By Ann Driscoll
Associate Editor
Boston venues can be a hassle. For many Berklee bands, the following scenario is familiar. You hear about a club that a lot of your friends play at. You visit the website, and send the booking contact an email, but don’t receive a response. When, after your fifth booking inquiry, the booking guy does respond with a surly one-sentence confirmation of the date, the venue offers little to no promotion and gives you a timeslot playing at midnight on a Monday night after such exciting acts as Billy Bob & the Thunderfarts.
To get to the club, you have to pay for a van-cab or worse yet, lug your gear onto a bus or the T, either draining your pockets or enduring some of the worst claustrophobic discomfort of your life, not to mention endangering your instruments by exposing them to spatially-challenged miscreants on public transportation. The drugged-up sound guy shows up late and acts exasperated at the burden of, you know, running your sound. The venue can’t spare you a single drink ticket, and the bartender scoffs at your meager tip after you pay six dollars for a Sam Adams.
Because the show is 21+, three-quarters of your friends can’t even make it, though your friend from Switzerland tries to get in with her ID but forgets her passport, so she’s turned away by the brutish doorman and has to make a humiliating trek home. Worse yet, the Thunderfarts were late, so your timeslot gets pushed back to 1:00A.M., and despite your furious texting, there is no one out there, not even mom.
Because you only brought in ten people and the Thunderfarts’ fans (dubbed “Thunderfarters”) quickly vacated as soon as Billy Bob left the stage, the club doesn’t pay you anything. You walk away with $30 drained from your bank account, (either on beer to drown your sorrows or cab fare) a club that rejected you like a toxic organ transplant, and a panging self-doubt about your career as a musician.
Luckily there is an alternative to this cruel scenario: the Berklee Cafshow.
Cafshows provide Berklee students with a conveniently-located, large space (the Berklee cafeteria—hence the name) accommodating, talented sound engineers (dubbed “monitors” in caf-speak) state-of-the-art PA’s and monitors, a full hour time slot at 10 P.M., campus-wide promotion, and an all-ages inclusive environment.
A long-standing Berklee institution under the umbrella of the Student Activities Center, the Cafshow Office has a new staff under the leadership of Manager Trevor Paul. Farin Hoover and Andrew Kline are monitors and Jon Golko is the lighting technician, responsible for making shows pop with responsive, real-time lighting designs, a new addition to the cafshow experience.
The Cafshow Office is devoted to providing high-quality equipment for performances. Last summer, cafshows acquired a new mixing board, new mains, and a new subwoofer. This year, they are purchasing new monitors and microphones.
Cafshows are expanding advertising too, posting monthly Cafshow listings around campus, and creating a permanent Cafshow display case in the 150 lobby.
The new singer-songwriter night will be a bi-weekly opportunity for two singer-songwriters to cut their teeth at playing the Red Room @ Café 939 from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Each will receive a one-hour time-slot.
While cafshows are open to all kinds of bands playing all kinds of genres of music, the Office hopes to garner submissions from more original bands and less cover bands. The cafshow office has many dates available and is actively seeking out performers for the fall semester.
The submission process involves signing a form at the Cafshow Office and submitting it along with a demo CD. Once selected for a cafshow, a performer or band must sign a contract. Says employee Lauren Vargas, “We are trying to increase our professionalism and enforce policies in our contracts. You sign up for a Cafshow, you commit to it, and you follow the policies, just like any other club.”
But unlike any other club, Cafshows are a convenient and professional way for any band—new or established—to play a gig.
