Licensing
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This means:
Use this guide as much as you like to book shows for yourself and others. Share it with your friends, reproduce, download, redistribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this guide but the original work must be credited and you may not sell it. All further derivatives are licensed under identical terms.

Booking Your Band in Texas Guide by Matthew Wettergreen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Licensing
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This means:
Use this guide as much as you like to book shows for yourself and others. Share it with your friends, reproduce, download, redistribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this guide but the original work must be credited and you may not sell it. All further derivatives are licensed under identical terms.

Booking Your Band in Texas Guide by Matthew Wettergreen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Any band looking to step up their game in 2010 can initiate their excitement engines. Over the next 5 days I’ll be releasing a list of venues within a four hour drive of Houston that you can contact to book your band a gig. This list is a lead up to Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY which will be held on January 31st where you can meet with other like-minded bands to book yourself gigs.

Release Schedule
Every day of this week, beginning on Monday, a new guide will be released for Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Victoria/Corpus Christi. If you come to Bandcampus on Sunday you’ll receive the full document, similarly, if you visit this site next Monday (2/1) you’ll be able to download the document in its entirety. On Monday, February 1st, the complete list of venues will also be posted as a google document so that anyone can access it and edit it for accuracy.

The Free ebook
On Monday, 2/1/10, the compiled version will be available as an ebook for free download. The full document includes the following:

• Venue Listing for Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Victoria/Corpus Christi
• Mad-Libs style email script to assist you in making first contact with a venue to book your band a live show
• Mad-Libs style phone script to assist you in making first contact with a venue or following up to book  your band a live show
• A recommended schedule to help you plan your bookings
• A basic explanation of how to go about contacting venues and booking your band a live show

If you like what you read, please consider blogging a link back to this post so that people  know where to get the document. And if you’d like to provide some ideas about the document, feel free to leave a comment at the end of this post.

Acknowledgements
This guide was compiled over 2009 with the assistance of many people: Lauren Oakes laid the early groundwork for this project in early 2009 by compiling the list for Houston. My intern Katie Brown is largely responsible for the project as it exists today, expanding the listings to cities within a four hour drive of Houston, organizing the data, and fact checking the listings. Attendees of Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY in July got a first look at the listings and gave it a review for typos and missing information. Those bands and others that deserve thanks are: .
Prairie Cadets, Montgomery Walker, Stateside Stereo, Western Civilization, The Favorites, , The Liquid Kitchen, Female Demand, Glasnost, Insert Name Here, Spin Alley, Joe Muscara, The Snake Charmers, April Kyle, Ajit D’Sa, Wayside Drive, Ned Dodington, Grace Rodriguez, and last but not least the members of Caroline Collective, and Houston’s Creative and Music Community.

Licensing
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. This means:
Use this guide as much as you like to book shows for yourself and others. Share it with your friends, reproduce, download, redistribute, remix, tweak, and build upon this guide but the original work must be credited and you may not sell it. All further derivatives are licensed under identical terms.

Booking Your Band in Texas Guide by Matthew Wettergreen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

One of the best things you can do for yourself as a band is to start touring as early as possible. As Mike King puts it on Artist House Music’s blog, “Tour Early and Tour Often.” He also mentions that in order to do this effectively, “be sure that your live show is awesome.” And again he is correct. But too many bands get caught up on the latter advice without realizing that the former is really what creates that engaging performance. Playing too many times to the same people burns yourself out from gauging the crowds reaction and puts the audience too close to the music to objectively evaluate your live shows.

Give yourself some distance. Play to a new crowd in a new city once a month. It’s that simple.

Constantly searching for new crowds to play to can give you that impartial view of your stage performance that you’re looking for. It can build your fan base and also do what Mike explains which is that touring can help you take your band to the NEXT LEVEL by kicking off your sales and marketing machine. As you play to new people, different people, you’ll gain an appreciation for what works and what doesn’t.

