Welcome to Brazos Matters.

I'm Jay Socol.

So unless you're of a certain age and grew up in Bryan College Station, you may not realize it used to be a routine destination for singers, musicians and bands looking for enthusiastic live audiences.

If you don't believe me, you can get a copy of the book Live From Aggieland: legendary performances in the Brazos Valley.

It was written by longtime journalist and friend of KAMU Rob Clark.

But we were also a place where I think homegrown talent could more easily learn their craft, find a stage and a microphone in local venues more reliably, find an audience, and then maybe go on to find some success.

But for a community with a monster sized university, it feels like the live music scene has been somewhat lacking for a long, long time.

So we're about to learn if I'm right or wrong about that.

My guests today represent a new nonprofit organization that aims at solving a number of problems for both artists and for venues, while also making it easy for you and me to even know where and when we can enjoy local talent representing the Brazos Valley Live Music Association are board members Adam Drake and Jerrod Lane.

Gentlemen, thank you for being here.

Howdy, sir.

Thanks for letting us come on in.

Okay.

So for organizations like yours, I think they start because there was a void of some kind.

So what was the void that led to this?

You know, one of the things that I kind of came on, this is the third person, you know, like it because Jared and Hunter Shurtleff, you know, a great local lawyer here, they were talking about how the live music scene has kind of dwindled in especially like the concert calendars you go to.

You go to websites now and you were you were who's playing?

What are they playing?

And you go to this website, you go to this website.

Now I just want it all in one space.

And so they came to me.

They're like, Hey, we know you.

You're into the music scene stuff.

We know that you do website stuff, We know that you've done calendars.

Like if you want to come and join this board.

I was like, Absolutely, because I love live music.

I love music as a whole.

And Jerrod can speak to this a little bit more too.

But, you know, I think we all just needed a little something to to to have a push to make that happen.

And I'll interject, because if you can't tell Adam has a little experience with a microphone.

Former radio guy I've been involved with with like music for a long time.

Jerrod what is your connection to all this?

My connection really is like kind of what Adam said was talking to Hunter Shurtleff As we were both board members of the Big Brothers, Big Sisters here in town and having some issues and also being part of a well, and I say this as nicely as possible.

I mean, we love to have an opportunities, but my wife works through the system office underneath facilities planning a construction so she's a the associate director over there in the office.

And so she kind of came up through the system where Josie Whiteasky And so a lot of times we end up being table fillers for a lot of the chancellors events and so on.

Any given year over the last four or five, six years is like we go to probably 15 or 20 events and it's kind of the same old hat, you know, it's the same silent auction, same live auctions, and also being a ambassador for the last five plus years with the Chamber of Commerce, It's a lot of those things love the support that they do, a love that our Chamber of commerce here.

But, you know, some of the stuff gets a little repetitive and that was kind of the goal that Hunter and I kind of saw was like, hey, can we take this a little bit different but also have the love of the live music side of things because there is a lack of, you know, marketing to, you know, what the venues are, especially with some of the venues that have kind of disappeared over the last decade, 15 years, you know, going back to the Hall of Fame, going back, you know, now to Harry's has been deconstructed and going to be developed into a whole nother project, which is understandable.

That's growth.

That's, you know, that's what's going to happen.

And Bryan College Station and the growing population and the school and what they're doing, I mean, this beautiful building that you're in, I mean, I was here when that was constructed because that's the side my wife works on.

So I see everything that comes through here.

But part of that in bringing this and a lot of music, it's like I do a little side business.

It's a passion project over the last year.

It's called the Red Dirt Shirt Club, and it's really just promoting young new artists that are on the upcoming, you know, coming up in the Texas and red dirt scene.

And that's where I kind of reached out to Adam more than anything.

It's kind of how we got connected is like, Man, you have these connections.

You can tie into these people because, you know, it's a fickle world and that industry is like a lot of them, real apprehensive of who's working with them or not.

Who are these new guys that are walking the world and.

Yeah, yeah.

And so and that's kind of where it's come from.

And then going into the association was just to do something a little different and support what I feel like is a lost art here in the market because the digital scene, I mean everybody's just stuck on their phones.

