Notes On Donald Getz Event Management And Event Tourism

The Frank Brown International Songwriter’s Festival as Utopian-Zone Event Tourism Nina Mankin, Tourist Productions Barbarar Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, professor

“Can you smell it?! It’s in the air! There’s Songwriters in the air!!” -Hollin “Bam Bam”, aspiring songwriter (standing outside the Flora-Bama Lounge)

It’s 2:30 a.m. and the main bar of the Flora-Bama Lounge (the physical and psychological center of the Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival) is still going strong. Though the official Festival shows are only at night, there has been live music

(including an open microphone for non-scheduled songwriters) going on since noon.

Many of the one hundred or so remaining alcohol and sun soaked audience members have been in and out of here all day for the last three days; this is the third of an eleven day festival that traditionally starts the second Thurday in November.

The Flora-Bama Lounge has got that kind of dim-lit vibe preferred by those looking to consume lots of alcohol and smoke lots of cigarettes. If you have had any experience with outside-of-the-urban bar culture, you would very quickly realize that you were in what some, particularly in the South, call a “road house” or “honky tonk”, that is, a lower-class watering hole with cheap drink, characteristically unclean floors, and almost exclusively white clientele. Look up at the unfinished ceiling and you’ll see dollar bills, brassieres and womens’ underwear stapled to the rafters. On the walls are pictures of smiling fishermen from decades past with their proud catches, big-breasted women in string bikinis, pro football players posing with the bar staff; these are the heroes of redneck beach life. Stop to listen to the music and chances are you will recognize something else about the milieu: this is “Country” country. So where are you?

1 The Redneck Riviera

“…There is a place on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico where emerald waves roll out to embrace the distant horizon beneath a sapphire sky. It is a place where the sugary sand that clings to your feet after a leisurely walk on the beach needn’t be brushed off before you go inside. A place where names and occupations aren’t quite so important – where legends share tables with locals, and not-so-locals…” –from The Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival program.

We are on a small barrier island appropriately called Perdido (lost) Key on the Florida Panhandle: the stretch of the United States along the Gulf of Mexico that elected George “Dubya”; a land that proudly calls itself “The Redneck Riviera”.

The Key, which stretches from Pensacola, Florida on one side to Orange Beach, Alabama on the other, is no more than a quarter of a mile wide and has only one road running down the middle. With the exception of one large and one small area of sand dunes and sea oats set aside as national seashore, the entire length of this eight+ mile stretch is lined with towering vacation condominiums, most built in this last decade of economic explosion.

During “the season” (Spring Break until Labor Day) I am told that you can walk the length of the Key faster than you can drive it, or you could if it weren’t for the crowds of vacationers who, as one local told me, “make you feel like you’re in Down Town New

York City!” But this is mid-November and while there are still some tourists this time of year, it’s nothing compared to six weeks ago. And while it can still be warm enough to take a dip in the Gulf, (though the locals will think you’re nuts), folks don’t come to

Perdido Key the second week of November for the surf; they come here for the music.

2 “The fact is I think all of us are a community and I’d just like to encourage us all to treat each other a little bit nicer and a little better, just like Mr. Frank did.” – Joe Gilchrist, owner of the Flora-Bama Lounge and main festival patron

Frank Brown, or “Mr. Frank”, as he is always referred to, was the night watchman/bouncer for twenty eight years at The Flora-Bama Lounge. He was a black man in a white man’s world and he was the stuff of legends. In a recent interview, Rock

Killough described Mr. Frank in language similar to most descriptions I have heard over the six years I’ve been attending the Festival:

“He was a very large individual and if anything started up he just had to walk up and it just stopped! Everybody knew you didn’t mess with Mr. Frank. He always carried, I reckon he had a license, but he had a pistol about that long stuck down into his pocket or his pants belt. You’re talking about a man who must have been about 6 foot 6 and weighed about 290/300 lbs; he looked like a mountain walking through that door. And man, did he love music! That’s how the festival got its name. They dedicated it to him to make sure his name didn’t get lost in the shuffle. I think that’s nice!” 1

Mr. Frank loved music. The story I’ve been told is that towards the end of his tenure at the Flora-Bama, Mr. Frank would come by on Sundays with his girlfriend and the local musicians would put on a special show for him. Mr. Frank died in 1988 at the age of 95, four years after he retiring from the ‘Bama in 1984 which was the year The Festival officially started. “Officially” is an important word here; as I was interviewing songwriters who had participated in the earliest years of the Festival, I began to notice discrepancies regarding dates. Actually, the event that everyone agrees marks the first year of the Festival, a concert given by Hank Cochran, Red Lane, Ken Lambert and friends, happened in 1986. They thought it fitting to name the Festival after their buddy and added the word “International” because they thought it sounded important (it was, by most accounts, a joke)2.

1 Personal interview 11/03 2 Interview, Joe Sun 12/02

3 Then in 1993, something happened that is typical of the Frank Brown Festival’s

“spontaneous and free-wheeling spirit”3. As songwriter Allen Rhody (who was there from the beginning) recounts “Everyone wanted to have a really big party that year so they just decided to call it ten years and celebrate the 10th year anniversary – even though it had only been eight years!”4 The landmark stuck and so next year (2004) will be the official 20th year anniversary.

