By
Phil Leckman
Arizona Daily Wildcat.
Live music and DJ nights maintain uneasy coexistence in Tucson club scene
Tuesday was a chilly night in Tucson, but the mood at the downtown Solar Culture venue could not have been warmer.
A crowd filled to capacity packed the gallery, bobbing their heads to the twangy desert grooves of Calexico, a local group whose fanbase is now international.
On nights like this, the viability of Tucson's live music scene seems beyond question. But recent years have seen major changes in Tucson's nightlife. Many live venues, like Third Stone on Fourth Avenue, have closed their doors, replaced by clubs like XS, Heart-Five, or MacDaddy's, that increasingly focus on the burgeoning dance music scene. Guitars, drums and lead singers, long at the center of Tucson's club culture, are increasingly sharing the stage with sequencers, turntables and DJs.
"There has definitely been a drop-out of medium-sized live shows," said Larry Horvath, entertainment coordinator at Club Congress, 311 E. Congress St.
Horvath, who took over the coordinator job just weeks ago, arrives on the heels of a tumultuous year at the Congress, one of Tucson's oldest clubs and a celebrated live music venue.
"Congress is world famous - everybody who's anybody has probably visited here or played here at some point in their career," he said.
But sagging attendance, he added, nearly led the club to abandon the live music format altogether.
"In the last year they had actually dropped live music here altogether for a while," Horvath said. "I'm sure to them it started to look like pulling teeth to get customers to come to live shows."
Live music is back on the Congress calendar now, and Horvath said he is committed to keeping it there for at least one night a week. But the club's difficulties have been mirrored at medium-sized clubs around town, often making things harder for local bands.
"There used to be a lot more live music, and a lot more bars that catered to people who wanted to see live bands," said Tom Weinert, singer and guitarist for local reggae band Stuck In a Groove. "A lot of venues have closed, or changed to a format that doesn't include live bands."
Weinert, who graduated from the University of Arizona in December with a communication degree, said his band is established enough to weather the squeeze. But he feared the chillier climate for live music might prove more grueling for newer or younger bands.
"We're pretty set, because we've got a lot of regular gigs around town, but for a band just starting out, who want to play out a lot, it's really hard to break into things," Weinert said.
Chris Biagi, a physics junior, is a local DJ and die-hard electronic music fan. He said that while Tucson's scene is still "in its infancy," its future seemed assured.
"The scene here is not really vital yet," he said. "But it's getting bigger and becoming more of a force. In the next year or two more clubs will be doing electronic shows and having electronic artists."
Biagi added that bands and live musicians who feel squeezed by dance's growing popularity are right to be worried.
"I see electronic music as revolutionary - there's so much you can do with it," he said. "I think (live bands) should definitely feel threatened."
To Biagi, dance music has numerous decisive advantages over live bands, at least as far as clubs are concerned.
"DJs are much better suited to club scenes," he said. "They're much more effective at working a crowd and getting them to dance. Bands are much more limited in what they can do - they're not nearly as versatile as DJs. Bands have to stick to a set-list, while a DJ has 600 records he can choose from."
Even Weinert conceded that electronic music's reliance on pre-recorded music makes DJ nights "more of a sure thing" than live shows.
"If you go to see a DJ he's not going to play a song that sucks, like a band might - it's less risky to go see a DJ, for both the audience and the promoter," he said.
For promoters, these risks can be considerable. Where bands are concerned, Congress's Horvath said, a club is putting a lot on the line.
"If you're already prepared, you bring in a DJ, he's one set price as opposed to a live band, where you have to barter and they have a rider that entails what food they want, towels for the stage, bottled water," he said. "At a show where a band costs $1000, you're probably looking at $2000 to put it on when all the hospitality is considered."
"The cost of a DJ is just one person - it's a lot lower and a lot easier," he added.
When all is said and done, this may be the deciding factor - clubs who turn to DJs risk less financially than live music venues do. And with dance's current raging popularity, these clubs stand a much better chance of recouping their investment.
"The amount of people that go out to see live music pales in comparison to the number that go to the big dance clubs," Weinert said. "If I was a club owner that was only interested in making money, I would take whatever was the biggest draw in town and I'd use it to my advantage. And right now that's dance music."
Despite dance's current ascendance in popularity, those with long-term perspectives on the Tucson scene say that both scenes can coexist. Steven Eye, current owner of Solar Culture, has been promoting live underground shows in Tucson since 1988. He said both DJ and live music possess vital, ecstatic energy.
"There's a lot of beauty in the dancing (at DJ nights) - each person gets to dance and it's really wonderful. A live band is working together to make that same thing happen, with a long tradition and history, whereas the DJ thing is really new and constantly evolving, but they're both really important."
