Pavement Special

Pavement Special Blog

An open letter to Linda Thompson: Moral high ground or moral hypocrisy?

Excuse me while The Pavement Special pulls the knife from our back so that we can respond to your ludicrous blog posting on the One Minute Trolley Dash website. Let’s get down to the issues, because you do make quite a few fairly serious claims in your blog post.

Firstly not one single musician is strong-armed into being in an Issue of The Pavement Special. Most of the musicians are friends of ours and they are fully aware what being in The Pavement Special entails and what they get out of it. As for your claims of exploitation, we will allow the musicians who have been involved with The Pavement Special to answer those claims, as severe as they are. To be quite honest we find your entire post offensive and it doesn’t even really deserve a response but we feel a responsibility to our audience to clarify your false claims.
 
Your definition of support is really laughable, if you think the few rands and cents that a musician makes out of mechanical rights is worth more in support, than the time sweat, energy and passion that it takes to put together a magazine and a compilation CD, organise a gig for the musicians to play, meet each other and organise to collaborate in the future and then to organise media coverage for them after the event (which we do on top of our day jobs), then having any kind of debate with you is pointless. It is that kind of old school music industry thinking that has left independent local musicians with an industry that offers them as little as it does.

Issue One took 6 months to make, working part time on weekends and we didn't pay any of the contributors - photography, writers, proof readers - they all did it purely because they love the music. And that the ultimate goal of The Pavement Special is to pay bands, and help support local musicians financially, but to produce what we have to date in a totally independent way we are not able to pay anyone.

Linda, when you page through the magazine and there are no adverts in the thing that means it is a totally independent publication, and we cover the costs and get like-minded, amazing souls to help contribute to it for free. The amazing thing has been that everyone has been OK with this because we along with all of them intrinsically believe in what we are doing, and money has fuck all to do with that. It is our sincere hope that others start doing the same - that is how a scene, and ultimately a robust, healthy independent music industry is created. People, like you Linda, are the reason there isn't one in this country.

The super profits that you suggest we could have made, might have happened if we didn't hand the thing out for free at the launch, or give away over 50 copies to each of the bands as well as to local and international media, and if we stocked the thing in more than 2 small, independent venues only in Joburg, maybe we would have sold more. But we didn't even come close, and the reason for the Issue Two party and the upcoming Issue Three party is to raise funds to pay for the next full issue of the magazine with more features, a double compilation CD set and approximately 14 bands included. The R 40 00.00 you mention wouldn't even have come close to paying for the 7 bands, 10 contributors, graphic design, production, CD manufacture, and printing costs of Issue One, and the funds we generate from the parties this year doesn't come close either, but it goes some way to helping us produce independent content in an industry sorely lacking in this, as well as do exposing numerous artists to the general public that they have probably never heard of.

If we followed your fucked up logic, we would have just done nothing, and in so doing, have spent the last 6 months being you.

The fact that you hold an opinion like that when running what is meant to be a cutting edge independent label (highly questionable) shows how irrelevant you are. When was the last time your label put out a CD by local musicians, we think you may find the answer is when Righard Kapp was still busy running it. Instead now you swan around as a music industry type, claiming to have a label that doesn’t even put records out. Your website is still carrying a blurb on the homepage from an article that Lloyd Gedye wrote in 2006 about One Minute Trolley Dash. It was written at the time you were just taking over the reigns from Righard Kapp. Since then you have done nothing but license a Dutch artist’s CD for distribution here in South Africa, not one local CD release in two years.

Yes as you correctly point out there are costs involved in putting out The Pavement Special. Issue One was completely funded by us, every journalist and photographer worked for free and even after we sold over 200 copies at the launch night we never made all of our money back, but hey we thought it was a success.

Not a single cent that has been made through The Pavement Special has been spent by Michael MacGarry and Lloyd Gedye in their personal capacities, every single cent has been ploughed back into the next project. We don’t do The Pavement Special to make money, we do it to promote the musicians in this country that we respect and the ones that we feel need help to get their music out there in an industry that gives them nothing, where their CDs can’t get stocked in major retailers and where mainstream media all but ignores them. The fact of the matter is we were selling their CDs for them on the night at the door as well as other merchandise, a service almost no one else is offering them in the country.

You simple arithmetic that assumes that we will make R40 000 from the sale of the 500 CDs is also pretty funny. Firstly R80 got you into the gig, the CD was free, but you can only get it by being at the gig. In actual fact we had about 150 people at the launch on Saturday 28 June 2008, a lot of those were musicians. In total we made about R2500 in profit, that’s after we covered our costs and this is already in a savings account waiting to be put towards the next compilation CD, which we plan to launch in August.

And last but not least, a minor point but for the sake of being accurate, CDT did not manufacture our CDs so get your facts straight.

Oh one last point, if you do not support our “false support” and “exploitation” (your words), why were you there on Saturday night, handing over R80 to get into the event. Seems fairly hypocritical to me. But we thank you for that support Linda, thanks to your R80 a musician goes to bed homeless and hungry and we can afford the monthly repayment on that new yacht we just bought.

Regards,
Lloyd Gedye & Michael MacGarry

 

You can read Linda's original blog post here 

 

We would like to call on all musicians that have been featured in The Pavement Special to leave comments below and tell us if you feel you have been exploited or not.

 
Or if you have been to a Pavement Special launch party and sampled our magazine and compilation CDs, please let us know what your views are.

 

Published Jul 02 2008, 08:36 PM by Lloyd

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