Let’s just face facts though, taking that first step to contacting venues and book a show for yourself can be a scary thing, especially if you’ve never done it before. Here’s an idea that can make it easier on you, schedule a BOOKING PARTY for you and your friend’s bands.  Booking Parties are really easy ways to reduce the friction to getting gigs for your band. All you need is a laptop, a few friends and a list of some venues to contact in neighboring cities. You’re surrounded by your peers who can provide encouragement and an eye to your emails and with the proper venue and contact information you’re prepared to further your career.

On January 31st we’ll be holding a Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY for Houston bands. We’ll provide the tables, chairs and the internet. We’ll also be giving you a venue list for Houston, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Victoria/Corpus Christi as well as a mad-libs style email contact form and a mad-libs style phone contact form and review the process of contacting (and following up with) a venue to book your band.

We held a similar Booking Party in July and the results were exciting:  One band, Liquid Kitchen, was able to book two shows within 72 hours of Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY. Another band, Insert Name Here, booked one show for themselves that week and continue to use the scripts to book themselves shows.

Come to Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY and make it easier for your band to start finding new audiences to play in front of.

WHAT: Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY
WHEN: January 31, 2010, 2-4pm
WHERE: Caroline Collective, 4820 Caroline, Houston TX 77004
WHY: Book your band to play in Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and more

Read the original post about Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY.

Download the mad-libs style email contact form to get your band booked.

Download the mad-libs style phone contact script to get your band booked.

–
Regular BandCampus sessions are (mostly) held on the First Sunday of every month at Caroline Collective sometime between the hours of 1pm and 5pm. Please mark your calendar accordingly for future events where we’ll all educate specific skills to musical artists such as, online/offline promotion, tour booking, financials, and recording. Please speak about this event to your colleagues, band members and other interested members of the Houston Music Community.

1. The formation of more Communities of Practice.

Communities of Practice are groups of people who share similar interests, industries, or professions.  Meeting with others experiencing similar challenges allows the sharing of information and experiences between the group that the members can learn from to improve themselves personally and professionally. Communities of Practice are also great places to discuss standards of excellence. Examples of Communities of Practice that exist are: Meetup Groups, Startup Houston Happy Hours, Fresh Arts and Spacetaker‘s Arts  Leadership Forums, Netsquared, Bandcampus, AIGA, Coworking spaces, Hackerspaces, Barcamps.

When I say I’d like to see more Communities of Practice I mean new Communities of Practice that are focused on improving themselves. Example: coffee shops discussing their businesses and how to deal with the economy and the influx of customers camping out all day. Music venues discussing the state of the music economy and how they can use their role in the music community to help drive band’s careers and increased fan attendance. Music writers meeting to pick up on the newest bands or help new writers build their career. Marketing Directors sitting down to review their plans with each other and provide guidance.

If you are not a member of a Community of Practice, form or join one. Go out in a social setting to meet everybody and begin the information and knowledge sharing.

2. The conversion of the passive to the active in existing communities of practice and community based events.

If you are already a member of a Community of Practice and your monthly meetings focus solely on socializing and having drinks, stop. Start planning situations where you can build the same camaraderie but accomplish something. Examples: Hackathons, Green Dev House, Dr. Sketchy, Startup Weekend, goal-oriented Barcamps, etc. Start taking advantage of peer-to-peer learning, just in time learning and other cases where learning and doing can be matched together, with beer if desired.

3. Greater communication between existing communities of practice towards the development of standards of excellence.

Your Community of Practice should not just get together to have a beer but take a proactive role in leading the economy in your industry. You owe it to your peers to tell them if they’re doing something that makes your profession look bad. Your peers owe it to you to share information which could help all of you streamline your process or be more successful as an industry.  Ask yourselves, “What can we be doing better?” “How are we all failing to serve our customers needs?” “What do we need to educate ourselves in?” Examples: Music venues setting unofficial non-compete regulations between each other because the musicians are unable to hold each other to them. Experienced bloggers taking a novice under their wing and teach them the ropes. Information sharing between local businesses in similar industries to determine pricing structures that promote standards of business w/o turning into price fixing or collusion.

