Life on Love Street

01/06/2010 In Uncategorized by admin

…performing in hospitals that is.

I’ve been using that line for some time but don’t think I have posted it. This seemed a good time. As promised, this blog is the place to get the inside scoop. So here it is. Love Street wil formally announce this tomorrow but you can read it here first.

But before I get to that, I would like to invite everyone to join us for a special evening tomorrow, June 2. Through the generosity of Dr. Joseph Varon and his wife, Sara, we will be celebrating entering our third year as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Please come say hello and enjoy the great food and drink at Maria Selma Restaurant on Richmond. There is no cost, but donations will be appreciated and will help us with this…

Love Street’s TONIC program is about to undergo a major expansion. For the last year or so we have followed a model of one performance a month, usually by groups and in group settings, on the fourth Monday of the month. This model comes with some built-in limitations. For example, the weekday performances make it hard for those with day jobs. The group setting requires a PA system and a volunteer to run it. And the once a month system severely limits the number of performers who can participate. But perhaps most important, it brings nothing to the kids in other parts of the hospital.

It is to overcome those limitations that we are rolling out what, for lack of a better name (so far) I’ll call TONIC Phase II. Actually, it is still just called TONIC – Taking Our Noise Into Children’s Hospitals. But it will have a different approach.

Adapting for our own circumstances the proven model of New York nonprofit Musicians on Call, we will be recruiting musicians to perform room to room on evenings and weekends. In order to relieve the hospital of the burden of providing an escort who knows hospital procedures, we will be having our own people undergo the hospital approval process. That way, our people will be badged volunteers who won’t need a hospital escort. We even have a number of musicians who have already volunteered to undergo that process so that they don’t need an escort. But in the long run, we think having a non-musician escort is the better system. For one thing, while finding musicians to perform is usually not difficult, it is easier to find others who are willing to undergo the hospital orientation. Then it is less burden on a musician and easier for a musician to come once to check it out.

The major advantage of this approach is that we can accommodate as many musicians as want to participate. No more booking a year in advance. We’ll initially start with a relatively small group and a limited number of performances per month – though far more than we have had in the past. Then as more musicians get woven in, we can expand it. And it doesn’t require a particular commitment by the musician. We will have slots available, and the musicians can schedule only those that work best for them. As that fills up, we will work with the hospital to add more.

We are very excited about this, as are our contacts at Texas Children’s. We got a little glimpse of what it will be like during the May TONIC performance by Cooper Wade. We noticed that one of the dialysis patients we usually see was not there and asked about him. The staff told us that he had just undergone a transplant and was upstairs recuperating. We knew that he liked music, so we asked if Cooper could go up to see him. They checked upstairs and said it would not be a problem. So up we went. Cooper actually visited two patients up there, mostly just chatting with them but also doing a song for one. (Cooper is amazing with kids, but I’ll post about that soon – probably on the Love Street site.)

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17/05/2010 In Events, Music, Nonprofits by admin

Yes, I have been working like a dog, hence the lack of updates here. To recap the weekend, we migrated the Love Street site to a new host, finally got approval to process credit cards online, got ticket sales started for Come Together, did a graphic for our June 2 event, finalized the lineup for the Spring Music Festival, and wrote the ad for that (mostly). All that in addition to some band stuff. The Come Together site still needs some work…

Really excited about the Spring Music Festival on June 5. We have three great children’s entertainers to kick it off from noon to 3:00 – Rachel Buchman, Glynace Eastham and Stefan Ruoss. Our band. Tie-Dye Sky, will be an easy transition from that, as we’ll start with some of the poppier stuff from our all-60s repertoire. Should be a lot of fun. We decided to make the afternoon session free. Great music, Claude Sims (juggler extraordinaire), moonwalk, face painting…all for free! What’s not to love? More info at the Love Street website.

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26/04/2010 In Events, Music, Nonprofits by admin

I mentioned this briefly over on the Love Street Facebook page but it warrants a better mention here. This is a very exciting time for Love Street.

On the event side we have Come Together scheduled for September and the Love Street Spring Music Festival in June. The music festival will be waaayyyy more kid friendly than last time, which wasn’t half bad.

On the program side, TONIC just completed its first full year (May 2009 to April 2010) and is going strong. Our biggest problem is that it is booked for the rest of the year! Why is that a problem? Because we know that as Come Together approaches, we will start hearing from musicians wanting to be involved. That’s great, but the lineup there is set, so there is very little opportunity. But while we have their attention, we need to sign them up for TONIC! Better to be able to tell them something other than “Check back next year.”