Yeah.

What are the frustrations that you hear from actual artists?

Well, you know, I moved away for about a year and a half.

I moved here in '07 and was gone for about a year and a half and came back in 2012 and something happened in that year and a half.

And I'm not going to say it's all because I wasn't here.

No, no, seriously.

You know, there was a shift in the in the shaping of live music from 2010 to 2012.

And I don't know what that is.

I you know, John from the tap and I he's the owner of the tap who brings in some amazing artists through the years.

He he and I talked about it.

We couldn't like pinpoint anything and, you know, kind of just narrows down to the digital age of, you know, everybody's on their phone, Do I need to go see this concert?

You know?

no, I see him on Tik tok or I see him on Instagram or whatever else.

So but, you know, so that was kind of starting then and now, like like you said, when we were kicking off, this was a hub, like everybody played here, Like people played here twice a year.

You would get big name, huge acts in the Texas red dirt scene that would play here twice a year.

Now, we're lucky to get them once every couple of years.

You know, Cody Johnson's a huge, huge entertainer now, like he's up for ACM, Entertainer of the Year.

So that's an understandable guy who is outgrown here.

Yeah, I mean, I could probably go play Kyle Field tomorrow.

Well, I remember being with the City of College Station doing the Starlight Music series, and attendance would be, you know, okay, but you put Cody Johnson on the schedule and the place is overflowing reliably.

And that was years ago.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I can imagine what he is know and that was ten years ago or 11 years ago now, because I still have the koozie in my car.

That's 2014.

He was out there and he put on a great show and that was a test from his management company to see, are it can we go from Hurricane Harry's?

It fits about 2000 people to something else where we can put in more than that and have more than 18 and up.

You know, we can let the 12 year old come let let the kids come and enjoy this music because my daughter at five years old can sing you just about every Cody Johnson Song, so so he and his team really wanted that.

And so I think what it just kind of boils down to is, you know, these artists are just saying that that we don't always feel that love from, from college Station and a little bit of us on the marketing side, a little bit of that is because we don't have those venues anymore, like a hall, like a Harry's.

And so they're like, Where can we go play?

Where can we go do these things?

And we want to kind of be that conduit between the cities and the the, the whole Brass Valley area that we're hitting all the way up to to Hearne and Caldwell and we want to help out all the way down to Brenham and over to Huntsville, like this entire area is what we're doing and we want to connect those artists with those venues, with those municipalities.

I just going to kind of interject a little bit because I've had these conversations reaching out for artists and, you know, I had a booking agent was asking about a young band that's out of the Waco area, and they're like, Where can these kids play over there anymore?

And I'm like, you know, because they're trying to get in maybe to the tap.

That's always a great place.

It's a 500 cap room.

You know, you have stage 12 that most people don't think about.

What the Brookshire Brothers that's on campus here, it's a nice venue.

It's a great venue, but strangely located.

But it's a nice venue, strangely located, and it's hard to market.

And I think the you know I hope the Brookshire you know, brothers folks are listening and kind of tap into because that's our goal is to help even those venues like hey, how can we help you get some more talent in here?

I know one of the artists that's going to play a venue are not our venue, but our our event next week and we'll get into that, I'm sure, later.

But it's a you know, she's played in front of some bigger bands that are Mike Ryan and Chad Cook band here recently.

And you know, her name is Molly McDonnell and she's an Aggie.

And, you know, I think just finished her freshman or sophomore year here.

And and this is a you know, our focus is getting her out there and helping that out.

But also those other bands that need to come through, it's letting them know where these places are that aren't just Bryan College Station is Brazos Valley because we are the center of that triangle of 20 something million people in Texas.

So what do you consider consideration of venue?

Because it doesn't necessarily have to be a grand scale, right?

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, so what are my favorite venues?

When I first moved here and a lot of artists who were here in the nineties and early 2000 and still rave about it was Zapatos and you can go there right on Northgate.

It fit probably what, 75 maybe people there on the patio.

But an Aggie artist, Jamie Lynn Wilson, she was a regular there.

That's where she cut her teeth and she said a little place like that had such a it was such a proving ground to me.

