By GREGG KIRK
Big Shout Magazine, July 1992

NMS 13. New Music Seminar. Nude Mudwrestling Seminar. Now Me Seminar. Nearly Mutant Seminar. Nicely Muddled Seminar…

I tried to think of an apt title for this year’s new music conference and at the same time keep myself awake as I drove north on I-95 to New York to attend the all-out schmoozerama. At this point in the conference-attending game I think it’s only fair to point out, I have grown jaded and cynical. This was my fourth time trekking to the Big Apple to participate in what started out 13 years ago as a conclave of no more than 200 people gathered together to support one thing and one thing only — New Music.

Of course, back then those two words had a different meaning than they do now. “New music” was the term given to the unpretentious kind of post-punk/post-new-wave music that was around before the word “alternative” got popular. Today, who knows what new music means? Judging from recent conferences I’ve attended, it seems to mean anything that’s bloated, polished, and sellable.

The New Music Seminar now boasts more than 8,000 registrants, all paying somewhere between two and three hundred dollars a pop. The directory guide, which comes with your complementary plastic grocery bag filled with various paid promotional material, is the size of a small midwestern town’s phone book. It is slick, glossy, and filled with high-priced advertisements. The trade show floor, where you can’t take two steps without walking into somebody’s haircut, is a bewildering blend of expensive, glitzy booths, audio/video displays, and various exhibits. You don’t have to be a mathematician to put together a few numbers and realize there is some serious money being consumed here.

So why am I drawn to the seminar like a moth to a flame, like a Muslim to Mecca? I guess because, at the risk of sounding corny, NMS is the musical Mecca for the time being, and every year after attending I walk away with a totally different philosophical perspective of the ugly music biz. And besides, though it’s easy to ridicule it for all of its extravagance and ostentatiousness, I can still admire it for its sheer size and power.

NMS. Non-Music Schmooze-inar… By 11 a.m., it had already been a weird morning. I had risen at 6 a.m. to drive to Philly with two other maniacs to attend Howard Stern’s “DeBaldy Divorce Party” in a car crammed with camera equipment, a large yellow banner, and booze. We groggily listened to the proceedings on the radio until we got to the epicenter, across from the Liberty Bell, where we rolled down the windows and listened for ourselves.

It was a miserable, rainy day, but that didn’t stop a few thousand people from congregating in front of the stage where Stern and his morning radio crew, dressed as Roman centurions (Rob Quivers was decked out as Cleopatra), shouted taunts and sang parodies. They were celebrating the fact that, not only had Stern conquered WMMR’s John DeBella in the ratings, the hapless Morning Zookeeper is now undergoing a divorce.

This all took place in the Judge Lewis Quadrangle, caddy-corner from the very building where DeBella was simultaneously broadcasting his morning show. Even if you didn’t agree with Stern’s fun-poking spectacle in spirit, you had to love it for all of its ballsiness.

We found a place to park, my companions assembled their banner, and I shouldered my way through the crowd in an effort to get a good picture. It was a drenched sea of humanity. People were pushed so tightly together that you couldn’t help breathing the warm, claustrophobic breath of the guy or girl next to you.

At one point, Stern enticed the audience to shout a particular taunt toward the WMMR building, and at that very moment, the rain came down in buckets as if the people at the radio station had control over the weather. To my amazement, no one even blinked as the entire twisted audience seemed hypnotized by the self-proclaimed “King of All Media.”

The whole thing lasted about 20 minutes and the crew from New York jumped into their van and headed back to their hotel to finish the broadcast. No sooner had the crowd dispersed, when a new gathering of mostly high-school age hooligans and various Stern fanatics assembled at the steps of the KYW/WMMR building on 5th & Market St. A handful of cops rushed over as a precautionary measure as the group began vehement chants of “the Zookeeper sucks,” “Howard Stern rules,” and “Charles Barkley screwed your wife.” For a tentative moment violence was in the air and it seemed a riot would ensue, but after a half an hour the fans lost interest and staggered elsewhere.

I hopped in my car and head for the Big Apple. Just outside of New York, the rain got so heavy that cars began hydroplaning all over the highway. This jolted me to attention, and I completed the rest of the trip with a healthy dose of adrenaline buzzing in my veins.

As soon as I passed through the Lincoln Tunnel, the inevitable homeless window washer rushed over and squirted Windex on my windshield to try to get money for cleaning my windows. But before he could wipe, I hit my wipers and pulled away as the light turned green. Damn. Just minutes in the big city and I was already acting hardened and indifferent.

I made my way to the Marriott Marquis where the conference was taking place, and I went through the formalities of getting registered. As I stood there with my bag of promo stuff, my laminated badge, and my camera bag, I realized that for the first time in my conference-going history, I was on my own — alone — with no one else to help fend off the schmoozers. I knew I had to approach the trade show floor with caution or I’d be engulfed in a sucking whirlwind of schmooze.