4. Increased support for startup culture.

We are a creative culture and entrepreneurship and social activists are driving innovation in our cities. We owe it to them not to hinder their progress and to champion their efforts. This message works anywhere but the ideas are tailored for Houston. In Houston, increased support for startup culture could mean many things. First, I’d love to see the expansion and increased visibility of Startup Houston (who are doing a great job already) as the definitive source for news relating to the startup culture. There is a culture and a market that is not being fully served by the Houston Business Journal or the Houston Chronicle. One site doing it right for their city is Technically Philly. They regularly report on the  issues that relate to local startups and users of technology, have a fairly comprehensive startup/technology-issue-related calendar and have membership options to support the site and its contributors. A regular [and frequent] section in the Houston Chronicle or Houston Press that covers startup culture and focuses on local startups is another idea that would go a long way towards shedding some much needed light on the incredible talent of Houston entrepreneurs.

I’d love to start a dialogue about this. What other Communities of Practice do you think are doing it right?

The first topic we address in Society and the Information Age are the cultural and societal shifts that occurred with the coming of the book and the extinction of oral tradition. Although we are now several technological generations beyond the book as a technology, parallels remain between society containing only verbal content and our now variegated content-saturated world. One looming negative aspect of this technological progress is a dissociation from process and a reduced respect for the energy required for creation. Instead we have an increased respect simply for creation itself. Luckily, a strong parallel exists between oral tradition and the internet age that can help society restore that interest in process and faith in information. That parallel is the perceived  importance of authenticity, trust and authority that was paramount in times of oral tradition and is now experiencing a renaissance in business and culture.

Oral tradition placed value in the process of knowledge retention and carried with it demands for trust and authenticity in society’s information and its delivery. Griots and bards and intellectuals were tasked with record and knowledge transfer, an arduous task requiring training and memorization. Some early texts existed not to be storehouses for our information but to serve as mnemonic devices to aid individuals in the memorization of the information for eventual dissemination to communities and discussion among equals.

The emergence of the mass produced book increased the ease in which information traveled but reduced the importance on the trust, authority and authenticity of the information. Trust and authenticity are not core characteristics of printed word as a technology, unlike oral tradition. The book additionally signaled a rupture in the respect for the process by which the information was obtained and stored. The mere presence of the inanimate form of information overtook the need for a live being to deliver it. This dissociated people from the process of creation and shifted the focus from one of cultural heritage preservation to that of enlightenment through increased information collection.

The further dissociation from the process and reduction in weight placed in trust and authenticity of source has continued with successive technologies such as television, radio and now the internet. “If it’s on TV it must be true” never applied in oral tradition as the people delivering the information carried with it authority and responsibility to deliver histories stories and parables to keep society cohesive and strong.

The recent wide spread emergence of value placed in trust and authenticity is one that we should all embrace. It is a way of filtering the gross amounts of information freely available at our grasp but more than that it is a return to some of the positive traditions that formed the basis of oral tradition, mainly virtue, truth and the need for authenticity in our information and our interactions. Increasing the value of authenticity in our society could eventually result in a return to the importance placed on process. If we begin to look at things like credentials and methodology of research when determining what, as a science writer, should be covered, we can begin to set metrics for value that are based not on sensationalism but on true fact and necessary information dissemination. Approaches in similar industries which consider process and synthesis of past knowledge as metrics of quality are what create real thought leaders, those that can tell us what we know, how we know it and where to go from here.

Rice University has asked me to act as a substitute instructor for the spring 2010 semester teaching a course entitled Society in the Information Age. The course examines the effects of technology on the ways in which we live, work and think about the world around us. This course has been taught for the better part of the decade at Rice and is one of the university’s most popular classes with students waiting years to be able to get into it. Rice’s decision to place a substitute in for the semester is a testament to the popularity of the course and their desire to provide the students with opportunities to expand their ways of thinking. That Rice selected me as the instructor for the course is an incredible show of their trust in my talents as an instructor and I am incredibly honored. This course presents an incredible opportunity to confront my own views of technology and explore with students this unique perspective including current topics like coworking, social networking and the new music business.