It showed me what we could be.

It showed me what I could do.

And I didn't have the pressure of giving up on a stage like an A Harry's like, get a hall like somewhere else like that.

You know, I was I was on a little, you know, plywood stage.

It was probably three inches off the ground.

She's like, that was that was such a great way for me to hone my craft.

And it was even better because her brother was a manager at the chicken at the time, too.

And so they would get off work and he would get everybody who was getting off at the same time and walk them down to Zapatos and be there for it in her crowd, for her.

And she's like, That did so much of my confidence.

And so, yeah, it doesn't have to be a thousand person venue.

It could be a place that you could put 15 to 20 or 30 people just as a, again, it's a proving ground for these artists, especially the ones that like Molly McDonald, who was a freshman here.

There are a lot of other really talented singers and songwriters here who just need that place to play.

They need to know about it because we missed out on a couple of different people.

Dylan Gossett is one who opened up in front of everybody for College GameDay this year when it was here in town, and he's an Aggie had no idea because he never played around here because he came around to the COVID time.

And so where was he going to go play?

Where was he going to go do?

Right.

But, you know, if we would have called him as a freshman, you know, four years earlier, then 20, 2017 or so, he would have jumped out.

He would he would have jumped at it.

He would have known like, yeah, here's this organization that could get me, you know, in a slot or let me introduce be introduced to the right people.

Man, How many songs would he have written about us?

You know, And that's that's kind of what I like because Lubbock has been killing it with the loud music scene for for over 30 years.

You know, you can go back to the two, the Waylon Jennings and you can go back to Buddy Holly.

But realistically, in the Texas country scene, Pat Green 30 years ago and Cory Morrow right at that same time, followed by Wade Bowen followed by Josh Abbott, followed by William Clark Green, followed by Flatland Cavalry.

I mean, we could go on and on and we have missed that because they they manufacture it.

They've got a really good community of people who were saying, let's get it the blue light, let's get you over it.

This other smaller, smaller venue to lead you up to the blue light.

And I think that's something that that again, we've missed and that we as a as a association could really help bridge the gap between.

But even jumping in on a little bit of that is like I don't know how many names you popped out there, but you can talk about a lot of those that have roots right here in Brazos Valley.

William Clark Green went to high school here, even though he went to college at Tech and, you know, really cut his teeth pretty big out there.

But I think half his bands from Bryan College Station.

Yeah, they they are coming up next week leading into Troubadour Fest that's coming here.

That's going to be right here at Aggie Park.

You know, the day before destination Bryan's given a free concert down at the Palace.

Yeah.

And you have the wild or blue playing there.

Their bass player, Sean Rodriguez, was born here.

He's from Bryan.

So you start if you start getting into this industry a little bit and start getting connected to the different people on these bands, you start finding out it's like they've all come through here somewhere or somehow and have cut their teeth somewhere through here throughout the years.

Now it's getting harder.

Kids are young, but talking about Dylan Gossett, another young lady that graduated from here a few years ago was Julian Rincon.

Interesting enough, both those artists just have signed with, well, Dylan was the first signature for the new label, Big, Big, Loud Texas.

And interestingly, a young lady named Miranda Lambert kind of runs that John Randall, who's written one of the best country songs of all time.

And it's a Texas based guy.

But then they went and stole our local kid here, Brendan Anthony, that I went to high school with at Gonzales back in the nineties.

And Brennan's now their VP of operations.

And, you know, since then they've signed Juliana, who is an Aggie, Dillon's an Aggie, and they have Jake Worthington, which is he's kind of made his name already in Texas country and is a throwback.

So it's interesting that, you know, you have these ties in there and you have a lot of talent that comes through A&M and you have a lot of leadership, as we all know, that A&M just breeds these things out of here.

Yeah.

And so you have somebody like Brendan that ran the Texas music friendly side of things for the governor of Texas.

He worked directly under the governor running the Texas music office.

I mean, you're talking about a guy who who, who was made something out of himself from from going to school right here, College Station and leading the Pat Green Band and then being the music office leader like he has done a tremendous job and he's he's a big supporter.

