It’s no secret that Milwaukee is a rocking city. There is a sea of venues at our disposal, ranging from legendary clubs, elegant auditoriums, charming dive bars and an assortment of stages erected at festivals taking place each and every warm-weather weekend. Renowned national acts of all genres and levels of popularity routinely make Milwaukee part of their tours, while a menagerie of local acts garner both local and national acclaim through rousing hometown gigs.
All those reasons made this item posted on The A.V. Club Milwaukee website last month a rather unsurprising piece of news – though featuring Madison ahead of us was a shocker. However, something below this post proclaiming Milwaukee’s musical supremacy captured my attention. A reader with the moniker “Slooow Down” highlighted a major flaw in our fair city’s otherwise formidable music scene [sic’d]:
“In Milwaukee, I need to take the time to ‘research’ each band coming to Cactus Club or Garibaldi that I’ve never heard before to see if they’re good. On top of that, bar venues in this city have piss-poor websites, or no site at all and just rely on myspace calenders that rarely even post cover charges. This city’s music scene would be much better if more venues put in half the effort into music listings that larger city venues put in. It wouldn’t cost them any extra money, and their draws would increase exponentially.”
As a person entrusted with the bi-weekly task of scouring these very Internet outlets to give you, beautiful Music Notes reader, a show guide, I couldn’t agree with Slooow Down any mooore emphatically. Even with the handy Google doc I whipped up (seriously, this thing is awesome!) to organize venue sites, Kevin and I still struggle to provide thorough details, due to 1. Something good being on TV and 2. Shortcomings, conflicting (when not entirely omitted) details, and lack of updates to the websites of numerous local venues.
In this day and age, when there are even websites out there devoted entirely to carbohydrate renditions of celebrities and telling moviegoers the best time to make yellow during specific films, there is NO excuse for a venue in a respected music city not to have a website. And if they’re going to have a website, they may as well make it an easily navigated and continually updated place, so as to warrant its existence. So like the concerned mother gently suggesting her son shower regularly (that’s a normal thing moms do, right?), I’ve gone ahead and critiqued the web domains of some of Milwaukee’s favorite real-life music domains. Hopefully, these words will be heeded accordingly.
Pabst, Riverside, Turner: I can’t rave about this site enough. Not only does it combine listings for three of Milwaukee’s finest and most active performance locations, it also includes meticulously detailed listings for each and every event. Those intrigued on taking in one of Turner’s excellent $10 shows (or any other offered) can read up on a band via included reviews and/or bios, while listening to a track or taking in a YouTube clip of said band. Never have I questioned a start time, an admission price, opening band(s) or whereabouts for any of these three venues. The site is also regularly updated. As you were, Pabst Theater Group.
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| The Rave’s surprisingly well-maintained website played an invaluable role in alerting me to a Powerman 5000 show I needed to avoid. Ashley Chamulak photo courtesy of TheRave.com. |
The Rave: The Rave gets a lot of (justifiable) heat for its glaring shortcomings. But somewhat compensating for the sub-standard sound, the predominately high school age crowd, its proximity to where Jeffrey Dahmer once lived and booking Insane Clown Posse regularly, The Rave’s website is pretty impressive. Beyond the always-appreciated calendar stocked with shows, all performers involved, start time, ticket price and a link to the official site of each artist, the venue also provides a comprehensive personal in-house bio and video clips. It’s really quite informative. Do I suddenly want to see TWIZTID there on Dec. 10? No! Still a thousand times no. But at least now I have a remarkable background as to specifically why I don’t.
Cactus Club: The website for the Cactus Club is a lot like the Bay View bar itself – rough around the edges, not particularly pleasing to look at, but somehow still good enough to keep you coming back regularly. No frills listings of dates, times and band names (without links to places to hear these bands, mind you) run down the page, offering the bare minimum… almost. Most shows have a link to the Facebook event of said show. However, even those event links often fail to list a cover charge and sometimes have a start time or show lineup conflicting with Cactus’ site, making a plain package also a sometimes confusing one.
Mad Planet: It’s less-than-attractive to look at, but damn it if it doesn’t get the job done. A methodical listing of date, time, all bands involved, and (usually) price run down the nondescript amalgamation of code. Shows are also usually posted well in advance, so the website, like Mad Planet itself, only needs to be visited once every few months. Since most every other corner has been cut, it could use some links to bands or brief artist descriptions to spice it up.
The Borg Ward: Because the event schedule on the included link hasn’t been updated since Aug. 10, I’ll go ahead and say it’s pretty bad. The MySpace page is at least current but still lacks any effort beyond simply listing band names and start time. I for one would appreciate some links to band sites, videos or even a genre description in conjunction with the show I probably still won’t attend anyway. It’s a collective, I know, but why can’t members collectively put in more work to keep the site fresh and useful? Not D.I.Y. enough to include a way for people to actually hear the grindcore band booked to play four shows there that month?
Linneman’s Riverwest Inn, Bay View Brew Haus, Stonefly, Frank’s Power Plant, Club Garibaldi: You know how in movies when the bookish girl takes off her glasses and lets her hair down, then everyone realizes how beautiful she can be? This is kind of like that. Each of these businesses is among the premiere clubs in town, but their black-framed glasses and pulled-back hair that come in the form of their unforgivably shitty web presence could really use a Rachael Leigh Cook-type makeover. Is there a programmer out there willing to be a Freddie Prinze Jr. and help the .com appearance match the inner beauty of these venues?
(For the record, I thought Rachael Leigh Cook’s character in She’s All That was perfect just the way she was. It’s just an analogy!)
Miramar Theatre: The same day Al Gore invented the Internet, he built the website for a Milwaukee music venue. There it has sat, untouched to serve as a reminder of how far technology has come since that fateful day.
As Slooow Down said, if local venues as a whole put more work into providing people with well-kept places in which to find events, complete details of each event and maybe the occasional interactive bell and whistle to help save us some legwork in finding out more about performers, more Milwaukeeans would come out to shows, more bands would make a point to come to town, and one of our fair land’s “Top 10 Rock Cities” would be rendered all the more rocking.
Like Oprah (or someone else, but probably Oprah) said, “It takes a village.”
So let’s cyber! Wait, that came out wrong.