“The transformation of the past that is History is always made in social circumstances….what the story loses in accuracy it gains in truth. Its truth concerns the bonds of familiarity” –Greg Denning5

Few surprised by this historic discrepancy. As songwriter Doug Gill said when I explained the reason for the time-gap in Festival years: “Man! That is so Flora-Bama!”6

Similarly, the concept of “International”, that by most accounts was a joke, is now functionally part of the Festival’s identity7 as is the stated goal of including “all kinds of music for all kinds of songwriters”8 even though the music played at the Festival is almost exclusively Country and this event, named after a black man, is attended almost exclusively by white people. It is as though the words “Frank Brown” and “International” are an unconscious projection into what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined community”:

“It is imagined because the members…will never know most of their fellow-members… yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” (6)

3 ibid 4 Personal interview 12/02 5 “Performances” p.49 6 Personal interview 2/02 7 A Norwegian songwriter participated n 1993 and each year since there have been between 1 and 15 international songwriters featured. 8 Joe Gilchrist, phone interview

4 “We’re all here for the same thing: to party, to play music, and to inspire each other” -Hollin “Bam Bam”, aspiring songwriter

Squeezed onto the small stage at the front of the main bar is a group of songwriters often referred to by the Festival audience as “Sonny an’ ‘em.” Sonny Throckmorten, ASCAP’s

Country Songwriter Of The Year three years running in the early ‘80s, is the de-facto ring leader of this bunch of songwriters which includes Bruce Channel, best known as writer and performer of the rock-and-roll classic “Hey Baby”, Rock Killough, long-time

Throckmorten buddy (with his bluegrass band of Perdido Key locals another Festival favorite), Larry Henley, who wrote “Wind Beneath My Wings”, one of the biggest pop records of all time, and longtime Merle Haggard collaborator Freddy Powers. You may never have heard of any of these writers but you have definitely heard their songs.

Sonny is a tall and lanky sixty-something Texan with a good looking, if scruffy, hound dog face, a long shock of white hair, a shit-eating grin and a voice that reaches up into canine register when he sees someone he hasn’t for a while, giving out his signature

“Puuudin! How ya been Puuudin?!!”

Sonny is introducing one of his songs, the 1980 #1 country hit, “The Way I Am”, made famous by Merle Haggard: “My daddy was a preacher and we’d travel ‘round in this big ol’ van. I ‘member goin over them breezeways in Louisiana with the bayou below. All I wanted was to get me a fishin pole and bucket o’ bait. That’s where this song came from, prob’ly not that far-off from right here” Sonny sings the opening line:

WISH I WERE DOWN IN SOME OL’ BAYOU

5 And the crowd erupts into generous applause, quieting down to a hush until all you hear is the high raspy emotion-filled tone of Sonny’s voice and the uneven strumming of his guitar, punctuated by the fluid clear tones of Pensacola local, guitar virtuoso John Joiner.

Sonny continues:

OLD CANE POLE STUCK IN THE SAND BUT THE ROAD I’M ON DON’T SEEM TO GO THERE SO I JUST DREAM AND KEEP ON BEING THE WAY I AM

The 18-20,000 people who come to this area for “Frank Brown” (as it is referred to by the

Festival staff; the locals just call it “Songwriters”) are made up of a combination of locals and two kinds of out-of-towners: songwriters, and people who love songs. For the 250+ songwriters, this eleven-day festival is unlike anything else they experiences throughout the year, and most plan their writing and performing schedules around the event. “Flora-

Bama” (as it is called by Nashville songwriters) is a chance to have a few days or more on the beach, share songs with your peers, inspire one another, make a little money9 and, most importantly, affirm a sense of community in a music business that is increasingly dehumanizing. Most songwriters who come to this event are, or have been, published writers who live and work in Nashville10. Many live within miles of each other but drive the 8 hours to Perdido Key to visit.

“You’ll never get someone yelling ‘Play Margaritaville!’ during Frank Brown” -Casey Kelly, Songwriter

9In a society where songwriters are increasingly treated as if their work should not be remunerated, getting paid, even if merely a token amount, is extremely important. 10 About 85% of the writers at Frank Brown are from Nashville. The remaining 15% come from Texas and Los Angeles. A small number (between 5 and 10 each year) come from countries outside the U.S. and Canada. This is estimated information from Festival staff and personal observation.

6 It’s important to distinguish what is going on at the Flora-Bama Lounge of the Festival from what happens here the other 355 days and nights a year. If the average age in the

Flora-Bama “main bar” (where Festival shows happen) is usually between 20 and 30, for these eleven days the average age in the room is closer to 45. And while the Flora-Bama is known year-round as a venue that caters to “original” entertainment (performers who write and play their own material), for the most part entertainers here will play “covers” of well known songs for an audience of rowdy patrons that “want to get drunk and sing along at the top of their lungs”11. During the Festival you will only hear original music.

