November 8, 1999
Acoustic Music, Live From the Living Room
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By NEIL STRAUSS
DURHAM, N.C. -- In more
than 30 years of touring, the Texas
singer Ray Wylie Hubbard had seen
far more professional-looking spaces
than the one he performed at on
Wednesday evening. The stage lighting consisted of a single black desk
lamp clamped to the top of a chipped
window frame. And the backstage
area was a small bedroom where
guitars rested against the wall next
to a vacuum cleaner.
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Wade Spees for The New York Times
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Ray Wylie Hubbard, right, and Jeff Plankenhorn, who accompanied him on Dobro, absorbed some applause during a house concert last week at the home of Jimmy Riddle in Columbia, S.C.
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This was clearly no ordinary club:
it was the home of Chris Elliott and
Carolyn Maynard. And for two hours
that night 80 music fans, most of
them strangers who had bought $10
tickets to the sold-out performance,
camped out in the couple's living
room and ate their food.
House concerts, as these events
are known, have recently blossomed
into a full-fledged national movement. From Seattle to Waco to
Queens, more than 300 homeowners
have become part-time concert promoters, turning their living rooms
into mild-mannered clubs for a night,
and scores of performers are discovering that they can make good livings simply by touring these private
residences.
At a time when live performance
outlets in many places are drying up
because of hostility from the police
and community groups, house concerts are becoming the most exciting
and vital alternative-performance
circuit around for acoustic musicians, with some shows selling out in
just an hour or two.
They are luring
an audience that professional concert promoters have given up on:
fans in their 30's and 40's, many of
whom shun the impersonal, smoky,
uncomfortable late-night club environment and prefer the familial intimacy of a living room concert.
"Part of the reason for the boom of
house concerts right now is people
are so hungry for community but
lacking in ways they can get together
with other people in an intimate or
friendly way that isn't commercialized," said Dave Nachmanoff, a singer-songwriter from Southern California who began performing house concerts a year and a half ago after
finding out about them on the Internet. "That's why when people go to
their first house concert, they're
amazed that people can do something like this. I've done a lot of
shows where by the end of the night
I've known every person in the audience at least by their first name."
The hosts of these concerts are
generally ordinary people who like
music and don't mind handprints on
the wallpaper. By day Elliott, 44,
works for a computer company and
Ms. Maynard, 43, is a schoolteacher.
But once a month, with the help of a
local college radio disc jockey, they
become music promoters, plastering
the city with posters advertising concerts in their living room by relatively well-known singer-songwriters
like Hubbard, writer of the honky-tonk shout-along "Up Against the
Wall Redneck Mother."
And Elliott and Ms. Maynard
are not alone in Durham. Steve and
Celeste Gardner hold a concert series in their home nearby. Last
month, in an effort to give the performances more legitimacy, the
Gardners even turned their house
into a nonprofit corporation, complete with a board of directors and an
advisory committee.
For the musicians, who range
from up-and-comers who can't get a
club date to some of acoustic music's
most celebrated musicians, like Bela
Fleck and David Wilcox, the cover
charge at house concerts is generally
higher than at clubs. Because most
homeowners already have jobs and
are happy just to have these performers in their living rooms, they
usually give them all the door money. In addition, the audience is generally more attentive, more enthusiastic, and more willing to buy CD's
after the show.
But there is a dark side: house
concerts stand on shaky legal
ground. Rob Bookman, the counsel
for the New York Nightlife Association, said that in most communities
homes are zoned as residential
areas, and when a homeowner
charges people to enter a residence,
the homeowner is running a business. In addition, Bookman said,
"there are strict standards of safety
for places with live entertainment,
and most residences don't meet
those standards."
Many people who present house
concerts remain unaware of local
ordinances -- "I just put on my
blinders," Gardner said -- and
promoters and artists say they
haven't heard of anyone who has had
problems with the police, with lawsuits or even with complaining neighbors.
"In our community, I wouldn't
think anything like that would come
up," said Glen Duckett, a computer
programmer who runs a house concert series called "Flowers in the
Desert" in Brenham, Tex., an hour
outside of Houston. "The fire marshal has been in my home for a
concert. I look at it this way: we're
not any different than a Tupperware
party. Someone is coming in to
present wares and make money, and
someone holding the party gets a few
free dishes. In my case, I always get
a free CD."
Though house concerts seem like a
throwback to a time before the rise
of the nightclub and concert hall in
America, their rejuvenation is largely a result of technology.
The Internet has made it possible for those
who run house concerts to promote
the shows at no cost, keep in contact
with one another and hunt down possible performers.
"We have about 90 places around
the country that hold house concerts
listed on our Web site, and we believe
that it's very possible that there are
three or four times that many going
on around the nation," said
Duckett, who runs the Web site
www.houseconcerts.com.
There may be even more house
concerts than Duckett imagines,
thanks to a new twist on the idea
developed by Kimberli Ransom, a 30-year-old singer-songwriter known by
fellow musicians as the queen of
house concerts. Instead of performing in the established circuit of living
rooms, Ms. Ransom schedules her
own tours by talking fans -- and their
friends and relatives -- who have
never organized a house concert into
letting her play.
