Christian Bands locked out of San Fran
Latest bit of intolerance from the left in San Francisco.
Christian Rockers cannot find a venue in the San Francisco Bay Are.
Here's the article:
And the bands played elsewhere With no prayer of a decent crowd, Christian rockers bypass Bay Area
Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, March 3, 2005 now part of stylesheet -->
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Two rock acts touring behind albums at the top of the Christian music charts are playing California this week -- but like most religious rock 'n' roll caravans, this one won't be stopping in the Bay Area.
Explaining to Christian rock fans in the nation's fourth-largest music- buying market why they have to drive at least 90 minutes to see Mercy Me and Jeremy Camp is a frustrating task for Christian rock musicians, promoters and radio executives, for whom religious music is as much a spiritual calling as it is a profession.
The reason Christian bands can't find a gig in the Bay Area, they say, is rooted somewhere in the ethereal world of blue-state politics and the bottom- line realities of the music biz.
To those in the secular music world, it's a head-scratcher.
"It's unusual for such a big metropolitan area to be that devoid of a type of music," said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar magazine, which charts the concert tour business. "It's like, sure, you don't go to New York City to hear country music, but country bands still play there.
"There must be some sort of cultural component to this," Bongiovanni said. "Either the audience doesn't exist, or it exists and it isn't being served."
Part of the reason is economic; Christian concert tours don't gross as much as their secular counterparts, making them less lucrative to promote. At No. 51, Bill Gaither was the highest-grossing Christian act on Pollstar's 2004 list of the top concerts.
The cultural component is harder to define.
Jon Robberson, a veteran West Coast promoter of Christian rock, says the Bay Area's demographics have become too "blue" -- or left-leaning, in political terms -- to be a regular stop for the biggest names of Christian rock. There aren't as many large evangelical churches, particularly in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley area, as there are in other parts of the state to support a show that draws 4,000-plus fans, he said.
So, Robberson is taking the Mercy Me-Jeremy Camp tour this week to Sacramento, Visalia and Irvine, where he knows there is an audience. He's even testing out a new market: Las Vegas.
"For the past four or five years, we haven't been able to book a big show in the San Francisco area," said Robberson, whose San Jose-based Celebration Concerts has been one of the West Coast's leading Christian music promoters for more than two decades. "The demographics have changed a lot in the past five years."
Carol Anderson, a publicist for top Christian bands since 1982, said, "The coasts are always tough to book, but the West Coast is getting harder and harder, San Francisco in particular. You need print media support and radio. After a while, the tours just stop trying to go there."
It's not just concerts. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks album sales, Bay Area music buyers don't buy a lot of Christian CDs. That's not an encouraging sign, said Aaron Siuda of Bill Graham Presents, which dominates the Bay Area's concert scene.
"Without (Christian) radio promotion, and with not a really good (attendance) history here, we haven't been able to see a track record of success here among Christian rock bands," Siuda said. "We haven't done these type of shows for the past few years."
Paramount's Great America in Santa Clara has hosted top names at annual Christian concerts, but those audiences include people who spend the day riding roller-coasters. And while Christian bands occasionally turn up in San Francisco clubs, they're often on the undercard of a bill headed by a secular band that draws most of the audience.
"We tour all over the country, but we hardly ever go through there," said Jeff Schneeweis, guitarist for Number One Gun, a Christian band out of Chico that has no problems drawing audiences in Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. "It's weird that not a lot of promoters have picked up on (the lack of Christian artists coming through the region). I don't know why."
The Bay Area wasn't always this way. Twenty-five years ago, the idea for what is now the nation's largest noncommercial Christian music network came out of a meeting held in the nation's cradle of the counterculture: San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
"KFRC was doing very well then and I wondered, 'Where are the Christian stations like this?' " said Bob Anthony Fogal, then a secular radio DJ who had recently converted to Christianity. After nights and weekends spent raising $100,000 by calling on everything from churches to the Bohemian Club, Fogal got his 400-watt station on the air in 1982 in Santa Rosa.
Now based in Sacramento, the nonprofit, listener-supported network known as K-LOVE has 97 stations across the country, but just a handful with weak signals in and around the Bay Area.
