October 15, 2017 — For a few weeks, I’ve been hearing a radio ad for a contest. The tag line: are you the next Guns ‘n’ Roses, Metallica, ….? Well, I can’t remember the rest, but you get the message. The contest, named Next 2 Rock, called for musicians across the country to submit their song. I think the finalist wins a contract with a record company, a new one at that. It makes me wonder if it’s that hard to find music from the actual streets. Or perhaps this is a short cut. Or perhaps rock is going the way of contests. Or perhaps there have always been contests. Personally, I liked the commercial – a strong message that someone somewhere is wants another GnR or whatever great musician/band to break it wide open.

The powers that be in that contest have put up the submissions, I don’t know if it’s all of them, for our voting. I’ve put the link below, although to actually listen to them you have to register to win the trip to the final contest performance. I registered, even though the trip will be across town for me, and I’ve listened to snippets of the artists in the first set of two pages. While that is certainly not a full listen, I noticed there were a lot of songs with a ‘70s sound,  even singers who don’t sound like Cookie Monster, a nice point for me. I think there’s hope here, hope in the music of the streets.

And then there’s the upper end, a certain little street known as Broadway. With the play Hamilton taking center stage as the must see, Bruce Springsteen is taking a run at Broadway, performing the first five performances of a 15-song set this week at the Walter Kerr Theatet in a limited run of a planned 79 performances that will run through February. The show is an intimate setting — just Bruce, the guitar, the piano and words and music, according to Bruce, and to use Broadway lingo, it’s a smash success. The first five of these sold out performances, with $850 face value ticket prices, grossed $2.33 million, or about $466,000 per night. Hamilton beat those numbers with $2.92 in gross earnings, but Bruce is definitely working the streets.

So this week is dedicated to the music of the streets, the high and the low, but especially to the musicians who play the music of the streets. My personal good luck to all those in the contest; I hope we really go get our next … from that contest.

Link for Next 2 Rock voting:

http://www.955klos.com/2017/09/07/next2rock-2017/

Bruce Springsteen’s Twitter page includes the set list and a link to listen to the songs (not the live performance):

https://twitter.com/springsteen?lang=en