Take the course for a test drive:

As mentioned, Society in the Information Age examines the role of technology in our current society. The course will explore shifts in the realms of politics, religion, commerce, and personal relationships. We will also discuss our changing perceptions of property, privacy, authority, journalism, knowledge and identity.

In any honest examination of technology, positive and negative effects become apparent. It is rare that any new technology is met with ambivalence and this is because the introduction of any new technology results in winners and losers. This has always been the case even as far back  as the story in the semester begins, at the end of oral history and the beginning of the book. By starting at the beginning, we’ll focus on what was an incredibly disruptive technology to society and use that to enumerate the absolutes of any technological change. Moving forward, we’ll focus the same lens on the components of the personal computing era, the popular explosion of the internet and use these two movements to highlight the true meaning of Marshall McLuhan’s seminal statement “The Medium is the Message.”

At that point we’ll have brought ourselves up to the present, one in which our society is inextricably linked to technology. One in which technology shapes our actions and our thoughts. In the second section of the course we’ll explore these changing perspectives. In one class we’ll discuss the idea of property and ownership, the free licensing of works of music, prose or even science. Ownership will be addressed in the context of the music industry, with examples given in piracy and sampling, still prevalent even twenty years after the 2LiveCrew sampling lawsuit. Next we’ll address a relevant issue in a university setting: plagiarism. With hordes of information so freely at hand everywhere nowadays, and some of it our own personal data we’ll then explore privacy. Important questions will address the value of privacy, social networking, government information gathering, and the permanence of information on the internet. A loss of privacy must have an equal and opposite reaction and we’ll explore that reaction in the form of an increased value placed on authenticity. This authenticity will be discussed through one disingenuous (lonelygirl15) example and one honest movement (Cluetrain Manifesto) that’s tranforming how we do business and interact online. Oddly enough, in a later section we’ll see how this authenticity has resulted in the emergence of businesses with a “happiness” model built into their core missions.

The second half of the course will address ways in which our lives are now different as a result of technology. The first topic will be social networks, online and offline. We’ll discuss what your identity online means as a member of a community and how individuals are forming their own communities of practice formed around their own interests, guerilla knitting groups and hardware hackers and people who meet for things called barcamps that have nothing to do with drinking. We’ll talk about the music business and why there will probably never again be anyone as big as Michael Jackson but that’s ok because we’re all rock stars now. From pop stars we’ll move on to political stars, with Howard Dean as the first candidate to use the internet in his campaign and next the varied internet strategies employed by John McCain and Barack Obama. We’ll outline how Obama effectively used Long Tail for fundraising and organizing. Next we’ll look at how religion has fared in all of this, the varied views of technology from the world religions and new methods of worship.

If the previous sections seemed to shed a positive light on technology, the next section will address some of society’s concerns for technology’s negative connotations. Some critics are heralding our society as one that is being dumbed down, hopelessly dependent without understanding the basics of our technological slaves. By returning to the discussion of the wealth of freely available information we’ll examine how we learn and how we value information vs. hearsay. We’ll also briefly discuss AJ Keen’s book “Cult of the Amateur” where he decries the internet generation for it’s lack of respect for experts and open acceptance of faulty information. More concerns will be raised as we explore the life on the screen, including those who spend too much time separated from society using technology, violence in video games, cyberstalking and the media habits of the technologically addicted.

The final month of class will be spent addressing what’s coming next, in technology and our bodies interfacing with it. First we’ll have a discussion of the future of manufacturing and how you’ll be able to print anything you want just like on Star Trek. More Science Fiction topics will be addressed with discussion of cyborgs and artificial intelligence. We’ll play with some current examples of virtual and augmented reality and ask ourselves how this might further shift our perspectives and bend our lives. After talking about cyborgs, robots and artificial intelligence it’s only fitting that we close the semester discussing the resistance, what it looks like, and how you can join.

