By most accounts, the third annual Louisiana Music-New Orleans Pride (LMNOP) conference was a great success and beneficial to its many participants.
About 600 people were counted as official registrants for the April 25-28 event centered at the the Hotel Le Meridien—a total only slightly higher than last year’s attendance figure—but panel discussions on business topics and workshops on the art of producing, writing and performing were said to more enlightening than in previous years. And fewer acts at the nightly showcases meant an emphasis of quality over quantity.
Given all that, it’s kind of surprising that the conference’s future in New Orleans is in doubt. Louis J. Meyers, LMNOP founder and executive director, hasn’t made a decision on whether or where to hold the event in 2000. New Orleans is the ideal host city for the conference, he says, but a lack of financial support and involvement by the New Orleans Music and Entertainment Commission has Meyers entertaining notions of moving the conference to another city. He plans to meet with city officials—the commission, headed by Jackie Harris, is a division of Mayor Marc Morial’s office—early this month to discuss the matter. A decision will be made in the last week in June, probably during Reed Midem Organisation’s annual U.S. music conference in Miami.
Meyers says it costs more than $200,000 to stage the event each year, and the figure has been rising by 20% annually. The registration fee for Louisiana residents is low, only $40, bur participation by locals has been much lower than organizers expect. “New Orleans is not the kind of community where I can charge a high registration price,” Meyers notes, “so the conference is always going to have trouble generating large sums of money. It needs help to survive.
The state, through the efforts of OffBeat (LMNOP’s original corporate sponsor) and the Louisiana Music Commission, already is on board with a pledge of support for next year’s event. For the 1999 event, the state kicked in $15,000. The city of New Orleans and its music commission did not contribute. Typically, the city supports a smaller, rival conference, Eric Cager’s troubled Roots Music Gathering, which will be held in August.
According to an aide, Harris was out of town the week before OffBeat headed to press and could not be reached for comment.
“The quality of the 1999 conference and the panels was just exceptional,” says LMC assistant director Steve Picou. “I just wish we could get more Louisiana music people involved. LMNOP did very well attracting registrants from out of state. It’s a very frustrating thing that people in the Louisiana music industry don’t realize its value.”
Actually, according to Meyers, participation by New Orleanians and Louisianans is on the rise. The city’s involvement may be the key to getting more locals signed up. “I spend 51 weeks a year promoting Louisiana music, but (city officials) don’t see the benefits of that,” he says.
He wants the city to agree to a three year, escalating financial commitment that will be based on LMNOP’s performance. In the meantime, Meyers says he’s talking with music-biz folks in New York City about the possibility of starting a new event there.
“There’s no shortage of phone calls coming in from people who would like me to bring this event or create a new one in their marketplace. I can do more than one a year, but not without doing damage to the first one. The [music conference] audience is only so large.
“Whether it means moving this one or starting another one, I don’t know,” Meyers explains. “1 would like to keep it in New Orleans and I will certainly be working toward that end result. At this point I’m not ready to commit. Jr depends on whether I have a chance to get my money back out of it.”
As for LMNOP 1999, there were too many speeches, workshops, panels and artist showcases to give fair mention to all, but a few stand out (for better or worse):
The Women In Music Symposium: Successful women in the music industry shared their thoughts with perspectives for men and women alike. The symposium dominated Sunday, the first day of the conference, and keynote speeches during the WIM banquet from Evelyn Shriver of Nashville’s Asylum Records, a division of Elektra, and Barbara Orbison, widow of the late Roy Orbison and president of Still Working Music, helped set the tone for the rest of the week. Orbison’s talk was highly personal as she “recounted how she’s managed her legendary husband’s extensive song catalog for more than two decades. Shriver discussed how she’s moved up the ranks of major record labels and managed a host of national and international talents.
On Monday, Loreena McKennitt, a Canadian Celtic folk artist with seven albums, shared thoughts about the founding and management for her Quinlan Road record label, which has logged sales of 8-million albums in more than 40 countries. Her central message: Don’t rely on major labels for success.
Frenchmen Street Showcases: Nightly acts a; Cafe Brasil, Checkpoint Charlie’s and the Dream Palace did not draw as well as showcases held in the Vieux Carte. “There doesn’t seem to be a true music scene there like there was in the past,” Meyers notes. Arguably, musicians at Storyville District, the new Ralph Brennan-Quint Davis club on Bourbon Street, got the most attention from LMNOP registrants.