There are a couple of other important differences as well; during these eleven days the

Flora-Bama main bar is smoke-free, and there are a lot of other molecules that are absent from the air -- the audience is conspicuously quiet. As Rock Killough, Festival favorite and veteran of all but one of the last sixteen years put it: “Most of the people here I would characterize as “grown”, by which I mean “mature”, as opposed to the younger hell-raising crowd you usually find. You come to Frank Brown to hear the music or you don’t come. And they enforce it with an iron fist; buddy, if you make noise you’re goin out on your be-hind!” 12

Back to Sonny who’s singing the chorus. The rest of the guys on stage and many in the audience join in:

IT’S THE WAY I AM I FIT MY SHACKL ES THE WAY I AM, REALITY I CAN ALMOST SEE THAT BOBBER DANCIN BUT I JUST DREAM AND KEEP ON BEIN’ THE WAY I AM

11 Hollin “Bam Bam” interview 12 Interview 11/03

7 Nashville songwriter and long time Festival participant Doug Gill leans over and whispers: “in the early ‘80s you could’ve asked ten Nashville writers what their favorite song was and nine of them would have said ‘The Way I Am’ by Sonny Throckmorten.

Man, this is history!” Festival Stage Manager Kathy Pace is giddy: “ I know it’s almost three o’clock and I went over tonight but I saw all these musicians in here having a good time and everybody was connecting and I thought why not? ‘Cause when the spirit moves you, you gotta let it flow! All one harmony, one accord, everybody was right there with ‘em tonight. It was beautiful. What a night!”

And the night isn’t about to end; a good portion of the songwriters in the club will now be going to “guitar pulls”, informal gatherings where songwriters pass a guitar (and often a joint and a bottle of whisky) around and share songs - often ones you don’t get to hear at the actual shows. These “pulls” will last until day-break, at which point the songwriters will return to the condos or beach houses the Festival has provided (through local donations) to sleep and write and hang out on the beach. Many of the songwriters will wander into the “hospitality house”, a converted old KFC across from the ‘Bama, for something to eat (provided by an array of local restaurants) sometime in the afternoon, before preparing for another round of Festival shows that will resume the following night.

As Rock Killough says “if you can stay here for ten days and you can walk when it’s over with, you’re in pretty good shape.”13 At Frank Brown you are not just taking in music and alcohol, sun and friendship; you are literally ingesting community.

“I have chosen to weave myself and my own experiences into this book…because lived experience is central to my writing and the subject of place.”

13 ibid

8 –Lucy Lippard, The Lure of The Local

This is the sixth year I’ve attended Frank Brown as a singer, songwriter and in-schools educator and I’ve come to some conclusions about it. As someone said to me at the

‘Bama recently,14 “You’re not from around here are you?”. I am not a Southerner. I’m from New England or, as they like to tell me down South, I’m a “Yankee” (does anyone in the North ever inform someone from the South that they’re a “Rebel”?). Someone else on this last trip rightly assumed that I was likely not a Republican. I’m also a feminist, a

Jew, and did I mention that I don’t tan or particularly like to drink or do drugs? None of this would suggest that I would feel very comfortable on the Redneck Riviera. On the contrary, I have rarely found a place where I felt as accepted and appreciated, both as an artist and as a human being, as at The Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival.

And I am not alone. Every songwriter, black (there are a few), white, straight, gay, old, young, American, foreign, professional, non-professional, outsider, insider, hit writer or total novice15 that I have spoken to about the festival has said the same thing: this is my community.

I would like, in this paper, to propose that the Frank Brown International Songwriters

Festival exists within a sub-set of Event Tourism that I am calling “Utopian-Zone Event

Tourism” or “UZE” Tourism. In a touristic “zone” of time and space, a community of individuals can temporarily be released from the constraints of the dominant culture that they collectively identify as being their “normal” world, and create a utopian space with a

14 On this last November 13-16 festival trip during which time I gathered most of the material found in this paper. 15 Of 248 songwriters this year, 28 were locals, 47 were women and 5 were people of color including 3 African-Americans.

9 different set of rules where they can “refuel”16 emotionally and spiritually before going back into the trenches of hegemony.

In the case of Frank Brown, the dominant culture is the Nashville music industry, which has changed in the last twenty years from something that used to very consciously perform “community” into something that now very consciously, and brutally, performs

“business”. During Frank Brown there is a temporary recreation of that now nostalgic past within a community in which many never experienced what the older writers describe as “the Golden Age”17 of Nashville but all nontheless identify with it18.

My hope is to accomplish two things in this paper: to give a sense of what it’s like during

Frank Brown, and to briefly examine two other sites, The Michigan Womyn’s Music

Festival and Burning Man as a way of further substantiating my argument for this form of

Event Tourism.