So we are working on a new model for solo performers to add to the group performances that we have featured thus far. There is work to be done to make it a reality, but the idea is that we could get performers there on evenings and weekends, which we haven’t been able to do before. That will open TONIC up to a lot more people. And that’s what has us so excited! Good day sunshine indeed!

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21/04/2010 In Uncategorized by admin

Apologies to our friends in the Jewish community. The event organizers completely overlooked Yom Kippur in scheduling the Come Together event. If your observances keep you away this year, we will see you next year.

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20/04/2010 In Nonprofits by admin

I’ll depart from my Beatles-themed titles, as this post doesn’t relate to the Come Together event. Well, not directly anyway.

One underpublicized fact is that many lawyers are eager to give back to the community. There are many programs that facilitate this, including the Houston Volunteer Lawyers Program, Texas Accountants and Lawyers for the Arts, and the Texas C-Bar program of Rio Grande Legal Aid.

Texas C-Bar just released (or updated) a publication called Forming a Tax-Exempt Non-Profit Corporation in Texas. It is a really great resource for someone new to the process. If you are considering starting a nonprofit, it is a must-read.

Having once been there myself, I can tell you that forming a nonprofit is intimidating. You have to do everything a startup for-profit business does and complete a daunting IRS form. Sometimes just trying to do a good thing can seem very hard. This publication from Texas C-Bar – and the generosity of the legal community in general – makes it a bit easier.

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17/04/2010 In Uncategorized by admin

Instead, stop and take a look at our new website!

Still some pages to get in, but enough was there to get the official Come Together website up and running.  This follows the Love Street Online Store from just a few days before, which will be the way we sell tickets for Come Together.  You can also by Love Street^TM coffee mugs, shirts and, when we get around to it, some other cool stuff.

Here’s some news.  I am working on a contest – with a little help from a friend even more Beatles obsessed than I – that will give people a chance to win free tickets.  It will involve correctly guessing the titles to Beatles songs from some short bits that we post online.  No doubt the competition will be fierce!

And then once more I go here to figure out a title for my latest post.

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13/04/2010 In Events, Music, Nonprofits, Uncategorized by admin

Appropriate for this time of year.  But this post is not about declaring the pennies on your eyes.  It is another in my series of the little behind the scenes things that goes into making an event like Come Together. This is actually one that I dealt with for the White Album event, so it is well in hand this time.

The question is licensing.  Just what exactly gives us the right to perform somoene else’s songs?   What if we want to record and sell them?  What about a video?  Or a webcast?  Let me tell you that for the uninitiated it can be quite confusing.   Actually, for the initated too.  Of course, most musicians never think of this before performing in a club.  For me it is an occupational hazard as an attorney.

Fortunately, the first two questions are easy to answer.  There is an animal called a compulsory license.  It is called ”compulsory” because once a music composition is published as a performance, the original artist cannot prevent anyone else from performing it.  Of course, the composer generally is entitled to a royalty for each performace.

As a practical matter, there is no way a composer can police the use of his or her song.  So what they do is subscribe to a service that does it for them.  You’ve heard of them - BMI and ASCAP are the most prominent.  But it is impractical for even those services to know every song that a hack cover band in a hole in the wall bar plays on a Wednesday night in Duluth, MN.  Their solution to this is something they call a blanket license.  Any facility that features music – whether a live band or just piped radio – likely will hear from BMI and ASCAP.  They use a formula based on the capacity of the venue and the way music is presented.  The venue pays one annual fee (to each of them) and it is good to go.   (On the other side of the coin, the way BMI and ASCAP apportion royalties to their clients is said to be unfair to less popular artists, but that’s another story.)

In our case last time, Sambuca Catering, which runs the Crystal Ballroom, had a blanket license, as any reputable venue would.  But even if they had not, there’s another thing to consider.  The copyright law has a “carve out” for charitable performances.   If it is not broadcast, and if none of the musicians are paid to perform, then no royalty is owed. Here, for example, is what ASCAP has to say about this:

If our organization is nonprofit,
are we required to obtain
an ASCAP license?
The non-profit status of an organization that
promotes or presents concerts does not automatically
exempt it from the license requirement. While
the United States Copyright Law provides a limited
exemption for certain performances by non-profit
organizations, that exemption is very narrow.
Specifically, Section 110(4) of the Copyright law
exempts public performances of copyrighted
musical compositions from liability if all three of the
following conditions are met: 1) there is no purpose
of direct or indirect commercial advantage; and
2) there is no payment for the performance to the
performers, promoters or organizers; and 3) there is
no direct or indirect admission charge or, alternatively,
if there is an admission charge, the net proceeds
are used exclusively for educational, religious or
charitable purposes. In cases where there is an
admission charge, however, under the statute copyright
owners may nevertheless serve a notice of
objection to the performance, which negates the
exemption.

