NERFA Bound

Thursday, November 12, 2009

NERFA is a funny word. No I’m not talking about a squishy football approved for indoor play. NERFA is short for NorthEast Regional Folk Alliance, which is a mouthful- hence, the abbreviation. David and I attend multiple Folk Alliance conferences throughout the year. Today we are heading to Kerhonkson, NY to partake in 4 days and nights of music-making, networking, extreme sleep-deprivation, and oodles of just plain fun with our friends. We disguise this fun as business. This adventure is hitherto known as NERFA.

David is currently behind the wheel, and I am thinking about the weeks behind us and the weekend ahead. We are over the half-way mark of our month-long east coast tour, and I feel as though it’s been a success. As far as shows go, we’ve had awesome nights and some evenings that left something to be desired.. usually we desired more people to come and listen. Small crowds don’t stress me out, though. I think it’s all part of the journey. And I happen to believe, maybe naively, that the exact right people are in the seats every time we play. Not one person more or less was supposed to be there, or they would have been. Every now and then you get a dud in your box of firecrackers, but that doesn’t mean you cancel the 4th of July. Keep on keeping on, light another sparkler. Create your own lovely party in the air.

Allow me to illustrate this in another way. The first time I went to a Folk Alliance conference was in Kerrville, TX on Sept 6, 2001. I had no idea what I was doing. I walked up to the registration table and a woman- who would go on to become a dear friend, Dalis Allen- must have seen the deer in the headlights look in my eyes. She took me by the proverbial hand and walked me through getting checked in. Then she walked me into the exhibit hall where she introduced me to 3 wacky women from Australia, a group called Bluehouse. Dalis asked if the girls would hang out with me and if they had available slots in their showcase room schedule for me. They offered a resounding welcoming, “Yes!” And a friendship was formed.

See, among the plethora of things I did not know going into this conference is that artists are “supposed” to arrange for showcase opportunities ahead of time. And armed with these showcases, artists come to the conference with an arsenal of promotional materials with which to draw in audience members for said showcases. Posters, postcards, flyers, schwag of all kinds- including but not limited to buttons, pencils, keychains, homemade chex mix with artist’s photo and showcase schedule on the baggie, fancy things for conference goers to hang on their name-badges and affix to their lanyards. As I mentioned before, I had no idea what I was doing, much less “supposed” to be doing. So I came armed with nothing. Not one showcase, poster, postcard or flyer. Fancy schwag was out the furthest thing from my mind. I did have some copies of my 1st CD in the trunk of my car, just in case I met someone important.

To further explain the madness of a Folk Alliance conference, I must explain that there are different kinds of showcases. At this particular conference, there were “Official Showcases” and “Private Showcases.” Let’s start with Official. These showcases happen on a stage in a hotel ballroom, with sound and lights (the whole conference takes place in a hotel). They are much like any normal concert. The artists in these showcases applied months ahead of time to be chosen from a large pool of submitting acts. Official Showcase artists play a short set of 15-20 minutes of music for an audience of conference goers. No other conference activities compete with these shows. One artist is performing at a time.

Now, let’s move on to Private Showcases. In the hotel where a Folk Alliance conference is held, there are designated “music floors” and “non-music” or quiet floors. People who want to go to bed at a decent (read: 2 am-ish) hour, book a room on a quiet floor. That way you can, for the most part, ensure that you will not spend the whole night trying to drown out the impromptu old-time music jam in the adjacent room- 2 banjos, a guy playing spoons, 3 fiddles, a home-made washboard & an upright bass, 14 guitars, a pair of mandolins, and 9-part harmonies to boot. You’d be amazed how many folk musicians you can fit in one modern day hotel room. I digress… So that’s what the quiet floors are for.

The Private Showcases take place on the music floors, usually 3 of them all next to each other, like floors 17-19. Along the crowded hallways of the music floors, you will find hotel room doors standing open with beds either removed or pushed up against the wall. Folding chairs are often supplemented and voila,  in the open space of a hotel room, you have a “stage”. The private showcases don’t start until after the conference’s main attraction, the official showcases, are over for the evening. The typical start time for a private showcase is 11 pm. At which point, the music floor hallways cram with folk musicians, and music lovers, and their instruments, as they all shuffle from room to room listening to music. These unplugged showcases occur simultaneously, so in essence, the artist could be competing with 10-35 other artists who are performing in the next room, down the hall, or on the next floor. It’s folk madness, really. I’ve done my best to explain it, but it’s one of those you-have-to-see-it-to-truly-understand-the-pandemonium sort of experiences. Like the running of the bulls, only far less people die.

So when I arrived in Kerrville in the late summer heat of 2001, I had no showcases, no flyers, again I emphasize: no clue. But the Bluehouse girls had decided last minute to host a private showcase room, and were happy to have me fill a slot each night. And so I played, my big Folk Alliance debut showcases, in a hotel room decorated with the Australian girls’ press photos scotch-taped to the walls alongside various undergarments strung above me like a clothesline. No, I’m not making the undies and bras part up. And in the audience as I played my heart out…. were the 3 Aussie girls themselves and no one else. It might be because I had no flyers to promote my newly given showcases, or maybe it was because I was so terrified of networking that I spent most of the conference stealing away to my hotel room where I would cry on the phone to David about how horrifying this whole business-networking thing was. Either way… I played to the Bluehouse girls.

To the naked eye, that whole conference might look like a bust, a waste. But that’s not how I see it. By the end of the first night, all 3 Bluehouse girls had separately invited me to join them as the opening act on their upcoming Australian national tour. Upon realizing that they were all in agreement about wanting me to tour with them, I started to seriously consider the idea. You might be thinking, what was there to consider? Well, they wanted me to come in 2 weeks and be there for more than a month. I had a day-job working for my Dad, and no plane-ticket.

I went home on Sunday and talked it through with my Dad, who agreed it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. He offered to help with the airfare and by Monday night I was looking at flights which I planned to purchase the next day. Tuesday morning, September 11, was a day we all remember. I don’t need to explain how the world changed forever that day. All the plans for the trip stopped along with the world as we all kept vigil and watched and waited. What was next? What would tomorrow hold? Airports shut down and airfare skyrocketed, and I doubted the trip would happen. But as the dust settled on those first 2 weeks after the planes and towers came crashing down, airports opened and TV programming returned, and I with the blessing of my family boarded a plane across the Pacific, across the world, where I was welcomed like a refugee in wartime.

I spent 5 weeks touring the Eastern coast of Australia with my awesome hosts, Bluehouse. It was the trip of a lifetime and they are dear, dear friends to this day. Those friendships, born out of a happenstance introduction at a Folk Alliance conference, have spawned songs, many gigs and business relationships, and many more rich days of laughter and love.

And so it is, you never know who’s listening. The exact right number of seats are taken at every show. Can’t wait to see what adventures NERFA leads me to in the coming years.