Event Tourism

“Events constitute one of the most exciting and fastest growing forms of leisure business, and tourism-related phenomena. Their special appeal stems in part from the limited duration and innate uniqueness of each event, which distinguishes them from permanent institutions and built attractions. Frequently their celebratory and festive ambience elevates them above ordinary life experience” - Donald Getz, Event Management (1)

16 This word was used a number of times by my informants including Joe Sun and first time festival participant Janet McGlaughlin. 17 “Golden Age of Nashville” is a term I heard from a number of the songwriters I interviewed including Rock Killough, Casey Kelly and Joe Sun. 18 This concept of “nostalgia without memory” is explored by Arjun Appaderai in his book Modernity At Large

10 “Event Tourism” was a new term in the 1980s (Getz, p.2), coming into existence alongside such other specialty “isms” as “Adventure Tourism” “Eco-Tourism” “Gastro-

Tourism” and a handful of others. This new semantic breakdown indicated not only the recognition of new (often niche) markets, but also a new field of study in which Donald

Getz has been one of the few writers concerned with the practicality of production.

Getz delineates three major categories of Event Tourism: “The Special Event”, “a one- time or infrequently occurring event outside the normal program or activities of the sponsoring or organizing body” (4), “The Hallmark Event”, defined by B. Ritchie and C.

Aitken in their analysis of the economic impact of the Olympic Winter Games as “Major one-time or recurring events of limited duration, developed primarily to enhance the awareness, appeal and profitablility of a tourism destination in the short and/or long term.”(Ritchie 1984; 2); and “Mega-Events” such as World’s Fairs or the Olympics (5, 6)

In their 1999 book, “Festival and Special Event Management”, a trio of Australian event organizers analyzed the growing phenomenon of event tourism within a strictly

Australian context, expanding on Getz’s delineations by adding the additional category of

“Local” events. (See Appendix for two diagrams)

There is fluidity within Getz’s categories – a concert may be part of a festival or a trade show, rallies may be part of conferences, sports competitions may be parts of fairs, etc.

What distinguishes the category “Cultural Celebrations” (which includes festivals, carnivals, religious events, parades and heritage commemorations; see appendix) is a

11 reliance on specific place. By Getz’ definition, The Frank Brown Festival, which relies heavily on its location, falls under this broader category of “Cultural Celebration”

Designed as a guide for festival organizers and promoters, Getz’ book has an underlying tautology that privileges concepts of “Professionalism” and “Quality” (as in “good” vs.

“poor”) within a set of criterion for a successful event that also includes the more commonly discussed touristic values of “Uniqueness”, “Tradition”, “Authenticity” and

“Festive Spirit”.

Festivals

Alassandro Falassi, in the introduction to his collection of essays about festivals, “Time

Out of Time” (1987, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque), traces the etymology of the word festival to the Latin festum for "public joy, merriment, revelry" and feria for "abstinence from work in honor of the gods." (2); according to Falassi these two words fused into one single meaning in the plural festa or feriae. 19

Falassi traces how feriae transformed from the religious Medieval feriae (meaning

“truce”), the Spanish ferias (“day of rest in honor of a saint”), the Italian feria

(“abstinence from work in honor of a saint”) and giorni feriali (“days of absence of religious ceremonies”) into the secular feria that became the term for market days and festive commercial events (2).

19 “In classical Latin the two terms tended to become synonyms, as the two types of events tended to merge.” (2)

12 Felassi is not interested in modern tourism per se. He is an anthropologist and most of the essays in his book were written before the emergence of the field of “Tourist

Studies”20. For my purposes, what is most interesting in Falassi’s etymological breakdown of the word “festival” is the one concept that remains consistent throughout the changing meanings of feriae from the religious to the secular -- the notion of "rest from". As the title of Falassi's book suggests, festivals exist in a "time out of time";

"Festival time imposes itself as an autonomous duration." (4) It is an autonomous duration during which a community can reaffirm itself:

“The social function and the symbolic meaning of the festival are closely related to a series of overt values that the community recognizes as essential to its ideology and worldview, to its social identity, its historical continuity, and to its physical survival, which is ultimately what festival celebrates.” (2).

Hakim Bey: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“This time I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will turn the whole world into a holiday…” –Nietzche

Hakim Bey (pen name for Peter Lamborn Wilson) is a counter-culture theorist/hero. One of the founders of the anarchist anti-copyright press, “Autonomedia”, Bey’s work has been at the forefront of the “copy left”, “hactivist” movement21. In his essay “The

Temporary Autonomous Zone” or TAZ, Bey describes a romantic vision of a world in which islands of anarchist utopias exist just under the radar of the dominant culture. His favorite historical example of the TAZ is pirate culture: “’Intentional communities’ whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law…enclaves of total liberty occupying empty spaces on the map.” (Bey 97, 119). Bey is not interested in the actual

20 The earliest essay in his collection was written by Goethe in 1788 and the most recent is from 1981. 21 See www.automedia.com and “electronic disturbance theatre”

13 workings of the TAZ so much as he is in its “spirit”, which he imagines as romantically egalitarian and profoundly sensorial (115, 119). Bey discusses three components that make up the “psychotopology” of the TAZ : a “Paleolithic” as opposed to “Neolithic” structure built around bands or tribes rather than family units (104), a “festival” jubilant, saturnalian environment that lies “outside the scope of ‘profane time’” (105), and the

TAZ is made up of nomads, rootless individuals willing and able to abandon the zone at the very moment of its discovery by the dominant culture it seeks to escape.