And everything that that we're trying to do and trying to to make this what it once was.

Back when he remembers playing here as a kid or he said things real quickly if you just to date I'm Jay Socol.

You're listening to Brazos Matters.

We're talking about ways to boost the live music scene in Aggie land.

And we have guests, Adam Drake and Jerrod Lane from the Brazos Family Live Music Association.

So if I'm somebody who is wanting to break into this industry, if I'm a local singer songwriter and I need some help, you want them to come to you?

Absolutely.

So talk about how that happens.

So there are a couple of different things that we're working on.

The website is still kind of a work in progress, trying to make sure we've got all the I's and the T's crossed and dotted, but we've got a portion on there for artists to say, Hey, listen, if you're a local artist, submit your music to us.

Let us know that you're available, because I want to take that.

And if we get a phone call from Operation Safe Shield, who's another great local nonprofit here, they're like, Hey, Adam, I'm looking for somebody to come play our event that we've got going on.

I'm like, Okay, cool.

What are you looking for?

I've got a roster right here, and I don't want to be a booking agent.

Jerrod doesn't want to be a booking agent, but what we can do is get them in contact with each other.

Like, here's here a couple of kids that are really good for you that we think are really talented.

So you reach out to them on your own.

And so that's just a way to kind of build that going.

And then we want them to give us their EPK because we want to have a electronic press kit.

So so for everybody who's like, Well, what do I need?

Well, you need a headshot, you need a little bit of your music that we can that we can sample and that we can put out there to people.

And you need to make sure that we know how to reach you.

And that's part of that.

That all goes to that electronic press kit.

You know who you are, where you are, how you are, how we can get in touch with the essentials.

The essentials.

Yeah.

And so that's going to be a portion of the website and something that we've been doing with Texas music friendly college Station is monthly meet ups.

So once a month we'll meet up and it'll be industry professionals.

It'll be musicians were like, Hey, we want you to come have a little bit of a, you know, mingling our get to know each other who's here and then have an open mic night.

So we want to take that idea and we want to build on it a lot more and say, what else can we do?

How else can we get these artists together?

Can we do a songwriter circle?

Can we call in friends like Radney Foster and say, Hey, can you come in for for a little bit and help these kids write a song?

But what that takes is we're not going to call a guy like a Radney Foster or Cody Johnson and say, Hey, can you come in?

We'll give you a 50 bucks for gas.

So we're like, Hey, you know, we want to pay them appropriately for their time, which comes into being a nonprofit and saying, Hey, Adam might not ask why he would need somebody because I don't care.

I'm like, I think everybody's the same.

But I do kind of want to interject a little bit because Adam does this a lot, and I love him for it because he's live the Texas music in Texas country side of things.

But one thing that we want to do is and we'll get this we'll get some flack back on this because we do lean very hard on the country side of things.I left my cowboy hat in the car, because that's that's our natural right line end to this.

And I'd at fault and on our own that all day long but we do want to support all live music whether it's an orchestra whether it's you know even the rock bands that used to, you know, do it.

Revolutions Cafe.

We want to support those people.

That's music too.

And we live in it.

And it's and it's still you know, that's still a little bit of the heartbeat of Downtown Bryan I know the city of Bryan probably wants to kind of spin a little bit, but you know what?

There are some great artists that can come out of that.

It might it might be the next deep blue something.

There's a lot of country Southern rock bands that started out as the the loud metal screamo bands that learned say, hey, maybe that's not selling to the right public at this.

Maybe I'll turn it down and do a ballad and then all of a sudden it sets them off on a whole different trajectory.

I think there was a conversation last night on a song about Billy Strings about that, and it's like, you know, phenomenal guitarist that wanted to do Hard Rock.

And they were like, Well, if he's more of a bluegrass guy, yeah.

And it just kind of spends a different way.

It was kind of just interesting stories that you hear about that around here and, and we want to support it all.

Yeah, know, I keep mentioning the Texas Country because again, that's, that's kind of what we are.

But we do want to do it for everybody.

You know, Soulja Boy played at Shiner Park.

We're 100% putting that on the concert tomorrow.

Yeah, Yeah.

