Why the Mill Ave music scene loses out to Tucson

[Vex Harrow]

The Phoenix New Times is running an article asking why Tempe, and by extension Mill Ave, isn't the favorite venue for a lot of bands. In fact, most of Arizona's musical talent likes Tucson a great deal more than Tempe!

It's possibly the oldest, loudest gripe in Phoenix's music scene: Why Tucson?

By that they mean, "Why is this cool band that I really love playing that bumblefuck shithole down South when they could play our sprawling metropolis of interconnected stripmalls?"

Electric Mustache's photographer/hatchetman Shawn Anderson weighed in after Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti booked not one, but two, shows in Ye Olde Pueblo this fall while spurning Our Nation's Fifth Largest City.

"So either Phoenix has become the sole embodiment of SB1070 and our smaller cities get a pass for being 'progressive college towns' or something else more (or even less) sinister is going on. If only someone that had any idea of what is going on would leave a comment letting us know," he writes.

The reasons listed go as follows:

Superior Venues, College Town Culture, Small-Potatoes Media, General Travelability, and Ability to avoid Shawn Anderson.

While some of these strike more of a chord than others. There are a certain number of things Mill Ave can do in order to alleviate these issues. Sure Tempe isn't exactly a "college town" but the atmosphere exists--in spite of all attempts to kill it!--and it could be easily harvested if people would only take advantage of it. We need something like Long Wong's again. We need the space behind Borders to become a venue for indie rock bands to play to small crowds, we really need something like The Coffee Planation to come back and make that corner a small space for bands to play in as well (but not half as loud.)

And on the small-potatos media. We could really use either staggering air time on Phoenix radio stations or something running out of ASU's transmitters that's dedicated to indie media. Rock, venues, literature. We have everything we need for the college types to tune into and be part of, they're just always barely beyond arms reach.

Link via Phoenix New Times.

[Fravaduarma]

Bravo, seems to me, is a magnificent phrase

[Vex Harrow]

I, uh, if you say so...?