Utopian-Zone Event Tourism

I had already considered the notion of Frank Brown being a “utopian” event when I came across Hakim Bey’s concept of the TAZ. My question became, is this “utopian” element fundamentally characteristic of the event and, if so, is it possible that it is also a fundamental characteristic of other related events such as The Rainbow Gathering,

Burning Man and The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival among others?

In thinking further, I realized there is one essential distinction between the phenomena

Bey describes and this particular form of tourism that I am imagining: what is at stake for the participants. In the TAZ of pirates or the Paris Commune, or even in the zone that

Bey imagines is created within computer hacker communities, the passionate and committed “zoners” are willing to die (or at least risk paying the consequences) for their ideals. As Bey writes, pirates were “determined to keep up (their lifestyle) even if only for a short merry life”(97); better dead than co-opted. In the case of those participating in what I’m calling Utopian-Zone events, there is the added element of safety, not danger.

14 Bound by specific time frames and held in environments where safety is a stated goal of the event22, UZE Tourism may actually be better described as performances of the utopian Temporary Autominous Zones; in contrast to Bey’s imagined zones, it is built into each of these events that the lesbians will go back to living in the day-to-day heterosexual world (Michigan), the dot-commers will go back to their investments and their Lexuses (Burning Man), and the songwriters will go back to the increasingly corporatized and cutthroat world of the music business (Frank Brown). I would argue that in fact, this third characteristic, what I call the “refueling factor” is endemic to the

Utopian-Zone Event.

What distinguishes UZE. tourism from any other ludic, saturnalian carnivale is the component of what Victor Turner called communitas. There are doubtless Utopian-Zone pockets at events like the New Orleans Mardi Gras, but that does not make Mardi Gras a

Utopian-Zone Event. Tourists go to Mardi Gras for its corporal excesses and sensorial and cultural stimulation. While it’s arguable that Mardi Gras is an event that happens in response to the dominant culture (Bakhtin), it does not take place within a unified community, or even in a unified place23.

22 “safety” are words used by both Burning Man and Mich Fest organizers. The Frank Brown staff is very clear that cabs will be provided if songwriters have been “over served”. 23The New Orleans Mardi Gras may be an example of what I would call a Utopian-Aura Tourist event. It may have classified, under my definition, at one time as being an actual U.Z.E. but, as the dominant culture it was originally responding to infiltrated the event, it lost its true UZE status and now only retains an “aura” of its utopian past; if UZEs are performances of TAZs, Utopian-Aura Events are performances of Utopian-Zone Events.

15 There are two kinds of tourists at an UZE: the community that comes together to enact a temporal escape from the dominant culture, and the individuals who come to be around the “vibe” or creative “flow” (Mihaly Csikszentmihaly) of the escapees. Sometimes the former (let’s call them “zone groupies”) turn into the latter (“zoners”); I would argue that this is another unique element that makes these events utopian -- there is a fluidity of identity that is uncharacteristic within the dominant culture; homosexuality is an available identity at Michigan, being an artist is an available identity at Burning Man, and being a songwriter is an available identity at Frank Brown.

Something else that I want to argue is endemic to U.Z.E.s is that it is inevitable that the dominant culture will try to infiltrate the event. How the event rejects, integrates or assimilates this infiltration will define where the U.Z.E. event is in its inevitable trajectory toward what I am calling a Utopian-Zone Aura Event24.

To be defined as a Utopian-Zone Event a cultural event must therefore have these four elements: a “Paleolithic” as opposed to “Neolithic” structure built around bands or tribes rather than family units25, a “festival” jubilant, saturnalian environment that lies “outside the scope of ‘profane time’”26 (and involves some form of corporeal excess), a

“refueling” element whereby it is understood that this time away from the dominant culture will function to strengthen the individual participants when they return following

24 Utopian-Zone Aura events might also include cultural festivals like, for example, Native American festivals that may at one time have taken place within a specific community enacting a culture event in opposition to the dominant culture but have become so totally co-opted by the dominant culture that they barely retain any functionally utopian element. 25 See “Hakim Bey” above 26 ibid

16 the event and, finally, a characteristic fluidity of identity within the zone that allows individuals who would not normally be part of the culture being expressed in the zone to participate during this time.

Burning Man and The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival as UZE Tourism

As it says on its website, Burning Man is “an annual experiment in temporary community.” For one week prior to and including Labor Day, 25,000+ participants and

1,000 volunteers descend onto a stretch of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where they build an “enclave that creates a sacred and fantastic time and place, providing escape, renewal, play and a sense of community” (Belk and Costa 1998 p. 237). The dominant culture that

Burning Man is seeking to temporarily escape from is “consumer culture” or, as Burning

Man founder Larry Harvey clarified in his 1998 community address, “commodity culture”27. Except for an entrance fee (of upwards of $250 per participant), no money is allowed at this not-for-profit event, where the making and exchanging of art by professional and non-professional artists living within a tribal and celebratory “theme camp” structure is fundamental to the identity of this week-long “gift economy”28.