Well, you may be listening to this.

You will be listening to this after that, but just know that that caliber of.

Yeah.

Performer was.

Yeah.

And we're and we're putting everything we possibly can from orchestra, from coral, from country and rock to blues and I mean all of that is going to be on the calendar.

Yeah.

We want to help all of these artists.

And so, you know, we've got a couple of connections that we're working with in other genres to say, Hey, can you come in?

Can you come and do this for us?

Can you know, or we want to reach out to the people who are doing that?

The community is like, Who do we need to call?

Who can we get to come in and do this?

Because we really don't know everything?

Yeah, we don't know everybody.

Well, we've got a couple of friends, the GMG House band who does a tremendous job of doing a lot of different things here in town.

They were opening or getting ready to open for for bone thugs n harmony.

And so like, can we get bone thugs down here and do like a little symposium for up and coming rappers or aspiring rappers?

Can we do something like that?

They're like, I mean, maybe let's ask.

And that's the best we can do, you know?

Like, you know, we're going to ask everybody for what can we do?

How can we help all music in the South?

Or is it I can tell you is no.

Well, that's right.

So.

So you're helping on the artist side.

You're trying to help on the venue side.

But then there are people like me who just would love to know who's coming and where I can go and when.

Calendar are hard, they are really calendars are hard.

There's an expectation that will ease into a centralized calendar and somehow it's magically updated.

I mean, how were you able to pull all that stuff together?

Because that's a lot.

So I'm going to answer that by going around a little bit because I love going to different cities.

I love, you know, when we go on vacation, we go do this.

I will always go to my phone, go get on the computer, like who is playing in town?

And I've gone to Beaumont.

I've gone, which there's not a lot going on in Beaumont, but you know, going to Austin, gone to San Antonio in a different places, and you've got to go to like 15 different websites to kind of figure it out.

You do.

And that's a pain that is that is such a pain to do.

So what I'm doing is I'm going to 15 different websites every week and putting that all together into one.

So if you go to BVLMA.org, we've got our concert calendar right there on the homepage, and then we've got an events calendar that's going to have things like, like any events that we're doing, like, like what we do with music in the moonlight that's also going to have the concert calendar there.

So, you know, there's going to be multiple ways for you to find that same concert calendar.

But it's me going to the City of College Stations website all right.

They've got a really great events calendar.

Let me, you know, cycle it down to just music okay well they don't have Red's Ice House this week.

Let me go to Red's Ice House to make sure they don't have anything going on.

And.

Okay, well, now let's hit Brenham.

What does Brenham have going on?

What does the Kenney store in Kenney have going on?

What does Huntsville's live music scene have going on?

And I've got a running list in an Excel file of making sure I hit this.

This place, this place in this place.

But what we also do is we want to hear from these artists too.

So listen, if you've got a local gig coming in, let us know about it.

And again, you got to BVLMA.org, Brazos Valley Live Music Association, just, you know, put it all in simple letters.

It's a lot of work.

But if you don't do it that way and you don't have the support of the community to help somebody go through that because there's a lot of people have tried to do their own event calendars and I appreciate it.

But yeah, and if you're trying to create it as a job, good luck.

I mean, it's just it's not going to pay.

You're going to sell more than you have to do a calendar side of it.

So I think that's why we spun it to a nonprofit to be able to kind of run it this way.

But with that as well is like because it is a lot of work, but if you don't do it, no one's going to see it because at some point people our age probably shouldn't follow the tab, you know, and find out that there's $2 chuggers on you know, Wednesdays.

It just but that's what they're supporting because that's what they've been doing for years and very successfully doing that.

But they still have great artists that come through there that maybe the adult wants to follow and find one place to go and find all that information.

And that's our goal.

So a while back, a young lady named Kaitlyn Butts played at the tap, and she is she's an amazing artist, but she's like produced by Vince Gill and she's got duets with Vince Gill.

And so while you may not know the name, you might see her a Vince Gill at an award show and like, hey, she's come into town, that that might be cool for me.

Adam Drake at 40 plus years old at Jay Socol at 35 and under to go and see and to go experience, even though you've never really seen her before.

