,” says Flash.

“As a musician, I would have just ignored mass e-mails from Big Time trolling for bands to play their shows. They are good for the club, though. They take dates and times that would otherwise be dark and bring heads through the door.”

Whether or not it’s “pay to play,” or whether or not it’s wrong is up to you to decide. For more of Von Wheelie’s thoughts, check out her Myspace site. For more information on BTE, check out its Web site.