Though I have heard a different myth about its origin, according to the official website,

Burning Man began on a beach in San Francisco in 1986 when a few friends burned a

27 This speech was partially in response to an article that accused Burning Man of “going corporate” because they started selling t-shirts and charging admission – possible indications of the event’s infiltration by the dominant culture. Harvey’s response is useful. To quote: “We’ve never been against commerce. I mean commerce is civilization, commerce was the Silk Route. Commerce was the Indians trading obsidian for sea-shells. Nothing wrong with commerce. We’re against commodification. That’s what we don’t do here.” From www.burningman.com 28 www.burningman.com. For “gift economies”, see the work of Marcel Mauss

17 wooden man-figure in commemoration of the summer solstice29. From that initial event featuring 20 participants, Burning Man has grown exponentially each year30. In 1994,

4,000 people participated purely from word-of-mouth on the web. That was also the first year Burning Man received mainstream media coverage; by 1995 the Burning Man population had doubled, expanding each year thereafter until it reached its current population.31

In theory, Burning Man continues to share what marketing analyst Robert V. Kozinets calls “the Internet hardcore utopian, anarchistic, expressive and libertarian ethos”

(Kozinets, 2000 p.2) expressed by its original Silicon Valley progenitors. But there are indications that Burning Man may be getting too large to keep its utopian vision pure.

While Burning Man is not-for-profit, one cannot help but wonder at the effect of a $6 million dollars + gross national revenue (from ticket sales alone - Burning Man also now sells drinks, not to mention the t-shirt sales mentioned above32). As one Burning Man participant writes:

“There are no rules about how one must behave or express oneself at this event (save the rules that serve to protect the health, safety, and experience of the community at large); rather, it is up to each participant to decide how they will contribute and what they will give to this community.”33

29 One friend told me it started because “a guy broke up with is girlfriend and burned an effigy of himself to mark a new life”. (Friend: Jaime Babbit 11/03) 30 The event moved to Nevada in 1991. It’s unclear at which point it stopped being about commemorating the Solstice. 31 According to the Burning Man website in 2000, “Onsite media included: CNN, ABC’s Nightline, NBC, Time, Washington Post, and a German television crew, and publications from England, France, Japan and Brazil”. Burning Man’s attendees were, in 1999, on average 30.5 years old, 64% male and 61% Californian. No racial demographics were given but, anecdotally, it is an almost entirely white event. Burning Man Ministry of Statistics: www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~mos 32 cf. #13 33 “What Is Burning Man?” by Molly Steenson

18 This may be so, but eleven pages of the website are dedicated to exhaustive lists of rules regarding policies on camp sites and theme camps, fire burning, noise levels, electric generators, the making and selling (none) of art, etc. This section ends with a rhetorical question: “There seem to be more rules this year. Why is this so?”, to which the answer which speaks for itself was: “There are…We are a radically free community and it’s time for us to take responsibility for preserving our freedom. If you can’t agree to our rules, feel free to start your own event!”

When I asked Dawn, a “Burner” (as Burning Man participants call themselves) what she looked forward to at Burning Man, she wrote (via email) “Synchronistic experiences and

ART ART ART (did I say ART?)” . When I asked her how it had changed over the three years she has attended, her response was revealing: “It has gotten larger and the amount of money in the dot com world has its influence.” The mention of “money” at a site that explicitly forbids currency exchange confused me. When I asked if she would elaborate on that, she wrote, “Just that in a gift economy, if someone is a dot commer with a lot of extra cash, they have the financial ability to create some amazing spaces/gifts… (i.e. some of the larger theme camps can take quite a lot of $$ to create – speakers, space, costumes, etc)”34 Dawn’s comments are yet another indication that the power of the market has been infiltrating Burning Man; “art” has become synonymous with “extra cash”. Even so, words used to talk about “The Burning Man Experience”35 on the main

34 Emails from Dawn ___ dated 11/22/03 and 11/23/03 35 “The Burning Man Experience” is actually terminology used in Burning Man’s current public relations material. As BKG has pointed out in class the use of the word “Experience” is indication of an event’s savvy association with the world of tourism and by inference, though Larry Harvey would like to disagree, with self commodification.

19 website and on the Burning Man bulletin board continue to evoke utopian ideals:

“transformative,” “epiphany”, “mind boggling”, “communal”, and even “utopian”36.

Participants are encouraged to “take this world with you”37 when they return to the isolation of the outside consumer world. This year, the festival expects even more visitors and the admission price will likely once again increase.