But we all know who Vince Gill is.

Yeah, so we're going to do that.

And same with, you know, Velcro pygmies who was a group that's kind of bass or our age if we're not following.

I know they play Shiner Park a lot.

You know, if you're not following Shiner Park, you might not know that the Velcro pygmies are playing there and so go to this one site.

Go to this one spot at BVLMA.org, and we're going to have it all there for you.

So I want to squeeze this in, I know we've got a few minutes left, but I want to make sure we get to this.

You guys are having a big event that you hope it increases awareness and also brings in some funding By the time people listen to this or watch this, that event may already have taken place.

But tell me the kinds of funds that you hope to raise over time and what those funds are are going to I go, what do you need money to do?

Everything.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, again, a lot of that that concert calendar and social media, that's that's a full time job.

I mean, that's it sounds like.

I mean, it really is.

And but we want to also just raise money to be able to do more events.

And, you know, Jerrod brought up a couple of different times.

You know, it's the Chili Fest model we want to put on an event to then distribute money to other people, to distribute money to other organizations that kind of have our same goal in mind.

Yeah, And that's kind of what Hunter and I you know, Hunter Shurtleff kind of helped start this.

He kind of had a role himself off because destination Bryan city of Bryan and his wife been on city council he has kind of recused himself a little bit on that so it was pretty quick that we spun with him rolling off that but still being able to do some of our attorney stuff and setting us up on a501c3 and bring in Toby on as the other board member on there.

But with that it was it was just like kind of it allows us of more fundings to kind of bring these pop up events like we're on a side as pop up because we're kind of doing a shotgun approach on this first event.

But having five artists there that we can at least compensate to get here, even though they're helping us out tremendously on this one.

But eventually getting better artists to come in here, that might be a pop up show at the Palace or somewhere in College Station and doing what we can to bring that community together and say, Hey, you may not have known as artists, but here's a way to find out.

And it could be a free concert, could be something if we're able to have funds that can help that.

Okay, Adam, I want you to close out the last 90 seconds or so by talking about the need for more live music in North Northgate.

Go.

man, that's a very loaded question that I don't know if I have the the the answer you're hearing in trouble, you know live music on Northgate again when I got here was a thing we had Fitzwilly's that that had live music.

And by the time I got here, the Dixie Chicken didn't have have live music like they had the back porch in the early, late nineties, early 2000.

But, you know, when I was there, we did quite a few shows, whether they're special event birthday shows or whatever else.

But it's important to get in front of these students I think as much as you can.

And with all the bands that are going over there with all these high rise apartments, I think it's even more vital now to find a place where they can go and experience live music that they don't have to drive all the way to, to the Texas Hall of Fame like we used to.

They could do it right there.

What's basically their backyard.

And so it's vital.

And we want to work with those artists.

We want to work with those venues and say, what can we do to help you get these in there?

Because music is the lifeblood of so many things in our world.

Well, and I don't know, it just seems like the fabric of the community, the fabric of Aggie land, that's kind of the epicenter when it comes to the potential for live music.

That's how it feels to me.

As you mentioned, I'm under 35.

So that's just that's just my that's my hunch.

No, I've been here since 1987.

And so I still have memories of what life music was back then.

And anyway, I appreciate what you guys are doing.

It's it's needed, I think, throughout this community.

I'm glad it's it's something you're focusing on outside of the borders of college conversation.

But thank you guys for what you're doing.

I wish you great luck.

The website.

I wrote it Down BVLMA.org.

That's it.

Perfect.

Adam Drake, Jerrod Lane, thanks so much for being here.

We really appreciate and wish you guys great success.

Thanks, Jay, for everything that you do for our community.

And here at Game, you really love it.

You bet.

Brazos Matters is a production of Aggieland's Public Radio 90.9 KAMU-FM a member of Texas A&M University's Division of Community Engagement.

At our show is engineered and edited by Matt Dittman.

All Brazos Matters episodes are available on YouTube and on podcast platforms like Spotify, Apple, iHeart and Amazon, also on the NPR app and KAMU website.

We'd love for you to rate and review and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

I'm Jay Socol.

Have a great day.