"One of our biggest frustrations was that we were never able to get a station in San Francisco back then," Fogal said. "That's the biggest reason there's not big Christian concerts here -- there's no booming radio station to reach that critical mass. If you walk down Market Street and ask people who Jeremy Camp is, nobody will know."
Lack of airplay may explain why Camp's "Restored" album has sold nearly 50 percent more albums in the Sacramento/Stockton market than it has in the San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose region.
"The thing that all of the markets ahead of it have in common -- even L. A. and New York -- that the Bay Area doesn't are a strong Christian radio presence and major Christian retail outlets (to buy CDs)," said Tricia Whitehead, a spokeswoman for the Gospel Music Association, which tracks music album sales. "While you can buy Christian music in your Best Buys and Targets, about half is sold in Christian bookstores."
K-LOVE's CEO, Richard Jenkins, sees the cultural factors as far from insurmountable for Christian acts.
"Once you get outside of San Francisco proper -- to Hayward, Pittsburg, San Leandro -- those cultural factors disappear," he said. "We've spent $250, 000 (on market studies nationally), and we know the market is there.
"Contemporary Christian music would play well everywhere but places like Marin County and Hillsborough -- the very, very affluent areas," he said. "Give me something with the strength of KQED-FM's signal, and we'd be a top-10 station."
The cost of acquiring such a station, however, is a prohibitive $80 million at least, Jenkins says.
Robberson figures that if the Bay Area won't come to Christian music, perhaps Christian music needs to adapt to the Bay Area. In July, for the first time in the nine years he's been staging the Spirit West Coast Christian music festival in Monterey, he'll dedicate a stage to harder-edged bands with "a step-up in the aggression level of the music."
"The lyrics are not real churchy, but it's still positive," Robberson said.
Number One Gun's Schneeweis, a straight-ahead rocker whose music isn't overtly preachy, said it's worth a try.
"Maybe now the festival won't be just full of Christian youth camp kids," he said. "This (stage) will let everyone mix together."
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.
Article link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/03/MNG3LBJL4G1.DTL
Christian Rockers cannot find a venue in the San Francisco Bay Are.
Here's the article:
And the bands played elsewhere With no prayer of a decent crowd, Christian rockers bypass Bay Area
Joe Garofoli, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, March 3, 2005 now part of stylesheet -->
Printable Version
Email This Article
Two rock acts touring behind albums at the top of the Christian music charts are playing California this week -- but like most religious rock 'n' roll caravans, this one won't be stopping in the Bay Area.
Explaining to Christian rock fans in the nation's fourth-largest music- buying market why they have to drive at least 90 minutes to see Mercy Me and Jeremy Camp is a frustrating task for Christian rock musicians, promoters and radio executives, for whom religious music is as much a spiritual calling as it is a profession.
The reason Christian bands can't find a gig in the Bay Area, they say, is rooted somewhere in the ethereal world of blue-state politics and the bottom- line realities of the music biz.
To those in the secular music world, it's a head-scratcher.
"It's unusual for such a big metropolitan area to be that devoid of a type of music," said Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar magazine, which charts the concert tour business. "It's like, sure, you don't go to New York City to hear country music, but country bands still play there.
"There must be some sort of cultural component to this," Bongiovanni said. "Either the audience doesn't exist, or it exists and it isn't being served."
Part of the reason is economic; Christian concert tours don't gross as much as their secular counterparts, making them less lucrative to promote. At No. 51, Bill Gaither was the highest-grossing Christian act on Pollstar's 2004 list of the top concerts.
The cultural component is harder to define.
Jon Robberson, a veteran West Coast promoter of Christian rock, says the Bay Area's demographics have become too "blue" -- or left-leaning, in political terms -- to be a regular stop for the biggest names of Christian rock. There aren't as many large evangelical churches, particularly in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley area, as there are in other parts of the state to support a show that draws 4,000-plus fans, he said.
So, Robberson is taking the Mercy Me-Jeremy Camp tour this week to Sacramento, Visalia and Irvine, where he knows there is an audience. He's even testing out a new market: Las Vegas.
