Local Musicians Can See The Light

Campbellooza wants to help bands get 'out of the basement'

By LESLIE GRAY STREETER
Dispatch/Sunday News

Back in the day when Rod Goelz was kicking around York County from curiously-named garage band to completely unnamed garage band, an all-day workshop about songwriting, the music biz and better playing would have been helpful to the young musician.  Fortunately for the current generation of local would-be rock stars, there's now Campbellooza 2001.

"I've been in at least a dozen bands. A lot of what I'm putting on (on Saturday) is something I needed when I was a kid," said Goelz, the guitar instructor for Campbell's Music in Spry, which this weekend is hosting a music business workshop called Campbellooza 2001 at the Goodwill Fire Company.  The basic theme is that the most brilliant unknown band in the world is going to stay unknown without the knowledge that can get a musician or band out of the drummer's garage and into a club or recording studio.

This is Campbellooza's first year, although Goelz, who is currently in three bands, has done similar events in the past at places such as YorkArts and the former Fenix club. However, those were done just by Goelz alone, "this year I have more than just myself." Note-able events: Planned highlights include "Songwriting 101," featuring the members of Lucid Dreamers, one of Goelz's bands; "Garage Band Music Biz," a seminar featuring Quentin Jones of the Reach Around Rodeo Clowns, "FunkShop," which will cover funk improvisation and "Reactionary Guitar," a discussion lead by Goelz.

"One of the things I maintain is that you need to have organizational skills, rather than just musical skills. You need to come up with a promotional package, establishing a relationship with clubs. You need to know about recording, all sorts of stuff. This is about getting your band out of the basement," he said.

Changing focus: "York is in-between a lot of large cities, and all of the attention is focused on them," said Bob Campbell, owner of Campbell's Music,  founded by his father in 1964.  "There is so much talent here and maybe not enough outlets for it. So we felt this would help give people more direction and maybe get the extra things that may be tougher to find," he said.

Although there are larger local music conventions, such as the annual Millennium Music Festival in Harrisburg, Campbell said Campbellooza is a smaller, more  accessible event.   "Millennium, from what I understand, is more of a band showcase. We're concentrating on that level that anybody, even the guys just starting out who think 'Gee, our band's not good enough to play,' can get something out of it," he said.

Goelz, 33, grew up working in a music store, the now-defunct Stephen Nicholas Music in West York, where he was able to get his performing feet wet.   "They would put on an event, an open mike night, and when people showed up they began to hear what I was all about," he said. "It sort of snowballed."  However, he knows not everyone is that lucky, thus Campbellooza.

The songwriting workshop, Goelz said, assumes that people "don't know how to write a song, so this is the really, really basic formula. We ask them to find two chords that sound good together and build out of that, then sing a melody over it. We want to start with something small but important."

Goelz said that in some of his past workshops, participants have gone above and beyond what was asked of them. Although he said he tells people to write "dummy lyrics," something that can be sung over the basic melody and changed later, "some of them come up with lyrics they like and keep anyway.

"The first time I did a workshop, one of the kids there told me that he knew how to write poetry and that he had a lot of fun ideas as far as guitar hooks," Goelz said. "But he never understood how to put it together. Everyone should try. Everyone has at least one good song in them. It just takes some time to find it."

Happy marriage: The music business workshops, he said, wed the musical knowledge and skill of the participants with the business or marketing knowledge they might not have.   "You don't really get this at organized schools," he said.

Jones, a musician who is doing the "Garage Band Music Biz" workshop, also runs a record label called Lanarc and a studio, Sound Cage, in Lancaster. He said the business side is often what musicians are missing.

"A lot of times, bands don't realize they need a business plan, need a direction," he said. "People rely on the fact that they've worked hard on the music but they fail on the promotion side, the business side, on all the things that make it something other than being in the garage. If you can put together a plan of action, you've placed yourself in the top 50 percent of bands in the world, if not more."

"You have to give a good presentation on audio, on paper and on video," Jones said. "Even the packaging on the outside is important. It has to give people areason to open your material. Certain things are the industry standard. I was fortunate enough to learn these things, coming up the hard way. But if you don't follow the formula, people will know right away you're a goof."

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