MUSIC and NIGHTLIFE

[May 1st, 2002] PREVIEW
A Quiet Word With Chicken John
On the eve of invading PDX, the ringmaster of San Francisco's untamed Odeon Bar speaks.

Bar bands tour all the time. But entire bars?

The Odeon Bar, a dive in San Francisco's Mission District, hosts performance artists, gimmick entertainments, weird bands and freakoid "concept" acts, bugging yuppie neighbors and giving haven to SF's ever-so-wacky arts scene. This weekend, the Odeon's locking its doors, loading its bartenders, doormen and performers onto a Green Tortoise bus and coming north to take over Dante's for a night.

Hard to deliver a sight-unseen verdict on a show featuring a "one-man pirate musical" and, maybe, a flame-throwing margarita mixer, among at least a dozen acts. But it promises to be...unique. We called Odeon Bar owner Chicken John. A fractured transcript follows.

Willamette Week: So what's up with the Odeon?

Chicken John: We're open seven nights a week--seven nights of odd, weird shit going on.

And the neighbors--

Man, fuck those fucking idiots. This has been a bar since 1956, and they moved in above it. Everyone says they want to support the arts, but no one wants to live next to them. What are they gonna do, shut us down? No one's got the balls.

Fair enough. What about Friday's acts?

We've got a contortionist who's also performing with Brooks and Dunn that same night. We've got this comic-book band--they're word-poet ninjas, but in a good way. Dammit the Wonder Dog. Jewels, she's this hot Russian chick who comes out in a G-string and not much else and has people staple money to her body. Doctor Hal, he's like the scientific mouthpiece of the Odeon Bar. You ask him any question and boom --he's gone. Photosynthesis? He can do 20 minutes. The kind of toads you lick and then you get high? He knows the genus. You listen to this guy talk about toad-licking for about 20 minutes and it starts to get a little surreal, tell you what. We're gonna have my one-man band, an indoor cycle rodeo...

Wow, sounds like quite a--

Oh, it's gonna be a real three-ring wingding, all right. Look, there's no business model here. We're just doing it until we get shut down or kicked out, and then we'll do it elsewhere. How much do you think I should charge, by the way?

Chicken John, I have no idea. --Zach Dundas

Dante's (1 SW 3rd Ave., 226-6630) transforms into San Francisco's Odeon Bar on Friday, May 3. 9 pm. $5. See www.odeonbar.com for more information.Chicken JohnJewels

Survival of the Fittest
Sparta proves there's life after the Drive-In.

For a band named for an ancient civilization that allowed only its strongest citizens to survive, Sparta seems incredibly humble and humanitarian. "We're not setting our sights on fame and fortune," says guitarist Paul Hinojos during a break in the El Paso, Texas, quartet's tour. The sentiment is understandable, considering the band includes 60 percent of At the Drive-In, tipped by fans and much of the music industry as the Next Big Thing before unceremoniously breaking up last spring.

During its heyday, ATDI was heralded as the best live band in the country, saw its major-label debut reach gold-record sales and received a ridiculous amount of attention for singer Cedric Bixler and guitarist Omar Rodriguez's Afros. Rapid success splintered the long-running five-piece. Shortly thereafter, Hinojos, guitarist-vocalist Jim Ward and drummer Tony Hajjar formed Sparta with new bassist Matt Miller.

Sparta takes a melodic lilt only hinted at by ATDI and fuses it with electronic loops and samples, tethering verses that fray and twine around hook-heavy choruses. Its songs are deft exercises in dynamics, rhythm and emotional, expressive vocal lines--almost as if Fugazi went electronica. It's a much more radio-friendly sound than the jagged histrionics of ATDI, but Hinojos insists, "We don't worry like, 'I hope we get a gold record.' We just want to just keep playing and growing in our band dynamic."

Though the band has signed to the Dreamworks label, its four-song debut EP Austere was jointly released by the major label and Restart Records, a label Ward and Hinojos own that has released records for bands from their hometown that might never have a chance of being heard otherwise.

Not exactly a Spartan move in the classic sense, but such generosity suits them. --Dave Clifford

Sparta plays Tuesday, May 7, at Meow Meow, 527 SE Pine St., 230-2111. The Catheters and Airplanes Are Better also appear. 8 pm. $10+ advance (Fastixx). All ages.

NEWS and VIEWS OF MUSIC'S WONDERFUL WORLD

HISS and VINEGAR

INTERNET RADIO: WHAT'S THE RUMPUS?

Chances are you've been hectored on the subject of the Great Internet Radio Royalty Controversy. The prolific email campaigns surrounding the contentious music/tech issue are often alarmist, and often don't explain themselves very well. Hiss & Vinegar talked to bright-eyed geniuses and silver-tongued flacks on both sides of the battle. Here's what we learned:

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Washington wizards decided Internet radio operations should pay performers as well as songwriters. That's different from the deal given traditional broadcasters. "When you hear Sinatra sing 'My Way' on the radio, Paul Anka's making money, but Sinatra's not making a dime," notes one East Coast wonk.

The Library of Congress sets legal standards for royalty rates through arbitration processes called CARPs. For a bunch of reasons, the CARP on Internet radio didn't wrap up until this year. In other words, for four years webcasters have known they would have to pay back royalties on every song played since 1998. They just didn't know how much.

"Webcasters have had a four-year no-interest loan," says John Simpson of Sound Exchange, a royalty-distribution service set up by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Arbitrators searched for examples on which to base the new standards, but found very few valid comparisons. They ended up using the whopping $5 billion Yahoo! paid for Broadcast.com in 1999 as a benchmark for assessing the market value of streamed content. Of course, it's not 1999 anymore, leading some to claim the basic assumptions underpinning the CARP recommendation are flawed.

The CARP recommendation is that Internet-only broadcasters pay .14 of a cent per song played, per listener. So, if you webcast one song to 100 listeners, you owe $0.14 in royalties. Noncommercial broadcasters and traditional radio stations that stream their content over the Web pay a lower rate. The CARP recommendation generally pleases the RIAA--because, of course, any free music on the Web will KILL THE MUSIC FOREVER. Meanwhile, webcasters and their allies are up in arms, because a rate that high will DESTROY INTERNET RADIO INSTANTLY. Hence, the email campaigns.

In reality, many people who've followed the issue closely say a compromise is likely to be worked out before the Library of Congress rules on the recommendation May 21. Such a compromise would establish separate licenses for noncommercial, hobbyist and commercial start-up sites. So maybe--just maybe--everything will be OK, though not everyone is optimistic. For more information (from various sides), see www.saveinternetradio.org, www.futureofmusic.org, www.riaa.org and www.loc.gov.

OUT OF THE RUMOR MILL, INTO THE FIRE

Knowledgeable sources say a June 14 Queens of the Stone Age show at Berbati's may feature some special guests. Dave Grohl? Mark Lanegan? You just never know until it happens, sometimes...Don't know about you, but H&V plans to start hanging out at Cafe Thi Vù, the Sandy Boulevard karaoke joint that bumps so hard it prompted confused cops to shut down the Of Montreal show at nearby Blackbird two weeks ago. Gotta be more fun than an Of Montreal show, anyway...Fame and fortune awaits you at www.musicfestnww.com...Hiss & Vinegar plans a surprise "sexy, mature" show in our living room next Friday night--$100 gets you a front-row seat.

Gossip? Tips? Email hiss@wweek.com.