What's even more impressive is recent interview of Thurston Moore in Time Out New York, where he explains that he was essentially told about the band from a fairly reliable source, accidentally missed their show, and then signed the extremely young act to his new label, Ecstatic Peace, sight unseen because he liked their name. Just his luck that the band acutally lived up its name. Awesome Color, whose album comes out tomorrow, will be touring with Sonic Youth for a month (go see them!). While the story is a tad unconventional, the sentiment is absolutely admirable.
At last year's Billboard Road Work Conference, the bigwigs from AEG and Clear Channel were wringing their hands wondering where their next arena filling acts were gonna come from, while simultaneously doing very little to support young acts and young people in general at the conference (their were only like 10 people who were in their 20s in a room of hundreds !). One extremely solid thing promoters can do to ensure the vitality of the concert business is to encourage and provide incentives for veteran acts to select younger acts to take out. I mean how much skin off Mick Jagger's nose would it be to have a top-drawing club band on the road with them. None at all, the fresh faced youth could give them a healthy pump of blood, in fact. David Bowie is another performer who has been vehement about supporting young acts and while some people go too far and say that the only reason TV On The Radio are succeeding is because of Bowie's valiant efforts, his extremely vocal support cannot be discounted.
I certainly hope veteran acts (AND MANAGEMENT AND BIZ EXECS!!!) across the genres take a cue from Moore and Bowie and make a concerted effort to pass the torch to take younger generation. The future of our industry relies on it.
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