BCN rumble forced to move to Harper's Ferry?

[Varulven]

That sound of the tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it? The once mighty WBCN Rock & Roll Rumble appears to have moved to a wonderful little venue, Harper's Ferry.

Now we love Harpers, but it is hardly a WBCN style club, not with Leon Russell and the Skatalites and other vintage artists you'll NEVER hear on WBCN?

So did Shred have a falling out with The Middle East?

From the Orpheum to a club that WBCN hardly does business with.

Wellington, by working with Shred - a leftover of the Oedipus regime - doesn't help the radio station.

Anyone know why they got the boot from the Middle East?

I thought it was fun to have The Count upstairs at the Middle East performing while the BCN rumble was going on - it was kind of poetic justice. Ahhh...file under the good old days...

What happened to WBCN's relationship with this important venue in Cambridge?

You want to see how relevant WBCN is?

We've asked these three questions for the past 20 years:

Name 5 of the last WBCN Rumble "Winners"

Name 2 bands that are performing this year (without looking it up)

Name 5 of the bands that have played there over the past 10 years?

It is as irrelevant as the former program director.

 

[raccoonradio]

I don't know if Harpers' still has their annual Battle of the Blues bands. years ago the focus was on blues
and related music there, featuring February's annual blues festival (big national and local acts in the
dead of winter) and summertime blues "rumble". One yr I got to be a judge--artists like the Paramounts
and Vermont's Seth Yacovane were competing. They got more and more into just plain rock for the
college age crowd and I think blues there is rare these days. Artists I remember seeing there include
Bo Diddley (with Walk That Walk), Shirley Lewis, and Little Charlie and the Nightcats.

 

[Varulven]

Norm Gardner -formerly of BNN TV - brought a coalition of us producers into the Harper's Ferry Blues Rumble thing. He has some great footage from a number of different tv stations. Alas, don't know if it was every broadcast. Now if WBCN tried to do something original like that! Shred just shredded the shrumble --- i mean the rumble...until there was nothing left of it

 

[bostonmusicman]

Joe, come on you've been doing good and providing great commentary and insight into the radio business that has been, for me, and I'm sure others, gaining you respect. Lets not throw it away with this BCN/Odeipus business again, we know where you stand. Don't let the past cloud your judgement and presentation of yourself today.

I'm guessing what you say is true though too. The BCN Rumble is way past its glory days probably wasn't good enough for the Middle East. What can you do? It isn't as easy to get on the scene nowadays. Winning the local rock radio station's (if you can call it that) battle of the bands isn't gonna guarantee fame, much less playtime. Recently, from Shred's Boston Emissions show how many of those bands have you heard get frequent air play on BCN? They have multiple personality disorder that needs to be ironed out and perhaps we could see a resurgence of the BCN glory days.

 

[Eli Polonsky]

That sound of the tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it? The once mighty WBCN Rock & Roll Rumble appears to have moved to a wonderful little venue, Harper's Ferry.

Now we love Harpers, but it is hardly a WBCN style club, not with Leon Russell and the Skatalites and other vintage artists you'll NEVER hear on WBCN?

Anyone know why they got the boot from the Middle East?

I don't know what happened with the Middle East, but Harper's has changed it's focus over the past few years, due to a combination of the changing times, and changing internal personnel running/booking the club.

While they still schedule the occasional "vintage" artist who draws well for them such as Leon Russell, The Skatalites, and they also have former James Brown saxophonist Maceo Parker coming, take a look at their current schedule. This is no longer the Harpers Ferry of a decade or two ago, which specialized in vintage and contemporary blues, and Grateful Deadhead style jam bands (they still book a few of them that prove to draw a good local crowd, but it's no longer their main focus).

Nowadays Harper's is scheduling a lot of mainstream alt-rock style bands, hard rock bands, some metal, and even occasionally hip-hop. Also, a lot of cover and tribute bands of mainstream commercial rock artists. With WBCN's current direction as a combination mainstream alt-rocker and classic hard rocker, perhaps Harpers now fits them better than the very eclectic Middle East, which books bands that are very popular on college radio, but that the current WBCN would never touch.

Harper's has completely redesigned their website from their old one, which used to say "Home of Boston's Best Blues", to a current rock motif. It became no longer profitable to be a mainly blues and vintage artists nightclub in a heavily student and young people area such as Allston, situated between B.U. and B.C.

The blues crowd, who (unfortunately) are now mostly middle aged and older, will pay for popular national name acts in swankier rooms such as Scullers Jazz Club and the Regattabar, and patronize laid-back suburban bars for local blues acts in areas that are not so dependent on the trendy youth market in the city. The area blues fans sold out the tribute concert for the late WGBH DJ Mai Cramer at the Regent Theatre in Arlington last Saturday night, but most of the audience (including myself) was middle-aged and older, and I'm sure most of them won't much patronize college area nightclubs such as Harper's any more.

I'm sure Harper's is making much more profit with their current image than they did as a mainly blues club. Like commercial radio, appealing to younger demographics is considered to be where the money is for nightclubs in the city.

 

[redbaron]

This is hardly breaking news seeing as how the Rumble started over 2 weeks ago.