Rick Vito Participates in Country Article

[michelej1]

Vito is one of the people interviewed in this article as to whether country and Christina music is crushing innovation.

By Naomi Snyder, Tennessean.com

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20...AACLiHu5FMg%3D

Could Nashville's country and Christian music industry be crushing innovation? It sounds like a ridiculous question, were it not for the musicians who think it might be true.

"It's very much a songwriters town, but it seemed like if you weren't country, they weren't interested," said Rick Vito, a former Fleetwood Mac lead guitarist who left Nashville a year ago to move to Hawaii. He said he even had trouble getting session work in Nashville.

Sociologists have begun arguing about whether Nashville's music scene is really all that creative. Although the city has grown tremendously over the past few decades, in part because of the music industry, some say country music's dominance drowns out different sounds here and puts the future of the industry at risk.

Richard Florida, the sociologist who wrote about "the creative class" as such an important ingredient for economic growth and vitality, has written that Nashville "sucked up all the growth in the music industry" between 1970 and 2004, meaning it grew more than other cities in numbers of musicians.

That's a good thing.

Daniel Silver, however, a colleague of Florida's and professor at the University of Toronto, has ranked Nashville below Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York and even Portland, Ore., in terms of musical diversity. Even though Nashville dominates in terms of country, Christian, folk and acoustic and is strong in rock, according to Silver's measurements, it drops off substantially when it comes to anything else. Silver ranked the cities based on the size of the fan base for MySpace bands in a wide range of genres.

Innovation "does matter, if we want to grow the new acts that connect in interesting ways for the new 'one-to-one' customer relationship that is the Internet,'' writes David Herrera, an assistant professor of music at Belmont University.

He argues that the degree of innovation will be crucial to the music industry going forward, an industry that has been hit with declining sales worldwide, according to the IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.



Grammy-winning R&B producer and songwriter Shannon Sanders loves Nashville, grew up here and lives here now. He thinks country music has been great and has boosted the tourism industry.

He spends nearly half his time on the road, though, collaborating with other artists, writing, performing and producing.

"Country is so strong. Because country makes Nashville a home exclusively, it's almost a problem for everybody else," Sanders said. "You're going to always be a stepchild. It's good for the city. It's not good for you if you do anything other than country."

Vito came to Nashville in the mid-1990s from Los Angeles and said he got a "mild" reception from audiences and record labels here.

He left for Hawaii last year, but he is moving back to Nashville this week because his wife and daughter miss the town. He was scheduled to play the Ryman Auditorium on Saturday as part of Muriel Anderson's All Star Guitar Night.

"I'm optimistic there's renewed energy now,'' Vito said. "I'm open. And things change, and hopefully it has a little bit."

Dig deep to find variety
Not everyone sees Nashville as unreceptive to new sounds.

There's a difference between what the major music labels want and the music "scene," or what the hopscotch of lively clubs and bars and musicians here will embrace, many say. And that's important for fueling innovation and creativity.

Mike "Grimey" Grimes runs The Basement, ground zero for the indie rock band scene in Nashville. He says he's running a profitable enterprise with 80 percent of the bands from Nashville. And he points out Nashville has home grown some successful rock bands like Kings of Leon and Paramore.

He said indie rock-band performers tour in country bands, and then come to places like The Basement to show off their other, less mainstream, musical talents.

"What we've created over here has been a conscious attempt to establish something outside of what's going on at Music Row,'' Grimes said. "As far as we're concerned, it almost doesn't exist."

But Herrera, the assistant professor of music at Belmont, thinks the dominant music industry does have an impact on innovation in Nashville.

"The core of innovation is risk and uniqueness — two traits not aligned with break-even analysis and profit,'' he wrote in an e-mail. "I would speculate that the more active the music industry is within any city, the more commercial and less innovative the music scene will be."

With a commercially minded outlook, he says, "even the local scene is more centered on the size of audience draw on any given night — rather than a community that encourages innovation and live music."

Silver, the Canadian professor, ranks Portland, Ore., higher than Nashville in terms of musical diversity.

Bands such as Pink Martini in Portland found success with unique sounds. Pink Martini plays lounge music with a twist; the band sings in multiple languages, including Spanish, French and even Croatian. It's sort of like listening to Lawrence Welk's show and wondering why the band is singing about skinheads. Pink Martini has sold nearly 2 million albums worldwide.

But John Allen, a vice president of publisher Bug Music in Nashville, said there are just as many innovative bands in Nashville as in Portland or any other moderately sized town.

For some, it's bizarre to assume that more electronica or jazz bands are needed to prove Nashville is creative.

"Just because you have a distorted, fuzz-out guitar, so what?" said Christopher Moon, who represents artists for Nettwerk Management in Nashville. "Yes, the industry is focused on country and Christian, but that doesn't mean you can't be eclectic and do great things in a different genre here."

Billy Cerveny, a founder of Brite Entertainment in Brentwood, which sells music through a $4.99-per- month digital subscription service, said there is more talent per square inch in Nashville than any other city he's seen.

He's critical of the music labels that "try to repeat the same formula until it wears itself out."

But he distinguishes between that and the variety of artists in Nashville.

"If you're anywhere in the world and you ask people interested in music where to go to experiment with music, I bet you Nashville is one of them," said Ralph Schulz, president and chief executive of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.

He said Nashville is a "talent magnet" that draws musicians from around the world to communicate in ways that might be tougher in a bigger city.

Even Farnell Newton, an adjunct professor at Portland State University, concedes that Portland may be more diverse, but not necessarily more talented.

"That doesn't mean it's all that good," he said.

Mare Wakefield, a local Americana artist, moved from Eugene, Ore., and spent some time in Portland, so she can understand the argument that Portland is more avant garde.

But Nashville is a place where people are more dedicated to their music and very serious about it, she said.

"They work hard and they want to be good,'' she said. "I feel Nashville is a very creative town."