I walked by the guy checking badges at the door and ducked down one of the secondary aisles of the exhibit floor to avoid the core of activity. But I had not taken 10 steps when I felt a tap on my shoulder and someone I had met at a previous conference was glad handing me and pushing some sort of product in my palm. As if the smell of blood was in the water, I was accosted within minutes by others before I knew what had hit me. The fact that I had attended the Howard Stern spectacle made me especially attractive to those from New York who found out where I had been.

After half an hour of being tossed, turned, slapped on the back, and splattered in the face by flying drops of spit from rapidly-flapping mouths, I was able to pull away and buy a tiny, wilted salad for $2 and a bottle of juice for a buck.

I sat at a table in the very center of the floor, choked down my greens, consulted the directory guide, and laid my plans for the next few hours. It was a weird conference. When I looked up at one point, Ice-T and a handful of hangers-on passed by me. During a lull in that latter part of the day, I strolled down an aisle and had the misfortune of being the only person in the row with Dave “120 Minutes” Kendall. We stared blankly at each other, and I silently passed wind.

Luckily, I ran into some friends and non-schmoozers from Florida who I had met at SXSW a few years ago. They run a metal magazine out of Orlando, and it was their first time in the City. Against my better judgement, we headed to the place literally called the “Schmoozatorium,” a giant revolving bar on the eighth floor of the Marriott where most of the high-powered networking is done. It took just one round of $6 Budweisers to convince these guys that there were better places to be.

We feverishly plotted our plans for the next few hours, deciding that a show at the Ritz, featuring Pavement and My Bloody Valentine was a priority, and all else would fall into place. It was dusk when when hit the streets.

I’ll spare you the gory details. There is nothing quite like being in the middle of Manhattan and hitting clubs during the New Music Seminar. There is nothing I can compare it to. Imagine that there were 20 J.C. Dobbs, 15 Khyber Passes, 15 Barbarys, and 5 Trocaderos in Philly, and suddenly 30,000 hair-cut waving, boot-wearing, dreadlock-flailing, presskit-toting, music freakazoids came to town on ecstasy. That’s a little bit what it’s like.

The night began to degenerate when we were denied entry at the Ritz (actually they wanted to charge us $16 a piece even with our seminar badges!) We decided that drinking was suddenly top priority, so we concentrated on bars rather than over-packed music clubs. As you can imagine, it went downhill from there.

The next day, I attended the alternative press panel. It was one of the main reasons I came to New York. As I said before, when I come to NMS every year, I feel like I can’t go home until I garner some bit of knowledge about the country’s state of musical affairs. The alternative press conclave was just the place for me.

As I walked to the conference room where the gathering was taking place, I read the actual title of the panel from a sign mounted by the door — “The Alternative Media: Have They Lost Their Credibility by Hyping Artists for Ad Dollars?” Oh great, I thought, my favorite subject.

If there’s anything I can’t stand when it comes to alternative music, alternative press, or alternative anything for that matter, it’s when the old question of selling out is raised. Why are so-called alternative fans so consumed with the idea of their icons selling out? And why is it that when the word “success” is mentioned in the same sentence as the word “alternative,” the words “sell out” are soon to follow? When obvious sellouts are so apparent (i.e. Vanilla Ice, Hammer, Michael Bolton, etc.), going on an alternative witch hunt is not only a waste of time, it’s destructive as well.

And so what if legitimate alternative artists make a little money? Don’t they deserve it?

Mike Shea, moderator and editor of Alternative Press Magazine from Cleveland, started the discussion by reading a letter from an anonymous fanzine editor who had had it with the fear of being considered a sell out if he reached any level of success. He went so far as to say that the sell-out issue was just an excuse some alternative types have for rationalizing their own failure.

Well, as you can imagine, these and other pressing topics were covered with the seriousness of a court martial proceeding, and I reached my limit when one alternative press nerd told the tale of a promotions person who had created the unforgivable faux pas of trying to push the wrong artist to the wrong fanzine. There was an incredible amount of attitude in the room, which also tends to come with the territory.

If you ask me (and let’s face it, you didn’t), alternative is just another word for trendy. And what is considered alternative today is rapidly becoming establishment even as you read this. In fact, that word “alternative” has been so drummed to death that it certainly won’t be long before its very use will seem ridiculous. Only when people can stop worrying about whether or not it’s hip to like, write about, or be associated with certain artist, will this all come to an end.

Remember when M.L.K. said he dreamed of a day when his children would be “judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin?” Maybe more people should be judging their music by its content and not the color of the band’s hair. Amen.