Growing Pains
Wednesday 18 September @ 10:20:01 |
 Has the expansion of the Minnesota Music Awards hurt the show or helped sustain it?
by Holly Day
Since 1985, the Minnesota Music Academy has been serving the music community in the Twin Cities and beyond. Or, at least, it has tried. Built solely on the efforts of volunteers and operating on a shoestring budget, the MMA has made a genuine effort to bring all facets of the music community into its fold, including fans, DJs, business interests and the youth population. However, it may be because of these very efforts that the MMA has lost much of the respect it once had within the very music community it’s been trying to serve—by stretching itself so thin and spending so much time trying to figure out exactly what it’s here for, the MMA has all but disappeared from the local music scene. The annual awards show, ordinarily scheduled for May, was pushed back until September, while other MMA regular music events, including the Icebreaker series and the Minnesota Musicians Do Minnesota Music shows, were cancelled entirely. With the Awards show date finally set for the 18th, and in a brand, spankin’ new setting, it seems as though the MMA is finally getting back on track. Fifteen bands are scheduled to perform at the ceremony, including Flipp, Basement Apartment, and the Honeydog’s Adam Levy.
While some may wonder at the logic of moving the Awards show from Minneapolis’ First Avenue—where it’s been for nearly a decade—to the more conservative River Centre in St. Paul, current MMA President Howard Day seems to think the change of scenery was inevitable, citing problems with overcrowding at the last Awards show held at First Avenue. “The Awards ceremony is to celebrate not only the accomplishments of the musicians, but also to help bring the awareness of what we do, and to also put on a fun, splendid evening. It’s a public relations campaign,” he explains. “We’ve gone out and got a lot of corporate sponsors to help pay for the event, which is a really great thing. I mean, it helps the business community, it helps with our vision and focus, it helps with bringing us a little bit of money to work with—and I do mean little. But it also helps us plan for the future, and what we’re trying to accomplish. Right now, we’re kind of looking outside of the realm of music to get more fans involved, get the community involved, and hopefully spark some more interest to have people go to these shows, instead of having the Awards show labeled as a First Avenue award show. We want to make this an event like it once was in the past. It was held one year at the Carlton Celebrity Room, and at the State Theatre, and places like that.”
However, while overcrowding at First Avenue may have been a problem with previous Awards show, there may be a snag in the logic of moving the event to another venue. The First Avenue shows were ridiculously cheap, and heavily comped, and bands that did show up at the event often brought arm-length guests lists in with them. “First Avenue was always supportive of putting on the Awards show there,” says former MMA executive director Mean Larry. “They never made any money off the show, and while the MMA never made a lot of money, either, we didn’t have to spend a lot, if anything, to book events there, either. Of course, we always had people telling us they could make the Awards show bigger and better, which essentially meant they could make it so it brought in more money—which is fine, but I always considered the Awards show to be a big, end-of-the-year party for everyone in the music community, and I think that the real appeal of it was to everyone who came to the events.“
Ironically, this big, fun party for the music is also the most stressful, backbiting time of year for the members of the MMA. The first thing most people say when the ballots are mailed out is ,“Why isn’t my band on here?” Rumors fly about clandestine deals between board members and major record labels, while the MMA offices are flooded with complaints about both omissions and inclusions to the ballot. “It seems like every year at this time, folks just start getting heated up,” laughs Mean Larry. “When I first started volunteering with the MMA in 1996, people hated the MMA. They absolutely hated it. I was getting phone calls, and I might as well have been getting hate mail. A lot of people think that the MMA just grabs these names out of a hat, and puts them on a piece of paper and call that a ballot, and it’s just not true. We get these nominations from people that belong to the Jazz Society, the Bluegrass/Old Time Music Society, the blues people—just all the different genres, and not just the rock and pop media. Because when you put that ballot out, that’s what the organization has to stand behind, and if you don’t put out a credible ballot, you’re not a credible organization. And then as far as the Award Show goes, you can just chuck it all in the can if you’re just jerking everybody’s chain by pretending you put out a real ballot.”
As it is, it’s almost easy to think this year’s ballot might be a rush job. The week after the ballot for this year’s event went to print, the MMA ran a retraction claiming that categories had been missing from the first ballot, and that voters must now download the new ballot from the MMA Web site—most of which, incidentally, hasn’t been updated since last year. Also, ballots that had been mailed in earlier were apparently not reaching the MMA due to the incomplete address printed on the ballot form. Still more questions arise at such inclusions in the ballot as Flipp’s album, “Blow It Out Your Ass,” which already won 2001’s MMA Award Hard-Rock Recording category. And while this may have been perfectly intentional, and that MMA members liked the album enough to vote for it in the same category two years in a row, it just looks like an oversight, a misprint.
