Feels like the last time
After a bad season of foul weather and Foreigner, CDF could be ready to bow out of Fridays
Charlottesville needs less than two inches of precipitation in the remaining weeks of 2003 to break a 66-year-old record for annual rainfall. That’s quite a reversal of fortune from last year’s drought, a change that climatology experts, quoted in The Daily Progress, attribute to shifts in the jet stream.
But some of the credit––or blame—for the rain must fall on the coifed heads of Foreigner, the ’70s arena rockers whose Fridays After 5 concert was rained out three times last summer. Apparently offended by Foreigner, the gods of rock thrice sent a series of storms, including Hurricane Isabel, to rain out the hot-blooded band. The Charlottesville Downtown Foundation, which runs Fridays After 5, finally held the Foreigner show at the Downtown Amphitheater on Sunday, September 28.
The anti-Foreigner showers also ended up playing head games with Fridays After 5—it now seems the bad weather may have shut down Fridays for good.
“It’s not clear to me at this time that they [the CDF] would be prepared to take on that event next year,” said Aubrey Watts, the City’s director of economic development, in a report to City Council on Monday, December 1.
Charlottesville is planning to start building a federally funded transit center near City Hall in 2004. The construction will include improvements to the amphitheater, home to the Fridays concerts, and Watts predicts the work will interrupt shows during the summer of either 2004 or 2005. Watts told Council the City is negotiating with CDF to hold the concerts somewhere else––perhaps the parking lot at the old Save-A-Lot grocery store near the Omni Hotel––during construction.
But in his report to Council, Watts hinted that the CDF might not be able to put on the shows next year.
“This year with the rain and everything, they had to end up canceling some shows,” Watts said to C-VILLE later. “They are having some issues they’re trying to work through.”
Asked if the City would consider picking up the tab for Fridays After 5, Watts said “I have not seen any desire on the part of the City to do that, but that could change.”
Last year the CDF began charging admission fees to Fridays After 5 to boost the group’s flagging finances, but the organization still seems shaky. President Patricia Goodloe says the CDF would certainly look for a new location for the concerts if necessary, but she wouldn’t comment on whether financial difficulties will mean the end of the concerts. She said she is negotiating with the City on the future of Fridays.
“I don’t want to mess up those negotiations by making any formal statements,” says Goodloe.
Regardless of the CDF’s financial outlook, free or cheap concerts Downtown could come to an end, anyway. On December 1 the Council considered leasing the Downtown Amphitheater to the Charlottesville Industrial Development Authority, which would sublease the site to a private concert promoter. The leading candidate is Dave Matthews Band manager and über-developer Coran Capshaw.
Under the current plan, the City would loan the CIDA $2.5 million, and that agency in turn would loan the money to Capshaw at “a below-commercial bank rate,” according to City documents. The developer would use the money to improve the amphitheater and its sound system, and pay back the City over several decades.
Council will vote on the proposal at its next meeting on December 15. According to City documents, the City wants Capshaw to provide for a minimum of 20 public events, such as Municipal Band concerts and First Night Virginia, and provide a Fridays After 5-type event during the summer “so long as it is economically feasible.”
Councilor Kevin Lynch took issue with that clause, saying he wanted some assurance that Capshaw would hold “free or reasonably priced” concerts. Mayor Maurice Cox countered that such a commitment would be unrealistic.
“It’s unreasonable to for us to say events will be free, even if it’s not economically feasible,” says Cox. “[This deal] is going to bring a level of experience in managing entertainment that we have no precedent for here in Charlottesville.”
Watts, who negotiated a similar lease arrangement with SNL Financial when that company moved from its Mall building to the former National Ground Intelligence Center, is negotiating the exact terms of the lease with Capshaw. His management of the amphitheater will likely mean more expensive shows, as his will be a profit-making venture. But if Capshaw’s Starr Hill Music Hall is any indication, those shows will be culled from a 21st-century roster of artists. Maybe that will keep the rock gods happy.––John Borgmeyer
Man of few words
Crozetians want to hear about the new Supe’s pro-growth agenda, but Wyant’s not talking
Now that David Wyant has won the White Hall seat on Albemarle’s Board of Supervisors, his new constituents would like to know more about him. So far, that hasn’t proven easy.
Speaking at candidate forums held in Crozet during the race, Wyant disparaged the major planning project affecting his district, the Crozet Master Plan. Wyant’s campaign literature, for example, said the much-publicized plan (which drew an average of 125 citizens to each of 10 community meetings) was the unrealistic product of “a very small group of people with the backing of special interests.”
