Rock ‘n’ Roll Saviors
Last week I attended my first Silent Disco. Well, sort of.
Have you heard of this, Silent Disco? I hadn’t.
A colleague told me this was a cool side tent event at Bonnaroo. And I wouldn’t know that as I don’t attend multi-day festivals anymore. I’m sure you could say it’s because I’m old but it’s actually because I just don’t want to see that many bands crammed into a 36-hour period. I like just a couple at a time. And then home.
You see, I’ve seen thousands of bands over the years, to the point I’ve actually forgotten if I’ve seen an artist.
Not that there aren’t lots of cool bands around today worth seeing. There are. But for me, too many great ones come through on Saturday nights and I’m just out of gas by 9 p.m. since I get up so early to host my show on 89.7 the River on Sunday mornings.
So, she explained that there is this side tent at Bonnaroo and as you approach you hear nothing and then you walk in and it’s hundreds of people dancing and moving to silence. Because they all have headphones on.
But there was no dancing at our event. I take that back, there was some funny robotic nonsense going on, but that likely had more to do with the substances and elixirs being consumed than the music we were listening to.
I was in Denver last week for the annual Coalition of Independent Music Store convention hosted by one of our members and also one of the 10 best record stores in the country, Twist & Shout. As we usually do, along with lots of business, we find time to enjoy music.
Q Prime artist manager John Peets, who represents the Black Keys, is a big fan of the coalition, so much so that two years ago he gave us the exclusive rights to sell and to distribute to other indie stores the side project from the Black Keys, Blackroc, their collaboration with a number of rap artists.
Then last year, he had the band do a private show for us in Birmingham, Alabama in a small club.
So, this year, he delivered another treat when he showed up at the convention with six advance tracks from the forthcoming Black Keys album. These weren’t even final mixes but John wanted us to be the first to hear them.
Unfortunately, today’s artists have to be super careful of leaks of the music so his preview event for us was tightly controlled, restricted to CIMS members only in the 8th floor suite of the very hip and luxurious Hotel Teatro in downtown Denver where we were holding our confab.
It was late when we got started, about 10 p.m. Prior to that we had spent the past three hours hanging at Twist & Shout, getting a tour of the backroom operations, chatting with staffers about procedures, discussing best practices and of course shopping the store. I found a John Cowan CD used that I don’t think is still in print.
After a brief introduction John explained the band was working to finish before year-end, but that the album could come in the first quarter of 2012.
Then they handed out cordless, volume control headphones, good ones, to 60 of us and John then tested a different CD on the system to make sure we could all hear it and had our individual volume set. He didn’t want to have to restart the Black Keys CD so this made sure everyone was ready.
We then listened to six tracks in a row without stopping to discuss each track. After the first three tunes you could see the amazed looks on everyone’s faces. After all six the buzz was there. Could this be even better than “Brothers?“
It was exciting. The first and third tune we heard were simply monster tracks and are likely to be very big radio hits.
Two years ago if you would have asked me what band would raise the flag for rock and roll and change Top 40 radio, I never would have guessed the Black Keys.
But now they stand alongside Tom Petty, Wilco, Neil Young and a handful of others who continue to shape modern rock and roll. Not only that but their breakthrough success at Top 40 radio (think KQKQ 98.5) forced what was becoming an almost unlistenable format to broaden their scope, and after the Black Keys we saw these stations open up to Mumford & Sons, Adele and other music they never would have considered before that. And if they tell you otherwise, they are full of it.
Adele, she’s at 3 million now. Mumford, around 2 million, while the Black Keys have yet to cross 900,000. However, they will cross one million sometime in the next six months with average weekly sales these last few months of 4,500 units a week.
And then they’ll tee it up again with the new record.
Rock is dead, long live rock.
Mike is the General Manager of Homer’s Records and has been active in the music industry for more than three decades as a retailer, writer, musician and radio deejay. He currently hosts “Sunday Morning” on 89.7 the River, and serves as a board member for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers and the Coalition of Independent Music Stores.