Every performance Love Street has ever assembled meets these requirements. Love Street does not seek any commercial advantage from its performances, the performers are volunteers, and any admission revenues are used for charitable purposes.   So unless Sir Paul rings us with an objection we are in good shape.

I said the first two questions are easy.   Webcasting appears to be a gray area.  In any event, I haven’t had a need to figure it out.  But video I have.  Unlike audio, there is no compulsory license.  You have to go directly to the music publisher who then can dictate the terms of the license, which is called a “sync” license because there is synchronized audio and video.  Or they can just refuse.

For the White Album show we had an offer of a pro video shoot being donated to us if we could get a sync license.  So I called SonyBMG, which publishes the Lennon/McCartney catalog.  (I figured that if we couldn’t make that work, there was no need to deal with the Ringo or George songs.) From their reaction, you’d think they’d never had anyone call wanting to sell a video of performances of Beatles songs before.   One of their considerations, of course, is protecting the Beatles’ brand.  They don’t want people to be confused as to the source of the music, thinking something is the Beatles when it really isn’t.  So I told them that, naturally, we had no intention of claiming we were the Beatles and that no reasonable person would mistake us for the Beatles.  ”Okay,” they said, and seemed to open up a bit.  ”So it won’t sound like the Beatles?”   “Well,” I said, “we will certainly try.”  From there it just got confusing.  ”So it will sound like the Beatles?”   I quickly concluded that it wasn’t worth the hassle.  So, alas, no pro video shoot of the White Album show.   That’s not to say we didn’t put a few videos on YouTube along with the rest of humanity.  But I am thinking that this ought to cover that.

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09/04/2010 In Uncategorized by admin

Just a short note to let you know I am still here. A lot of work behind the scenes right now doing such things as setting up the ticket sales procedure, payment processing, etc. – all the mundane stuff that people only notice when something goes horribly wrong. Everything remains on track for ticket sales to begin May 15. And for Jon’s benefit, that’s a fact not an opinion.

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27/03/2010 In Events by admin

Okay so that one’s a bit tacky, but as this post is about a fundraiser I couldn’t resist.  Look for something more formal soon, but here’s the scoop.  Dr. Joseph Varon and his wife Sara have very generously agreed to host a fundraiser for Love Street.  The funds will be used to augment Love Street’s existing programs – principally TONIC - and also as seed money for Come Together.

The event will be on the evening of Wednesday, June 2, at Maria Selma.  We plan for it to feature musicians who have participated in TONIC or other Love Street events in the past, so it should be great!  And with food and drink thrown in, you really can’t go wrong.  So save the date – June 2.  There is no cost for admission, but they do ask that you RSVP.   If you email your  name and contact info (including phone) to info@lovestreetlightcircus.org, we will get you on the list.

So a big thanks to Sara and Dr. Jospeh Varon!

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23/03/2010 In Uncategorized by admin

Tie-Dye Sky returns to the scene of the crime tonight, as it begins to rehearse some of its Come Together material at the South Coast Film & Video studio.  That was the site where we had some of the key rehearsals for the White Album show back in 2008.  Many thanks to Everett, Ted and the rest of the gang over there for their hospitality.

On a related note, we at Love Street occasionally get asked about our connection to the group that has performed a couple of Beatles shows at Discovery Green.  That group bills itself as the Fab 40.   While there is no formal connection, many of the orchestral players who participate in their events were also a part of the White Album event.   And one of the Fab 40’s leaders, Dave Blassingame, did play a pivotal role in helping to bring the music and the orchestra together for that event.  Ultimately, the difference is that the Fab 40 is a more or less static group of musicians, whereas we seek broader involvement of the music community (the same reason that the Love Street band was spun off as Tie-Dye Sky).

We hear the Fab 40 will be presenting the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds at Discovery Green in June.  Die-hard Beatles fans know how influential that album was on them.  We’ll see you there!

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