"For the past four or five years, we haven't been able to book a big show in the San Francisco area," said Robberson, whose San Jose-based Celebration Concerts has been one of the West Coast's leading Christian music promoters for more than two decades. "The demographics have changed a lot in the past five years."
Carol Anderson, a publicist for top Christian bands since 1982, said, "The coasts are always tough to book, but the West Coast is getting harder and harder, San Francisco in particular. You need print media support and radio. After a while, the tours just stop trying to go there."
It's not just concerts. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks album sales, Bay Area music buyers don't buy a lot of Christian CDs. That's not an encouraging sign, said Aaron Siuda of Bill Graham Presents, which dominates the Bay Area's concert scene.
"Without (Christian) radio promotion, and with not a really good (attendance) history here, we haven't been able to see a track record of success here among Christian rock bands," Siuda said. "We haven't done these type of shows for the past few years."
Paramount's Great America in Santa Clara has hosted top names at annual Christian concerts, but those audiences include people who spend the day riding roller-coasters. And while Christian bands occasionally turn up in San Francisco clubs, they're often on the undercard of a bill headed by a secular band that draws most of the audience.
"We tour all over the country, but we hardly ever go through there," said Jeff Schneeweis, guitarist for Number One Gun, a Christian band out of Chico that has no problems drawing audiences in Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. "It's weird that not a lot of promoters have picked up on (the lack of Christian artists coming through the region). I don't know why."
The Bay Area wasn't always this way. Twenty-five years ago, the idea for what is now the nation's largest noncommercial Christian music network came out of a meeting held in the nation's cradle of the counterculture: San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
"KFRC was doing very well then and I wondered, 'Where are the Christian stations like this?' " said Bob Anthony Fogal, then a secular radio DJ who had recently converted to Christianity. After nights and weekends spent raising $100,000 by calling on everything from churches to the Bohemian Club, Fogal got his 400-watt station on the air in 1982 in Santa Rosa.
Now based in Sacramento, the nonprofit, listener-supported network known as K-LOVE has 97 stations across the country, but just a handful with weak signals in and around the Bay Area.
"One of our biggest frustrations was that we were never able to get a station in San Francisco back then," Fogal said. "That's the biggest reason there's not big Christian concerts here -- there's no booming radio station to reach that critical mass. If you walk down Market Street and ask people who Jeremy Camp is, nobody will know."
Lack of airplay may explain why Camp's "Restored" album has sold nearly 50 percent more albums in the Sacramento/Stockton market than it has in the San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose region.
"The thing that all of the markets ahead of it have in common -- even L. A. and New York -- that the Bay Area doesn't are a strong Christian radio presence and major Christian retail outlets (to buy CDs)," said Tricia Whitehead, a spokeswoman for the Gospel Music Association, which tracks music album sales. "While you can buy Christian music in your Best Buys and Targets, about half is sold in Christian bookstores."
K-LOVE's CEO, Richard Jenkins, sees the cultural factors as far from insurmountable for Christian acts.
"Once you get outside of San Francisco proper -- to Hayward, Pittsburg, San Leandro -- those cultural factors disappear," he said. "We've spent $250, 000 (on market studies nationally), and we know the market is there.
"Contemporary Christian music would play well everywhere but places like Marin County and Hillsborough -- the very, very affluent areas," he said. "Give me something with the strength of KQED-FM's signal, and we'd be a top-10 station."
The cost of acquiring such a station, however, is a prohibitive $80 million at least, Jenkins says.
Robberson figures that if the Bay Area won't come to Christian music, perhaps Christian music needs to adapt to the Bay Area. In July, for the first time in the nine years he's been staging the Spirit West Coast Christian music festival in Monterey, he'll dedicate a stage to harder-edged bands with "a step-up in the aggression level of the music."
"The lyrics are not real churchy, but it's still positive," Robberson said.
Number One Gun's Schneeweis, a straight-ahead rocker whose music isn't overtly preachy, said it's worth a try.
"Maybe now the festival won't be just full of Christian youth camp kids," he said. "This (stage) will let everyone mix together."
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.
Article link: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/03/03/MNG3LBJL4G1.DTL
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