In retrospect, it seems as though throughout much of its history, disorganization has played a major role in the operation of the MMA. “There was a complete turnover in the board when I first got there,” says former Executive Director Mean Larry, who came on in 1986 and left a little over a year ago. “Even though the organization had been around as long as it had, there wasn’t a lot of written information on how things are supposed to be done, and unfortunately, what happens is that people leave kind of disgruntled and angry and kind of burnt-out and pissed and so they end up not talking to anybody who succeeds them.”
Howard Day seems to think that disorganization may have played a big role in the MMA’s shortcomings as well, and has big plans for the future of the MMA. “Right now, we’re on a large public relations marketing campaign, just to say hello, and let people know that we exist, that we are an organization out trying to do more than what we have in the past,” he says. “This year, we’re holding a seminar panel focusing on five areas: performance, business, production, youth, and women. One of those things with the organization that we’ve been trying to do is incorporate more of these programs. That’s one of the first goals, is to let people know that we are in existence, and we’re trying new and different things. These new and different things include the education aspect or the MMA, which is the biggest part of what we should be doing and haven’t done enough of lately. So with that, we set up a goal to do a once-over of the MMA to make it look more appealing, including a new logo and having the Awards show at River Centre. So far as music education is concerned, this year what we’re trying to establish are what are kids and what are adults not getting? What are we missing? And we’ve set up an application form for our members to fill out to give us a ballpark figure of what it is we’re obviously not doing, sort of a self-assessment, and what are the things that are missing. So right now, we’re basically in a fact-finding period.”
Changes in goals for the organization, along with changes in leadership, have also stalled the MMA. During Mean Larry’s tenure on the board, the MMA was mostly made up of musicians, and geared towards helping musicians, while today it’s more music fans and DJs than actual musicians. “I’m from Duluth, and when I discovered the MMA, I always felt they were somewhat of an island and we [musicians] were all kind of just surrounding it,” says Mean Larry. “When I got involved with the organization, that was one of the goals I put forth, was that we really needed to develop the members, and get the members involved with the organization. And how we did that, how we tried to do that, was get them involved in things like the nomination process, which they weren’t involved with in previous years. Previous years, we polled selected members of the music industry and the media for nominations. We also kept a newsletter going, and those things are a whole lot of work, you know. We had a Web site that we actually kept up to date. We doubled membership from 1998 to 1999, because we were actually sending out membership renewals, we were actually making an effort to bringing in new members. Because that was also a key in that, as a board member and as Executive Director, I challenged our board members every year to bring membership in. The board members are supposed to do that sort of thing. They’re supposed to bring in money to the organization. Unfortunately, the way the MMA has always been set up is that the board members also happen to be their main volunteers. They have a hard time separating the fact their volunteering duties are not related to being a board member. Just because you spent eight hours volunteering, that doesn’t mean you can’t do your duties in the board of directors. And so that part of the way why the MMA doesn’t function so well, is that—that’s why people get burnt out. They’re on the board of directors, they’re also volunteering their ass off, doing a lot of work.”
Howard Day’s immediate solution to volunteer burn-out is to create a fund within the MMA to pay full-time employees to take care of the mind-numbing tasks that unpaid employees are loathe to take on. “We’re all volunteers here,” he says. “There are only a few people that have enough time to do it, and working for free 24 hours a day gets old after a while. So that’s another reason why we’re doing it a lot different this year, is that we’re trying to move toward getting enough money so we can start paying some people to start doing some stuff that needs to be done, like taking care of paperwork, and the newsletter, and the Web site. Otherwise, these things never get done, because nobody ever has the time to volunteer their time to do them.”
While both men have different ideas of what directions the MMA should take and how it should be run, it’s obvious from talking to them, as well as other past MMA volunteers, that everyone involved with the MMA really does care about the organization, and wants it to succeed. And, while Howard Day’s current campaign to bring big business and the casual listening public into the fold of the MMA may not seem like the most artistic approach to solve its current problems, finding additional sources of revenue is most certainly in the MMA’s best interests. It’ s also painfully obvious that changes need to be made to simply keep the organization from falling completely apart, and these changes need to be done in a way that doesn’t alienate the very musicians that the MMA was founded to support.
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