Over at Gannett’s faux-alternative Velocity, David Daley previews Erin McKeown’s Friday show at the Phoenix Hill Tavern.

Josh Hammann previews TV on The Radio, which includes former Louisvillian Jaleel Bunton. Bunton left the Ville after high school and headed out to the Big Apple.

Former VHS Or Beta guitarist Zeke Buck’s band People Noise will open. They’re at the Brown Theatre on March 9.

More late.

Your hard-working editor has been busy as usual here at the end of the month, getting the dead tree edition of Louisville Music News prepared and off to the printer, plus getting all the content formatted properly and ready for upload to the site on Thursday. All this by way of explaining the lack of postings.

However, there’s always Jeffrey Lee Puckett’s Tuesday new CD release column. This week, he knocks off a quick take on Ronnie Spector’s new project plus his usual list of new releases.

If you have not been following the trial of Ronnie’s ex, the producer Phil Spector, on murder charges, the trial will be televised, presumably on CourtTV. Get the latest background from this Yahoo story.

Here’s an interesting article from the ArtsJournal.com site about the average age of audiences attending American Orchestra’s performances. The data seem to indicate that the average age is increasing rapidly. Consider this quote: “In 1982 the average age of this audience was 40, in 1992 it was 45, in 2002 it was 49.”

There’s quite a bit more and it’s worth reading if arts attendance matters to you.

While Marty Rosen was over at the Bach Society, Andrew Adler was at the U of L School of Music for the Speed Art Museum Speed Endowed Concert Series season-ending concert by violinist Miriam Fried and her son, pianist Jonathan Biss. He was impressed with the integrity. Read the whole review here.

Marty Rosen has a review of the latest Bach Society performance, which is not exactly the kind of music he normally covers. But Rosen rises to occasion.

Byron Crawford has the story of 14-year-old Jordan Leigh Young of Mayo, Kentucky getting the chance to sing with Dolly Parton. Read his column here.

The C-J’s Andrew Adler defends public financing for the arts in his Sunday column for the paper, dismissing charges of elitism and arguing that it’s all for the public good. Read it yourself here.

Busy with getting the dead tree edition of Louisville Music News wrapped up. Our cover subject this month is Louisville native Darnell Levine, who is just launching his career in soulful r&b, plus our usual lineup of columnists.

After a slow January and February, live music in Louisville looks to be taking off in March, with a boatload of shows listed in the calendar and in the upcoming section. We’ll be busy.

I exchanged a series of email with a band manager recently; he was interested in getting info about his group on the LMN website and, of course, possibly a write-up in the dead tree edition as well. As I frequently do, I asked for gigs, a color photo, website and, if possible, a short, 75-word blurb about the group. I also tossed in my regular rant about not describing the group as ‘unique’ or saying that they ‘rock,’ as the first is almost never true and is not a synonym for special, unusual, rare, uncommon or individual, while the second has been rendered meaningless through massive overuse by everybody, sort of like ‘nice.’

So he bit on the rant: of course his group could be described as ‘unique,’ because they had some musical trick or they other that they did. I wrote back and said, no, unless they did something like inventing their own instruments and musical scale, nothing they did in the way of musical trickery was likely to be ‘unique,’ since unique means ‘one-of-a-kind’ and takes no modifiers.

Back and forth it went. In the meantime, he sent me a 450-word bio instead of the 75-word blurb I had requested. The bio was, as is often the case with new groups, a mashup of puff piece reviews, non sequiturs (”He’s a hardworking musician and his mother loves him.”), brags about possible connections (”So-and-so producer is said to interested”) and the like. Pretty much condensable to the group name, a stab at the style and a take on possible demographic appeal, e.g., “Bandname is a young-boy, four-piece indie rock band from yourtown, with dreams of making it big.” Only I didn’t add the last part, since that’s true for pretty much every musician out gigging.

Boom, back came a scathing response that they weren’t children, that I was being arrogant and snide and probably all into some hipper-than thou bar band as my ideal and so on.

Of course, this was not the first time I’ve been flamed for not meeting someone else’s expectations, so I wrote back, explaining why I had written the short description, then took his 450-word bio and edited it down to 64 descriptive words. I said I wasn’t arrogant, just old and experienced; that ‘boy-band’ was industry-speak for pretty much any group where all the musicians were between 18 and 25; that I had no hipper-than-thou pretensions left in my body and that I was all about promoting Louisville-area musicians, but that I expected managers and band members assigned to PR duties to do their job and not expect me to.

So one of the band members wrote back with a sort-of apology and tried to explain what the manager was trying to do and said I could use the 64-word summary as a blurb.

Were I not as calm and patient as nine years of listening to songwriter demos had forced me to be, I might have blown the group off completely, leaving just their name and weblink in my database. I suspect other music writers would have done just that. I posted the info that they wanted and the link to their Myspace page and left it at that, but it certainly made me think that it was time to start telling musicians who came to the LMN site what works and doesn’t work in the PR department, at least as far as I was concerned. Whether it is advice usable elsewhere is up to the musician to decide.

So the lessons of this exchange:

1.) Don’t argue with the music writer - you can’t win. He/she has something you want and need and you don’t have much that he/she needs, unless you are already famous. It can also have negative effects down the line - memories are long in the media business.

2.) Music writers of all stripes are generally inundated with publicity packages, emails and calls. Keep it simple, stupid and don’t inflate the text. It won’t be read.

3.) Put all the relevant info in the top of the document: who, what, when, where and how much. We if want to find out more about you, we’ll read further.

4.) If you send emails, for God’s sake, don’t show off your brand-new HTML chops. Ever. Plain text, plain text, plain text. Don’t put images it the body of the message, either.

5.) Do give us all the basic info - a publicity sheet that advises me to go to a website to get the group’s gigs is one that results in those gigs not being listed.

6.) Get some understanding of the publication you’re contacting. Take a look at the website: does the publication cover your style of music? If you’re from another city, does the publication cover out-of-town groups? If you’re going to play in that city, be sure to put that info upfront.

7.) Unload that shotgun and put it away. Sending your info to every publication you can find an email for is a surefire way to be put on the spamblock list.

That’s enough for now. I’ll post some more Do’s and Don’ts at a later time. Meanwhile, I have log the several hundred dates I already have received for this issue. The dead tree edition has its own demands.

[An addition from Marty Kasdan] : Don’t guestlist someone and not follow through to make sure the name is really on the list. Friends come and go, enemies are forever.

— Paul Moffett, Editor

The Courier-Journal’s Jeffrey Lee Puckett takes a listen to Lucinda Williams‘ new CD, West, gives it, oh, a thumb up and a shrug. Read the review for yourself.