Society in the Information Age meets Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:00pm to 2:20pm in Duncan Hall 1064 on Rice University’s campus. Any non-Rice community members wishing to sit in on the class may contact me.

When I go out to eat with friends, our meals arrive at the same time, and usually all at the same temperature. In my personal kitchen, this is next to impossible. Aside from a cripplingly novice technique, the most difficult part of cooking for me is timing. I tend towards complicated multi-dish meals that require ingredients to be prepared and added at specific times for perfect execution of the meal. Usually, I spend time researching a couple recipes to understand the essence of the dish, assemble my own recipe with additions/substitutions and then mentally prepare for the steps required to prepare everything on time. As I was planning dinner last night I had an epiphany. Gantt charts.

To the layperson, a Gantt Chart is basically a task-dependent timeline. These graphs are visually descriptive and clearly indicate the stepped phases of a project. Below is an example. On the y-axis are the tasks and on the x-axis is the timeline. As you can see, evaluation may not commence until training has completed. You might also observe that in order to complete the report by the due date of 11/26, writing must begin on the 12th.

As an engineer, I am very familiar with Gantt charts for project management of multiple task- and time-dependent steps. Until last night, I had never considered using them for cooking. They’re perfect for the task though. Each ingredient and its prep can be charted based on the time it takes to complete the task. Your prep time can be staggered to account for your cooking skill level.  Visually you can simply discover the most labor intensive steps and understand which tasks must happen either concurrently or in succession.

Let’s look at an example. This is a recipe prepared for chicken soup in a familiar form:

8 cups chicken stock
1 cup chopped carrot
1 cup chopped potato
1 cup diced celery
1lb of chicken breast, cubed
3 cups noodles, cooked
1 T. minced garlic
1 t. chopped thyme
2 t. chopped parsley leaves

Brown chicken in skillet with salt and pepper. Bring stock to boil with lid over high heat. Add chicken, potato, and carrot to pot, reduce to simmer. Simmer for 30′, add thyme. Simmer for 20′ longer, add celery, garlic and cooked noodles. Simmer for 10′ more, remove from heat, and add chopped parsley and salt pepper to taste.

And now we have the Gantt Chart version of the same recipe:

If we compare the two recipes we see some clear differences. First is the formatting of the two recipes, the former being a word problem and the latter a graph. The second difference is in the quantities, with the standard recipe calling for the quantities of the final prepped ingredients while the second begins with raw quantities. The third difference are the time requirements of the recipes, the second outlining the amount of time required to prep each individual ingredient.

Visually, the formatting differences between the two recipes are so stark that they require different execution methods to create the final meal. The first recipe tells you the volume of the ingredients but does not indicate the process to prepare these ingredients. As a cook you must know and account for the time it will take to peel and then chop the carrots and the potatoes. Similarly, you must fill in the blanks for the preliminary steps to prepare the stock, the cubed chicken and the noodles. All minor preparation steps but they must be completed by specific time points in the recipe, for example, the noodles must be cooked by the time they are ready to place in the stock. In the second recipe, the raw ingredients are listed and their preparation steps outlined on the timeline. Therefore, there is no need to mentally prepare the process leading up to cooking or even cooking.

Another formatting difference between the two recipes is in the worded quantities. The first recipe calls for specific volumes of prepped ingredients (1 cup of chopped carrots) with no mention of how many carrots or potatoes are required to make a cup each. I have no idea how many chopped carrots make 1 cup nor am I cooking for a restaurant so waste is an important consideration. Luckily, this is a soup recipe so there’s some play in the quantities. Therefore, in the second recipe specific quantities of vegetables are listed. This simplifies assembly of the raw ingredients for the recipe and minimizes waste.

