[By Luke Z. Fenchel] It has been long settled that radio — and not video — killed the radio star. And while major record labels may be dinosaurs, it is difficult not to feel at least a bit sorry for an industry that can’t manage to market a legal product that contains sex, drugs and drinking that you can dance to. Radio, on the other hand, sells advertising, not music; and thus it is baffling why it spends so much of its time shoveling shit.
Television — and here I’m referring to both the boob-tube and the YouTube — has somehow managed to emerge relatively unscathed, while doing little actual harm to the aesthetic or commercial viability of music. But if the radio star — and by extension the music industry — is to survive the next few quarters, some very industrious people are going to have to start thinking creatively.
Enter our charming and unlikely heroes: Cary Brothers, a non-country fanatic from Nashville and his Ithaca-raised manager Josh Neuman. At first blush, they are strange candidates for the position of saviors of popular music.But scratch their surfaces and you’ll discover two industrious fellows with a compelling model. Brothers grew up worshipping Elvis (Presley, not Costello), bunked with Zach Braff at Northwestern University, and moved to Los Angeles to make it in music on his own terms. Thanks to the success of a little song called “Blue Eyes,” he did.
Neuman, after spending his childhood touring with John Brown’s Body (née Tribulations), decided to continue a career in the music industry, working his way up from the tape room at BMG music publishing to break bands that include American Hi-Fi and Fall Out Boy. Together, they took a small but influential Los Angeles music venue on North Cahuenga Blvd. and transformed it into a music community and hit-making collaborative. Impressed yet?
When he moved to L.A., Brothers found himself drawn to a burgeoning scene of singers and songwriters centered around the small Hotel Café. Resisting the “opener, opener, headliner” model of most music venues, the Hotel more closely resembled a jazz club, or the cult club Largo. Speaking to me by phone while on tour, Brothers explained that the intimacy of the Hotel is about the “camaraderie you feel in that room — from act to act over the course of the night.”
The format was so successful that they decided to take the show on the road. Neuman joked, “I was the sucker who took the bait and thought that I could actually put it together.” They began with a few one-off shows — at Sundance and then at the South by Southwest Festival. The Hotel Café tour is now on its third national tour. The show on Wednesday, Mar. 26 will include Brothers and Binghamton-born Ingrid Michaelson, as well as upcomers Meiko (a long-time bartender at the Hotel), Joshua Radin and Priscilla Ahn.
Even if you’re not familiar with the names, you may be familiar with the music. Like Brothers, some of the Hotel Café performers are finding success through less traditional channels. “I think film and TV are obviously the new radio,” Brothers told me. “There is no way around that.”
Brothers likens the Hotel Café tour to riding a surfboard with five other people. “Some people have to lean back and forth or side to side to let people see their faces. You follow each other’s lead the whole night, and kind of ride this thing… and just trust each other enough that the whole idea is going to work.” Brothers paused, and understating the success of the tour — all of the shows have been sold out — commented, “and, you know, we haven’t fallen off the board yet; not in a massive, horrible spill-out way.”
Neuman’s only regret is that this time around, he won’t be able to offer a free version of the Hotel Café show for Ithaca High School kids before the show at the State. His father was the music instructor for IHS for many years, and he liked to hold music assemblies for children when a big-name act came through town. “It was so cool for kids who couldn’t come to shows because they were too young, or poor, or whatever,” Neuman explained. The next time he visits with the tour, he hopes to do something in that model. “Next time, I’d really like to bring something back to the community like that.”
The Hotel Café tour featuring Ingrid Michaelson, Cary Brothers, Joshua Radin, Meiko, and Priscilla Ahn occurs on Wednesday, Mar. 26, 7:30pm at the State Theatre. The State Theatre is located on 107 W. State St.