Networking

Alterna-rock invades PBS and HBO

by Matt Ashare

On the afternoon of June 12 Sonic Youth were filmed performing in front of a small audience at a soundstage on West 54th Street in New York City. No big deal, right? After all, MTV's long-running Sunday-night alterna-rock showcase 120 Minutes has been in the habit of broadcasting live sets by so-called "underground" or "emerging" artists for the better part of a decade. Saturday Night Live was also once known to present edgier (i.e., commercially marginal/artistically "difficult") groups like the angry young Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and English ska-rockers the Specials from time to time. And though I can't recall the network, I vividly remember being thrilled to my 14-year-old core by the sight of a band called the Clash performing "London Calling" on some late-night music show circa 1979 -- a year or two before MTV went on line with "Video Killed the Radio Star."

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Where it's at

* On Tour, Saturday nights at midnight on WGBX/Channel 44 through August 30. Next installment: June 28, featuring Beck, the Refreshments, Cibo Matto, and Rickie Lee Jones.

* Reverb, Sunday nights at 11 p.m. on HBO2. Next installment: June 29, featuring Wilco and Dinosaur Jr.

* Sessions at West 54th, Saturday nights at 11 p.m. on WGBH/Channel 2, beginning July 5 with k.d. lang and Paula Cole.

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But Sonic Youth's June 12 set isn't destined for MTV, Saturday Night Live, or any other commercial network or show. The art-damaged pioneers of indie-rock discord are one of several dozen performers who will be featured on Sessions at West 54th, a new live-music series developed by the Boston-based American Program Service, filmed by cinéma-vérité specialists D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus of The War Room fame (Pennebaker also shot the notorious Dylan documentary Don't Look Back), and scheduled to air on public-television stations in 85 percent of the US market beginning July 5 at 11 p.m. Yes, Sonic Youth are coming to Channel 2, home to what one of my friends derisively refers to as "Master-Race Theater," the civilized stomping ground for Ernie, Bert, and Julia Child.

Is Sessions at West 54th proof that the once "dangerous" Sonic Youth are now as "safe" as Sesame Street and cooking shows? Perhaps. Or maybe, through its carefully planned strategies to deliver America's lucrative youth market to advertisers, MTV has become too safe, or at least too narrow in scope, to waste valuable space airtime on groups who challenge the imaginations of their listeners and refuse to play by the commercial rules of mainstream pop -- groups like Sonic Youth. In fact, the same week that Sonic Youth were taping their Sessions at West 54th session, Kurt Loder was unwittingly helping to define the boundaries of who and what has become acceptable for MTV: in a "Music News" segment, Loder hyped four new upcoming MTV Unplugged specials featuring artists he characterized as cutting edge. The "new" acts in question -- the Wallflowers, Jewel, Erykah Badu, and Blackstreet -- all currently have platinum-selling albums in the Billboard Top 40.

In contrast, the eclectic roster of performers slated for Sessions at West 54th -- jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, the young pop trio Papas Fritas, folk-rock veteran Richard Thompson, and bluesman Taj Mahal -- seem to have only one thing in common: they're all critically respected artists who don't necessarily move a lot of units in a culture devoted to moving units. So maybe Newt Gingrich was right when he tried to rally conservatives against the subversive liberalizing influence of PBS four years ago. Maybe we should all be more surprised that Sonic Youth haven't been a public-television staple in the past than that they've finally arrived at what might just be their true home.

APS has been promoting Sessions at West 54th as "the first weekly contemporary music series conceived and recorded specifically for public television." It's not. A month ago it would have been. But on June 7 On Tour, a new PBS-funded series produced by Sunshine TV in association with KCET in Los Angeles, began bringing groups like punk-rockers Bad Religion, rappers A Tribe Called Quest, and pomo-poppers Cibo Matto to public television on Saturdays at midnight.

On Tour, which continues through August 30, takes a somewhat different tack from Sessions: true to its name, it goes on the road with bands rather than bringing them all to the same production site. But the two series have a similar mission -- to present relatively raw music, rock-vérité if you will, to what is generally considered one of the more refined television audiences. And both balance out the more challenging underground acts they've chosen with some safer bets. As On Tour producer John Diaz explained during a break in the action between performances by Sting and Steve Earle on the series's first installment, "We have all these big bands that we're dealing with, but they're not really the basis for the show. The basis for the show is all these young bands that we're dealing with."

Diaz, whose young-and-scruffy crew are pictured in the rough, Pennebaker style, discussing the artists they're going to be shooting, goes on to invoke some of the same catchwords and dualities that remain sacred in the Sonic Youth-inspired indie-rock underground. "If the band looks bad -- that's what they look like. It's real instead of glitz. That's the idea about it being on public television instead of a big network. It gives it more credibility" [emphasis mine].

In the same program, Nil Lara, an up-and-coming young singer/songwriter of Cuban descent, sums up his band's unglamorous van-based touring style by explaining that they're "doing everything Fugazi." He offers no translation for this exotic adverb, leaving one to wonder whether Diaz and his crew thought "Fugazi" is Cuban slang or whether they knew it's the name of a staunchly independent DC-based punk band. Either way, it's a good bet that any number of viewers who might have tuned in for Sting wouldn't have known what to make of "Fugazi" without some explanation. It's also fair to assume that some of the viewers who flip to On Tour this Saturday for Rickie Lee Jones and/or Beck won't be familiar with Cibo Matto, a postmodern-pop outfit fronted by two rambunctious young Asian-American women who will also be appearing in that installment.

Lara, who is just one of the lesser-known performers featured alongside mainstream alterna-rock outfits like Smashing Pumpkins (August 2), the Cranberries (August 16), and Bush (August 30) in On Tour, has also been chosen for Sessions at West 54th, as have Ricki Lee Jones and Beck. Meanwhile, Cibo Matto were recently featured in yet another non-MTV live-music series, HBO2's Reverb, a 45-minute show that started airing Sunday nights at 11 p.m. back in April. Reverb, which is airing a best-of special this Sunday, has sent camera crews to rock stops like Boston's Paradise, LA's Viper Room, DC's 9:30 Club, and Minneapolis's First Avenue to capture performances by the über-indie Pavement, Archers of Loaf, Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr., and Railroad Jerk -- all bands who've yet to come even close to breaking into the Top 40.

Does all this represent a challenge to MTV's primacy? Hardly. It's simply the result of a sophisticated shift in MTV's programming, which now has the primary goal of selling pimple cream, athletic shoes, and soft drinks to teenagers, and only a secondary interest in bringing new music to television. With its slick editing and hip backstage banter, Reverb has the right balance and pace to appeal to the small contingent of viewers who frequented MTV's Alternative Nation, a nightly show that was canceled earlier this year. But the artful documentarian style of On Tour -- Diaz's "real instead of glitz" -- and the kind of conceptual focus Pennebaker and Hegedus will likely bring to Sessions at West 54th both reach for an altogether different audience, one with little use for acne remedies. On MTV these days you're more likely to see a group of teenagers (in a show called Road Rules) than a group of musicians on the road. That's what the kids would prefer to see. So anyone looking to produce a live-music-based series featuring bands like Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, and Pavement is naturally forced to look elsewhere -- to the likes of APS, PBS, and HBO2 -- for support. (The new M2 is, as yet, a non-issue since it's not available through most regular cable services, and VH1 remains dedicated to nostalgia.) Indeed, On Tour producer John Diaz jokes that "we're a music show with no music in our title." But the reality is that MTV is increasingly a network that features music only in its name.

Sonic Youth may still pop up on an episode of MTV's House of Style. But in the future, if you want to see the band play live, public television may just be the place to go.