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival grew out of the 1970s lesbian feminist movement which sought to establish “women-only spaces and genres to nurture womens’ creativity and community”38 outside the confines of the patriarchy. As it states on the

Festival homepage, “Mich Fest” or “Michigan” (as the festival is interchangeably called)

“is a female generated alternative culture where we envision the world we want to live in.”39

Each summer since its inception in 1978, participants spend from one week to one month,

(depending on if one is attending or volunteering), in a women-only space, divided by individual campsites and communal “theme camps” that spread over 650 private acres of land in Central Michigan. The festival name refers to the many musical performances that occur, but in reality music, along with women’s dance, theater, comedy and art are secondary, functioning as background or “soundtrack”40 to this “intentional community

36 Cf #18 37 ibid 38 Ann Cvetkovich and Selena Wahng p.131 39 www.michfest.com. Entrance fees posted on the website are upwards of $390 for the entire festival. 40 ibid

20 (that) carries enormous symbolic significance, even for those who have never been there.”41

In the feminist spirit of continual reexamination and redefinition, Michigan has struggled with controversy over the years from debates over racism (it is a predominantly white event) to the most recent debates over the exclusion/inclusion of the transgendered community.

Kay Turner, folklorist and twelve year Michigan veteran says that she has seen the number of attendees decrease in recent years. She attributes this to the controversy over the inclusion of the transgendered community which divided the older women who “still believed in the idea of a women’s community” (as in the Michigan policy of “womyn- born womyn”) from the younger women who wanted to include the transgendered participants. Turner sees this division as part of a larger change within lesbian culture which is currently engaged in a debate over gay marriage that Turner feels, along with the intrusion of the transgendered community, is an infiltration by the dominant culture that the older participants come to Michigan to escape. “The gay marriage thing is, I think, an intrusion of ideas (at Michigan). Instead of difference one begins to claim a more assimilationist strategy and people stop coming for a sense of a community of difference… I think the marriage thing is on the rise and the community thing is on the demise”42. Even so, as Turner pointed out at the end of our interview, Michigan can still

41 cf #22. I’m interested in the possibility of these festivals also functioning as “imagined communities” in the Benedict Anderson meaning of the term to include members who are not at the event but are included by virtue of their relation to the whole. See Anderson, p.6 42 phone interview 11/03

21 be as transformative sexually and politically for a first-time “festie” (as Michigan participants are called) as it was for her when she first attended in 1992.

Frank Brown: A Non-Professional Event or “What Board?!”

I began this investigation with the belief that I would be able to substantiate a claim for

The Frank Brown International Songwriters Festival being on the brink of moving from

Utopian-Zone to Utopian-Aura Event. In my six years as a participant in Frank Brown, I have witnessed controversy over the inclusion of Nashville publishing companies as sponsors of events43. I’ve seen attempts at bringing in major corporate sponsorship. I’ve seen conflicts arise over songwriters’ lodgings and gig schedules, and have heard grumbling about “preferred treatment” for some songwriters over others. This year, there was a particularly interesting conflict between Festival Coordinator Reneda Cross (along with her assistant, the only paid staff at the festival) and new addition to the festival,

Venue Manager Sandy Beach. Sandy decided to add more shows to The Silver Moon

(second largest Frank Brown venue, situated in the hospitality house across the street from the ‘Bama), because larger-than-usual attendance warranted it. Reneda claimed that

Joe said he didn’t want more shows but the show went on, a testament to how little control the Festival Coordinator wields.

As seems to always be the case at Frank Brown, chaos rules. I’ve come to believe that it is this culture of what songwriter Casey Kelly calls “free-for-all serendipity” that

43 A clear indication of the intrusion of the “dominant culture”. This year BMI, SESAC and 5 different publishing companies each contributed $1000 to the festival to be able to have their own writers come down, thus by-passing the normal selection process (biased at best to begin with).

22 maintains the Festival’s Utopian-Event status. When I asked volunteer Festival Vice

President Carey Pitts about the function of the twelve member advisory board of locals and songwriter luminaries, he did what everyone I ask about the board does: he laughed and rolled his eyes. I was worried this year when Reneda told me in a phone interview that she sees the Festival growing to the point where it will become a substantially larger event supported by corporate underwriting. “I want this to be the next South-by-

Southwest!”, she said, referring to the major music industry conference held yearly in

Austin, Texas and she confided that she was already lining up General Motors as the major festival underwriter44. When I asked Joe about this, his response was more staid: “I would imagine that any corporate sponsor would want to get some promotional value for what they contribute and I don’t expect anybody’s a big enough masochist to actually want to get into the middle of this thing and try to change it”. He added, “I hope it doesn’t get a whole lot bigger or we’ll lose our personal touch.”45

As Joe also pointed out, the Festival has a built-in size limit; it can only grow as large as there are venues to play in. As it is, most of the venues (which guarantee players at least

$50 per show; players are paid $100 per show at The ‘Bama) lose money on the event.

As Joe says, “They take pride in being able to be involved. You know, it’s not a money thing”.46 By his own account, Joe personally loses upwards of $100,000 a year on Frank

Brown; the real question is how the festival would survive without him. Frank Brown is

44 I asked about this and it turns out the mayor of Pensacola, a friend of hers, has a General Motors dealership and thinks he can make a deal with them. 45 Phone interview 11/03 It’s important to note that South-By-Southwest is not a festival but is rather an industry conference. 46 ibid

23 not run by the kinds of professionals featured in Donald Getz’s book47 It is only in the last four years that there has even been any official application to play at the festival

(none of the regulars fill it out). Frank Brown is not even a member of the Florida

Festival and Events Association48. And yet, as Songwriters Guild of America Events

Coordinator Rundi Ream put it when I asked her what she thought would be the “right” way to run Frank Brown, “It’s a mess, but it seems to do just fine that way”.49 While it would be easy to put Frank Brown in the category of events that exist merely out of the largesse of one philanthropist (and just call it “Joe’s Party”), the pride that the area takes in the event50 and the “buzz” within the songwriter community is so significant that it indicates a much larger phenomenon, one I have tried to bring to life in this paper.