Producer’s Clinic: American Sector Recording Studio on St. Charles Avenue was the site of a record production workshop with Barry Beckett (Paul Simon, Elton John), Pete Anderson (Dwight Yoakam, kd. lang) and Jim Dickinson (Big Star, The Radiators). Registrants got to pose questions to the highly regarded producers as a record was in the making.
Exhibit Hall: There were 15 booths making up LMNOP’s “trade show” and the room was extremely quiet, probably because the panelists were getting so much attention. Those left to man the exhibit stations had very little to do. “The trade show is something we’ll have to rethink if we come back next year,” says Meyers.
Technology Panels: There were many forums on the internet and other technological revolutions affecting the music industry, but none as celebrated as Wednesday’s “One Way or Another,” a discussion of competing digital download formats such as MP3, a2b and Liquid Audio. MP3 is currently taking the world by storm.
LMNOP’s founder is generally pleased with this year’s effort. “We captured the vibe we were looking for and that’s the roughest thing to do with a convention. I think we’ve turned a corner,” adds Meyers.
After only five months, Levon Helm‘s Classic American Cafe on Decatur Street has closed its doors. It was just a year ago that Arkansas-native Helm, drummer and primary vocalist for the legendary rock group, The Band ventured south to the Crescent City . from his home in Woods rock, N.Y., to discuss his plans for the club with managing partner and friend Carmen Marotta of New Jersey.
Marotta says the club wasn’t earning enough to justify keeping it open during the slow summer ‘season. With more than a dozen investors, including local jazz artist Banu Gibson and developer Eugene Grimaldi, Marotta will plot a course of action to lease the building to another operator or regroup with a plan to start over in the fall.
The former seems more likely, according to those involved with the now-defunct club. “The club was not meeting its expectations,” says Ralph Grimaldi, president of a division of Grimaldi Construction, developer of the six-story building where the club is housed. “They decided the slow summer season would be a good time to take a break in the operations and consider possibly finishing out the building.”
“Jr’s a beautiful place and a fun club, and I think they achieved a lot of what they wanted, to become a first-class music club,” Grimaldi says. “They have some serious competition and with the slow part of the season coming up, it didn’t make sense to take a beating this summer. The future will depend on what the shareholders want to do.”
Classic American Cafe opened with a bang, with performances by remaining members of The Band, but Mardi Gras season revenue fell below projections. Sources say the club recouped some money during French Quarter Festival and JazzFest before closing May 13.
Helm was a regular part of the club’s scene, often performing with his handpicked blues band, and mingling with patrons. But fans who went to his club hoping to hear him sing some of his gems from the 1960s and ’70s—”Up on Cripple Creek,” “The Weight,” “The Night They Drove 01’ Dixie Down,”
“Don’t Ya Tell Henry”-might have left disappointed as he was forced to stick to his drum kit. Sadly, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer last summer and though the treatments have been successful, he hasn’t recovered quickly enough to use his trademark growling, high-pitched voice.
Whether his medical condition was a factor in the club’s failure to draw large crowds is open to speculation. As a member of The Band, a group that was very much celebrated as the same many parts in lieu of singling out a from man, Helm has never been a household name. Located catty-corner to the House of Blues, the club brought in numerous local and national acts, including Marva Wright, Irma Thomas, James Harmon, Anson Funderburgh and the Rockets featuring Sam Myers and others, but despite efforts to bring in top-notch talent, the operation never seemed to catch on. “We’re looking at all kinds of options,” says Marotta, “mergers, leases, acquisitions, anything that makes sense to our own financial well-being as well as encouraging live music at that location on a regular basis. We had to make the decision that had to be made so that we could move forward.”
Marotta says musicians and others who did business with the club won’t be left in a lurch. His company will satisfy all outstanding financial obligations in the near term.
New Orleans-based Louisiana Red Hot’ Records has acquired 15 CDs from Binky Records of Baton Rouge. Binky’s stable includes several singer-songwriters from Louisiana and Oklahoma, including Mike West, Bob Childers and Greg Jacobs. Releases from those three artists will be on the market June 22.
West, a multiple OffBeat Best of the Beat award winner, is a folk singer who performs close to 300 gigs annually. His fifth and latest album is titled Sixteen Easy Songs for Drill and Banjo. Childers and Jacobs hail from Stillwater, Oklahoma.
The addition of the Binky product brings 15 new tides to Louisiana Red Hot Records, one of the fastest growing independent labels domestically.