Behind the scenes for local bands

Photo by Austin Stemper

Lex Vegas performs in the basement of Crayola House.

Lex Vegas launches into a song off their new CD, the kids start to go nuts, the crowd is singing along, kids are doing speaker dives and stage dives. The whole building is full of energy.

After they finish their 45 minute set, kids line up at the "merch" (merchandise) table and then head home, never questioning what goes into the band outside of those 45 minutes they poured themselves out on stage. Fans never see the hours spent practicing, booking shows, designing merchandise, and working on websites.

Ray Worth of Lex Vegas and Worthless Booking said, "DIY (do it yourself) ethic is very important to me, I spend every dime I make towards music." This DIY mentality drives many of the local bands in Harrisonburg and around the country. They literally do everything for themselves.

Lex Vegas books all their own shows, designs all their own merchandise, and are their own webmasters. Worth says "I prefer to book my own shows, that way I have a relationship with the promoter before we pull up to the club; it makes everything more personal."

Booking shows takes up a lot of the band's time, and Worth works on both ends of this project. He books local shows for touring bands and he books tours for his band. Harrisonburg has no rock music clubs, so people rent buildings such as Capt. Tees or Cups to Go. In other cases, shows are held in the basements of houses.

The Crayola House, where Worth lives, has had a long history in the Harrisonburg music scene. "We have a great basement to practice and a great basement for shows and we want to take advantage of it as much as we can," said Worth. "There is something special about seeing a band put everything they have into their music in such a small intimate space." Crayola House basement can hold 50 to 100 people.

Worth also tries to book one show a weekend for his own band, a process which entails sending out lots of emails, MySpace.com messages, and instant messenger conversations. A common practice for booking shows is trading, where bands in different towns book shows for one another.

After listening to a show, fans may want to buy the band's merchandise. Many local bands design and in some cases make their own. Highways and Oceanshores even do their CD layouts and put them all together by hand. Mark Risser, vocalist and guitarist of Highways and Oceanshores, says, "It means more to us, since we pour our time into the whole CD, the music as well as the package. It is also an easy way to get a good looking product for cheap, so we can sell lower than most of the other bands." Worth does the same for his band. As he said, "I haven't had any formal training, I just taught myself Photoshop."

Promotion is also very important for a band. For a DIY with no label support, their only promotion is what the band does itself. Having merchandise helps get the name out, but that isn't enough. Most bands make a website that has information about upcoming shows and the band in general. On top of that, most bands make a MySpace.com, or purevolume.com page, which host .mp3s for free.

Uploading .mp3s on websites is a good way to help spread songs around to a larger audience. "I really don't know anything about web design but I just looked around, and put together a simple design." Worth went on to say that "myspace is a good tool for bands, as well as purevolume and hxcmp3s.com." All of these pages are good places to load songs and build fan base, as well as connect with similar bands, all of which can help build contacts for booking.

In addition to promotion, merchandise, and shows, bands have to schedule practices. Highways and Oceanshores tries to practice once or twice a week, usually in the afternoon. Risser said practices run for between an hour or two, depending on need. "It keeps us tight, and helps us grow closer as musicians and people," he said.

Lex Vegas practices twice a week as well, Worth said, including a five-hour practice once a week. "Five hours is a long practice, but we have lots of start-and-stop parts and they need to be tight," he said. They also use the time to work on new material.

Most DIY bands write their own songs, and each band has different methods for song-writing. In Highways and Oceanshores, for example, one of the members will write a song and bring it in to practice, where the band will expand on it and tighten up any loose ends.

Lex Vegas starts with a riff and builds it from there during practice as members add their own parts and new parts, until they have a song they are happy with. "We can write parts that sound however we want; we aren't limited by a genre, and I am really excited about that," said Worth.

Worth sees this as one of the benefits to being a DIY band. "We aren't tied down or limited at all, which is really nice about being independent of label support. There is no one to answer to except ourselves."