Laura Juel, for one, would like to get past Wyant’s public remarks to better understand how he plans to manage Crozet’s impending dramatic growth. A town of 3,000, Crozet, under current zoning, could quadruple by 2020. Like many people in Wyant’s district, Juel awaits the new arrivals as she would a hurricane––hoping for light rains while boarding up the windows.
“I know the growth is coming,” she says. “What are we going to do about it?” That’s the big question in Wyant’s district, but it’s hard to get him to address it.
“I know his family has lived here for more than 200 years. He’s said that several times,” Juel says. “But I don’t know anything about his vision.”
Of 4,017 votes cast in Crozet, Free Union, Earlysville, Brownsville and Yellow Mountain, the Republican Wyant took 54 percent by employing the tried-and-true strategy of bashing an opponent while making as few public commitments as possible. The closest race within the district was in Crozet, where Wyant topped his opponent, Democrat Eric Strucko, by a slender 41 votes.
On the issue of growth, candidate Wyant would only say, “I am not in favor of taking away peoples’ property rights,” which some might recognize as a sly wink to developers.
While Wyant said little about growth, Strucko perhaps said too much. Strucko sat on the County’s Development Initiative Steering Committee (DISC), where he spent time working on the Crozet Master Plan. Starting in January 2002, the County sent architects and planners to meet with Crozetians in a series of community work sessions that were advertised in media outlets, stores, libraries and gas stations. Details of the plan were hung in the Crozet post office.
The resulting Crozet Master Plan aims to coordinate the development of subdivisions, roads, shopping centers and schools in a pedestrian-friendly scale, with the hope that Route 250W won’t follow the example set in the County’s other growth areas along Route 29N and Pantops.
“Growth management doesn’t lend itself to sound bites, where the message is conveyed in 10 seconds,” Strucko says. “It has a lot of moving parts and requires contemplation. I think I laid out too much of a plan.”
Strucko credits the Wyant campaign for playing on people’s fear of growth by spinning the Crozet Master Plan as “my opponent’s plan to urbanize Crozet.” That’s the way Wyant described it in a statement conveyed via his campaign manager to C-VILLE in October.
“The whole thing is really screwed up,” says Brian Cohen, who publishes the Crozet-centric newspaper The Whistle. In his November “Soapbox” column, Cohen claimed “Wyant lied and misled the citizenry” by portraying Strucko as a tool of special interests who wanted to bring growth, raise taxes and curtail property rights.
“[Wyant] is accurate in that Strucko’s approach takes a lot of regulation,” says Vito Cetta, whose company, Weather Hill Homes, is building about 80 houses in Crozet. “That’s because we live in a beautiful place, and we want to keep it beautiful. Buildings are so visible, and this stuff will be around indefinitely.
“Albemarle is getting 800 new homes a year whether we like it or not,” says Cetta. “We have to have sensible planning, or this place will look like a big subdivision. Anybody, in general, who would object to planning I think they got blinders on.”
Cetta says he thinks White Hall’s Supervisor-elect “means well” and hopes Wyant will change his mind once he learns more about the plan. Wyant himself has acknowledged in forums that he didn’t attend any of the Crozet Master Plan development sessions, and Wyant hasn’t spoken to any of the plan’s major players––County planner Susan Thomas, Planning Committee Chair Will Reiley and architects Warren Byrd and Kenneth Schwartz, for instance––for details about Crozet’s future.
“I’d be interested to hear his alternatives,” says Cetta.
So would many others, but Wyant isn’t talking. He didn’t return numerous calls over several weeks from C-VILLE, and Cohen says he was only able to interview Wyant for a voter’s guide through his campaign manager, Peter Maillet. Juel, who is president of the 350-member Crozet Community Association, says she couldn’t get calls returned to have Wyant speak at candidate forums.
“When I’ve spoken with him at candidate forums, he didn’t really answer the questions. He just changed the subject,” says Juel, who describes Wyant as “real flippant.”
“I asked him how I could get in touch with him,” says Juel. “He said he’d have somebody get back with me. I said, ‘No, if I elect you, I want to talk to you.’ He said he had a lot of things going on.”
