COVER BANDS
After our grandchildren moved away we fulfilled our dream of moving to New Orleans. We also love live music (why else would you move here?) and we love OffBeat. On our first night in our new home we went out and had a blast at the Best of the Beat! Thank you for that.
But one small thing stuck in my craw: the category of Cover Bands. I don’t remember who won but I notice it’s always Top Cats, Molly Ringwalds or some other cheesy but fun group, when New Orleans is crawling with incredible cover bands. Why has Preservation Hall never won best cover band? They travel the world playing cover songs. Or Kermit Ruffins? Hello? Treme? Or the super amazing Deacon John, who has never written a song in his whole career? Top Cats, shmop cats, Preservation Hall is New Orleans’ best cover band!
Thank you for the awards show, and for keeping New Orleans funky.
—Michelle Fusilier, New Orleans, LA
Glad you enjoyed Best of the Beat. There’s just a slight technical misunderstanding of what is meant by the term “cover band.” A cover band is a band that acts as a stand-in for a popular music group. Cover bands offer a simulacrum of a concert by Kiss, the Rolling Stones, U2, etc. Bands working from a folk tradition or a shared tradition, like Preservation Hall or many Cajun, zydeco and R&B groups, are not referred to as cover groups even when they perform the same or similar material. It’s a shared culture. Kermit writes a lot of his own material so he wouldn’t qualify anyway, and Deacon John organizes R&B and blues programs with original arrangements. These are very creative musical exercises that should never be confused with cover bands. You could argue that the classic rock that provides the material for most cover bands is also a kind of shared culture. It’s an interesting point, but categories are invented and maintained to enforce the understanding that there are differences between genres. It’s an elastic exercise, but if you didn’t have categories you probably wouldn’t have award shows either.—John Swenson
BEST OF THE BEAT
As I was watching George Porter, Jr. being honored, it made me realize how lucky I am to have been born here, and that 67-mile drive to and from New Orleans since I was 16 years old to see and experience this great music has all been worth it. I began as a musician, then club owner, then a writer for No Cover, and then I began to write live reviews for Wavelength, all along knowing that I would end up working with my idols and the musicians I grew up admiring. Thank you for all that you do OffBeat. You are beautiful people, and I appreciate your passion and dedication towards all of the hard work that you do.
—Rueben M. Williams, Thunderbird Management Group, Larose, LA
On behalf of the Creole String Beans I want to thank you and the entire OffBeat family for your support of our band and all homegrown Louisiana music. We really don’t have words to express how incredibly grateful we are for the award, for the recognition, and for making January 27, 2012 a night we will never forget. Your party-throwing street cred grows bigger every year.
Like most local bands, we work our asses off week after week, rehearsing the deeply dug classics and trying to catch lightning in a bottle by writing new ones. We’re fortunate to have a loyal bunch of fans who pony up the cover charge and come out to shake it. But the honor of being awarded an Album of the Year in any category is the kind of shot in the arm to our creative process that money just can’t buy!
—Rick Olivier, Creole String Beans, New Orleans, LA
I just wanted to take a minute to give a big thank-you to OffBeat and to everyone who voted for us in the Best of the Beat awards. One of the things that makes New Orleans so unique is the incredible infrastructure that exists to support and recognize local artists, and OffBeat is a huge part of that.
The amount of love and respect given to musicians here is truly a beautiful and rare thing and it is both a pleasure and a privilege to be a part of this wonderful community. Also sincere congratulations to all of this year’s nominees in every category. I’m honored to be keeping company with all of you!
—Robin Clabby, Brass-a-holics, New Orleans, LA
It is with great pleasure and much gratitude that Andrew Duhon won Best Singer/Songwriter at the annual OffBeat Magazine’s Best of the Beat Awards!
We’d like to give a big thank you to Jan Ramsey and the OffBeat Magazine staff for all they do for Louisiana music. Congrats to all the winners of this year’s awards.
Without your continued support this would not have been possible.
—Erin Frankenheimer, Santa Monica, CA
Thank you for the amazing party and for the award. Of all the awards I have ever received this one means the most to me. My daughter had the time of her life, too.
—Scott Billington, Burlington, MA
LACKING VISION
New Orleans has a very creative, improvisational and innovative populace, with a varied and flexible set of skills, despite the way residents are characterized by our so-called economic development leaders. A good look at the growth of our city’s music and other creative industries indicates that the majority of creative and cultural activities the city and tourism industry relies upon has historically come from the city’s most marginalized and neglected neighborhoods, whose residents are typically characterized as lacking in skills. In my conversations with many economic development leaders it often seems they are the ones lacking in vision, understanding, knowledge and a sufficient skill set and yet they continue to denigrate the skills of others, thus blaming their failed economic policies on those with the least input into those policies. In addition, many designing and making decisions in regard to such policies have little understanding of the unique set of economies and the nature of the economic production activities that occur here and that have served to put New Orleans on the map as one of the world’s most creative cities. Most of the significant creative production activity occurs, or is located in, what is known as the ‘informal economy’ which is a very different economy from the underground or criminal economy, a fact that most in economic development in this region do not seem to understand, or refuse to acknowledge in many cases because that allows for greater exploitation of creative workers by the dominant mainstream business community.
New Orleans has never been a manufacturing city and in the post-industrial era it would be folly for us to try to become one now—we manufacture the products and services of creativity, innovation, new pathways, culture and host of new ideas…and that is what we should continue to do, including, and most especially in the area of urban planning, policy development and economics, despite the resistance of local civic and business to that notion.
—Sally Stevens, New Orleans, LA