It is important not to underestimate the participation of the local community at Frank

Brown. All the food served at the hospitality house is donated by local restaurants and the sixty+ volunteers (who do everything from taking tickets to ferrying songwriters to gigs) are largely locals. The Frank Brown Festival program has featured welcoming letters from at least two and often all four local Chambers of Commerce since at least

1994 (the first program I could find). Almost from the outset, the in-schools program has been a vital part of the festival, bringing songwriters into dozens of area classrooms to

47 Festival Coordinator Reneda Cross was a massage therapist who was dating one of the Frank Brown songwriters when she began as a volunteer 6 years ago before being hired as Festival Coordinator – a job she continually vows to quit – three years ago. 48 I recently found out about this very active business institution. When I asked if Frank Brown was a member Carey Pitts said “Hadn’t thought about that. Maybe we should join.” Personal conversation 11/03 49 Personal conversation 11/03 50 roads leading up to the club are lined with storefront signs that read “welcome songwriters!”

24 talk about their craft51. It is in this area of community service that Joe Gilchrist sees Frank

Brown continuing to grow52.

I did notice one very interesting change at the festival this year: the addition of a new venue called “Pirate’s Cove”. Pirate’s Cove – a name that itself would please Hakim

Bey - is located 20 minutes away by boat from the hospitality house in an idyllic marina setting. Jimmy Louis, a long time Festival participant, initiated an all-day weekend jam session where songwriters came and played for each other and for locals. When I asked

Jimmy if I would be able to buy food at Pirate’s Cove he replied, “Oh no. Your money’s no good over there. But we do want to hear your songs”53.

51 This year, the money the Festival has always donated toward music scholarships for high school students in now taking place under an official 501-C3 “Frank Brown Foundation”. 52 Cf #34 53 personal conversation 11/03

25 Bibliography

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Rabelais and His World trans. Helene, Iswolsky Bloomington: Indiana University Press

Arnold, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism Verso: London

Bey, Hakim (1985) Temporary Autonomous Zones Brooklyn, NY: Automedia Press

Burning Man Website: http://www.burningman.com

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1975) Beyond Boredom and Anxiety San Francisco: Jossey- Bass Publishers

Czvetkovich, Ann and Selena Wahng (2001) Don’t Stop The Music: Roundtable Discussion with Workers from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival GLQ 7:1; Duke University Press

Dening, Greg (1996) Performances Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Falassi, A (Ed.) (1987) Time out of time: Essays on the festival. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press

Getz, Donald (1997) Event Management and Event Tourism New York: Cognizant Communications Corporation

Hall, Bollin Michael (1992) Hallmark Tourist Events: Impacts, Management and Planning London: Belhavin Press

Harvey, Larry (1998) Larry Harvey’s 1998 Speech http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/1998/98_speech_1.html

26 Hobsbawm, Eric and T. Ranger (Eds) (1983, 1987) The Invention of Tradition Cambridge U Press

Kozinets, Robert (2002) Can Consumers Escape The Market? Emancipatory Illuminations From Burning Man Journal of Consumer Research Vol 29, June 2002

Lippard, Lucy (1997) The Lure of The Local: Senses of Place In a Multicentered Society New York: New Press

Mauss, Marcel ([1923] 1976) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trns. Ian Cunnison, New York: Norton

McDonnell, Ian and Allen, J and W. O’Toole (1999) Festival and Special Event Management Brisbane: John Wiley and Sons

Michigan Womyn’s Festival: http://www.michfest.com

Morris, Bonnie J (1999) Eden Built By Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals Los Angeles: Alyson Books

Ritchie, B (1984) Assessing The Impacts of Hallmark Events: Conceptual and Research Issues Journal of Travel Research, 23 (1) 2-111

Steenson, Molly What is Burning Man? http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/

Wray, Matt (1995) Burning Man and the Rituals of Capitalism Bad Subjects, Isue#21, September, 1995

The following personal interviews with the author were referenced in this paper. Many other interviews were conducted both during December of 2002 and November 2003. All the following informants have given permission for their words to be used in this context. Cross, Reneda (11/04/03) Phone interview with the author “Bam Bam”, Hollin (11/15/03) Interview with the author Gilchrist, Joe (11/08/03) Interview with the author Kelly, Casey (11/14/03) Interview with the author Killough, Rock (11/14/03) Interview with the author McGee, Dawn (11/03) Interview via email Pitts, Carey (11/15/03) Interview with the author Rhody, Allen (12/02) Interview with the author Sun, Joe (12/02) Interview with the author Turner, Kay (11/03) Phone interview with the author