The County’s Planning Commission is currently reviewing the Crozet Master Plan. The Board of Supervisors––including Wyant––will vote on the plan in late January.––John Borgmeyer
Unchained melody
The Washington, D.C., DJ duo Blowoff, a.k.a. Richard Morel and Bob Mould, inaugurated new local dance club R2 on November 14. With enthusiasm for Charlottesville and what they saw of its club scene, Blowoff will return to R2 on December 12 and January 16. Blowoff is one of several projects for each of the musicians. Mould, who has fronted rock bands like Hüsker Dü and Sugar and worked as a solo artist during the past 20 years, also had a stint as a scriptwriter for professional wrestling. More recently, he has branched out to record electronic-style music under his own name as well as the pseudonym LoudBomb. Morel fronts an electronica-guitar rock band called Morel, which last year released the sublime CD Queen of the Highway. As Pink Noise, he is also a much-sought-after remix master, who has worked with Mariah Carey, Beth Orton and Charlottesville’s own Clare Quilty. Both profess a deep appreciation of pop music: Morel likes the Pink/William Orbit single from the Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle soundtrack and new music by Mark Ronson; Mould likes the new Sarah McLachlan record, calling the single “heartbreaking.” He also characterized the latest TV commercial for Little Debbie Snack Cakes as “trippy” and “really well done.” Cathy Harding talked to Blowoff about working the crowd at R2 and wearing so many musical hats.
Cathy Harding: What were your impressions of R2?
Richard Morel: For both of us it was really exciting to go to Charlottesville. We thought the crowd was so cool and so hip to what we were doing. We had no expectations going in. We left on a total high because the night was so great.
Bob Mould: We have a weekly gig at the Backbar at 9:30 Club in Washington and it’s a much more intimate space. I was pretty blown away by the amount of immediate feedback at R2. Not only people dancing but people looking up to the booth and giving the big thumbs up to certain songs, which was great.
Your set lists have a really wide mix of club music, pop music and everything in between. With your motto, “Let the music set you free,” are you speaking as much to yourselves as you are to the crowd?
RM: Absolutely. One of the things that is central to both of us is we play music that we truly love and dig. We play records that we get off on. As far as the style, it’s less important than the vibe we get off them.
BM: I’ve been making music and listening to music and obsessed with music my whole life. It’s an interesting time in the sense that when I started in music professionally 25 years ago, there were only five or six stylistic differentiations in music. As information has traded quicker and technology has made it much more affordable for everyone to make music, it has become so much more splintered that it would be pointless to be so micro-genre-specific. As Rich said, a good song is a good song. The challenge is how to string them all together across the course of an evening as legendary DJs used to do to try to tell a story through the night.
Is there a learning curve to going from guitar, bass and drums to the DJ gear?
BM: For me, the past five or six years has been learning by trial and error, learning by looking at the manuals, and learning by listening to music I like and emulating it, which is pretty much how I learned to play guitar many years ago.
On the first night at R2, I kept thinking about the DJ as a director of a ’60s-style Happening: It’s great, when it’s working, to set the direction for an ephemeral event, and really difficult, I bet, when it’s not.
RM: When I got back into the dance and rave scene seven or eight years ago, I immediately thought it was like a Grateful Dead concert. That was the closest reference I had to club culture and what was going on at that point. Besides the obvious drug reference, there was a large group of people responding to music. It had a real hippie vibe.
What’s the status of the Blowoff record?
BM: We’re about 10 songs in. I would feel good if we got four to six more songs recorded in the next couple of months. It’s a pretty wide variety of styles.
RM: It’s kind of a good mixing of where Bob is coming from and where I’m coming from. At one point, Bob was talking about how it has a ’60s pop sensibility with two male vocals a lot of times singing together. The production is not like that, but in terms of the classic two male vocals
…Are we talking Everly Brothers here?
RM: In a way. Or Righteous Brothers or The Association. Of course, the lyrics are a little different, but the themes are the same.
Relationships, looking down the road, wondering about your identity?
BM: Pretty much. It tends to be on the darker side. The music is pretty uplifting. Personally that’s a combination that has always intrigued me—the darker lyric with the brighter music. There’s a lot of guitar on it, there’s a lot of beats on it, there’s a lot of vocals on it, there’s a lot of trading off lyrical ideas on it.
What about the individual projects, like Bob’s Body of Song?
BM: I’ve been talking to a number of labels about releasing that. In the next couple of weeks I’ll know when that record will be up and available. For my older fans, it’s more in the Workbook vein.
RM: We’re just completing the new Morel record, which will come out, hopefully on Yoshitoshi, the end of next year. On the Pink Noise front, I’ve done a remix of Luke Wan, which is coming out in the next month, called “The Wish.”
Is it challenging to have so many different music identities?
BM: My personal frustration is my birth name and the work that I do under that has been so prominent for so long that people who write about music are hesitant to go with me on the other things.