During each tour Ms. Ransom
asks fans, when they add themselves
to her mailing list, to indicate whether they are interested in being a host
for one of her folk-rock concerts.
Then, before her next tour, she calls
those who expressed interest, explains how a house concert works
and sends them a packet of information. Through this technique she has
performed 150 house concerts in the
last year and a half. She has even
picked up a sponsor, Jim Beam
Bourbon, which fronted her $2,200 for
tour expenses, and she has written
what may be the first book on the
phenomenon, "House Concerts: A
Guide for Musicians and Hosts."
This word-of-mouth tour, as she
calls it, germinated when she decided to release records on her own
instead of through a small music
label. "I wanted to go national," she
said, "and I was willing to do what I
had to: give up my house and my day
job and live on the road. So I thought,
'How would it be possible to do this
without a record label?' And the answer was obvious: my fans. So I'm
playing in the homes of my fans. And
not just that, their friends. They'll
see on my itinerary that I'm going
through somewhere and send my CD
to a friend or relative who lives
there. And 99 percent of the people
who host me want to do it again. I
now have a schedule that takes me
through July."
Besides being able to build a more
loyal and far-flung fan base than is
possible through club shows, house
concert musicians like Ms. Ransom
also enjoy being pampered by their
hosts, who often feed them home-cooked meals and put them up comfortably for the night. As a general
rule, house concert presenters are
much more grateful hosts than club
owners.
"My wife and I just pinch ourselves that these people are in our
living room sometimes," said Tim
Blixt, a park superintendent who
presents concerts in his log cabin in
Wayne, N.J., by musicians like Cliff
Eberhardt, Cheryl Wheeler and Jimmy LaFave. "I'm convinced that the
people we present in our living room
are the most talented people making
music today."
One could probably trace house
concerts to any point in history, from
recent research suggesting that Neanderthals were blowing flutes in
caves to the classical recitals that
continue to this day. In early America, the home was a cradle of music:
there were soirees at antebellum
plantations and dances at country
cabins with local fiddlers. Before he
found national fame as a blues musician, Muddy Waters became a local
celebrity by turning his Mississippi
Delta cabin into a raucous juke joint
for music and moonshine.
The modern house concert, however, emerged only a few years ago.
Such shows had existed for decades,
but only recently -- thanks in part to
the success of slightly older house-concert series like Rouse House in
Austin and Urban Campfires in San
Antonio -- have there been enough of
them, linked via the Internet, to constitute an actual circuit and scene.
Small towns, rural areas and suburbs with no clubs for acoustic music
now regularly bring in touring performers.
Most house performances follow
the same format: the concerts are
promoted through the Internet, fliers, word of mouth and sometimes
local newspapers or college radio
stations, all of which include the
phone number but not the address of
the home. Tickets range from $5 to
$25, and the show begins between 7
and 8 p.m. Anywhere from 10 to 100
people might attend.
Occasionally the show is preceded
by a potluck dinner, a catered meal
or, in the case of one series in an
18th-century farmhouse in Connecticut, carriage rides and stew. Living
rooms are preferred to yards and
porches because they are more intimate and the acoustics are better;
smoking is generally forbidden, and
the availability of alcohol varies. The
concert begins with an introduction
by the host, and then the performer
plays two 45-minute sets, with a
break for snacking, socializing and
CD-selling. The only expenses for the
host are optional ones -- renting folding chairs, buying refreshments,
copying fliers and so on.
Some houses are much nicer than
others, and some hosts, like Jimmy
Riddle, a 39-year-old psychiatrist in
Columbia, S.C., take their concerts
much more seriously than others.
The night after his house concert
in Durham, Hubbard drove to
Columbia to perform at Riddle's
beautiful turn-of-the-century home.
As Riddle prepared for the show
by removing his 18th-century vases
from their pedestals and sitting in
each of the 41 chairs he had arranged
to make sure the legroom was ample
and the sightlines were good, his
mother, Nell, stood in the kitchen
cooking sausages, making sandwiches and heating apple cider.
"These cups are too small," she
said, shaking her head. "That's what
happens when you send Jimmy out to
do something."
With family photographs still on
display on the coffee table, Riddle began greeting his guests, collecting $12.50 from each person. One
was Garry Cockerill, 42, a dry-cleaning supply salesman who read about
the concert in a newspaper and
drove 45 minutes from Sumter, S.C.,
blasting Hubbard CD's out of his
convertible the whole way. It was
Cockerill's first house concert.
"I couldn't believe my ears when
he said it was going to be in his
house," Cockerill said. "I kept
laughing, 'You're telling me that
you're going to have Ray Wylie Hubbard in your living room?' "
But by the time he left the mesmerizing and often humorous two-hour show, Cockerill had been
converted. "That was something
else," he said, clutching a newly
bought, freshly autographed CD by
Hubbard. "I'll definitely be back
for the next one."