The final difference between the two recipes is the weighted importance of time. Most recipes I’ve read provide time in the form of “prep time: 15 min., overall cooking time: 60min.” Again, a word problem requiring some accounting in the rearranging of the steps involved to make the dish. In the first recipe, time is listed as a function of the combined ingredients to cook the final dish. My process for cooking the soup using the first recipe would be to chop and dice everything before heating the stock, because of my novice knife skills and because I like to complete all the prep work before the cooking steps. Using the Gantt chart though, I can see that there are periods of inactivity that I can exploit to prep some of the additional ingredients. Using the timeline, specific preparatory steps can be programmed in during these cooking periods. Also, you can clearly visualize the due dates for specific ingredients, such as the cooked noodles and the browned chicken.

The more I think about this style of formatting, the more I begin to consider that this is how skilled chefs think about their dishes when reading a recipe. I’ve also considered the fact that formatting a recipe this way might be taking all the fun out of the puzzle. But as someone interested in data visualization and explaining concepts through graphs, this seems to remove all the stress of planning a meal. It breaks cooking down to a step-wise process allowing me to focus on more important things, like not cutting off the tips of my fingers.

A stressful end to six months of hard work needed to be rewarded with a couple days off to relax. At first, traditional methods of relaxation were attempted at brief intervals; reading, playing a short video game, taking a walk, watching a movie, sleeping in an hour. These were met with complete failure and as a couple days turned into several days more creative measures were taken. With each successive attempt at relaxation, more time and creativity was applied to the task; sleeping til noon, Deadwood Season 1 (3rd time), a day-long video game, starting the day with booze, ending the day with coffee, teaching the dog to understand a complex set of hand signals, staying up all night, transplanting all the spider plants to teapots. These drastic approaches were met with less relaxation, more stress and a growing fear of the work being avoided. The experiment ended after two weeks, a failure, when the final attempts amounted to nothing more than slothfully lazing about in bored idleness, too listless to even decide on lunch. Work was resumed, but now with a fervor that had not existed before the experiment began; anything to avoid having to relax again.

I asked for Grace’s opinion about my explanation for the past two weeks of vacation. She said “it sounds like the final sentence of the passage should read ‘three days later I slit my wrists.’” She obviously didn’t see the humor in it or share my pride in successfully writing in the third person. I later pointed out that it might be the egg nog and that maybe watching Deadwood wasn’t such a good idea. This confusion is exactly how I feel about today’s sweater.

Today’s sweater is a tightly knit black  cardigan adorned with embroidered poinsettias and enough imitation pearl and other beads to clink when you walk. The pearls are connected by dotted lines of shiny beads that resemble the kinds of balls you’d dress a cake with. They are not edible. And how insightful of the manufacturer to sew ONE small bead on the inside of the cardigan in case you happen to lose ONE of the hundreds of beads on the outside. The complete package gives the impression of black graph paper crawling with flowered vines. While this is definitely a women’s sweater (maybe a math teacher’s) the buttons are on the right side. And it’s the buttons that really stop me. They, like most Christmas sweater cardigan sweater buttons are plastic with knit covering but on the front of these buttons are sewn seven shiny beads.  The buttonholes are clearly too small for the pearl adorned buttons. What I’d love to ask the previous owner of this sweater is, “were the beads sewn onto the buttons when you bought it or did you think that there just weren’t enough beads on the sweater to begin with?”

The film to pair with this bad creation and the primary passage of this post is Bad(der) Santa (Unrated Edition). For those who originally wrote off this film as filthy, depraved, and utterly despicable, you’re not wrong. But first and foremost, this is a Christmas Film which means that it is one of redemption, forgiveness and family. Just maybe not your family. But still, this is as close to an adult date film as you can get, with Billy Bob Thornton playing the rock bottom Santa thief and Gilmore Girls’ Lauren Graham playing the cute barmaid with a Santa fetish. It has held up well over the past couple years and is worth a second look.