working title

Job Number Eleven, Small Business Owner

While I worked at The Second Deli and for the newspaper, I also had a third job, as a small business owner. When I moved back to the area where I grew up, my sister and I decided to start going to shows to see local musicians, after a kid in a band gave us a flyer in a mall. After that show, we realized there wasn’t a good way for bands to let people know about their shows, so we decided to create one. Our website was born.

We called it Word of Mouth PA, which was just a name that popped into our heads. We thought it would be temporary, but it stuck. At first, we just listed local shows, any that we could find, using social networking sites for our information. We didn’t solicit for information or money from bands; we just wanted to share information. We began to also review venues after going to new ones every weekend. Quickly, bands began to notice us, and we were invited by a band to their CD release show. In their email, they asked if we’d interview them for our website. To be entirely honest, it hadn’t occurred to us until that moment that we could interview bands. We didn’t think anyone would really notice us personally, we just wanted to spread the word about these local musicians.

So we ended up making our own compilation CD to give out for free (all songs by local bands) at the CD release show (which was probably the most unsuccessful CD release show in the history of music. The band releasing the CD didn’t even get to play at their own release show and there were numerous problems with the sound system and sound technician). It was a blast, and our first interview was pretty funny. I was elected to ask the band the questions we came up with (at this point, I wasn’t working for the newspaper yet), while my sister held the recorder and later transcribed the interview.

I remember a random bystander walking by and asking if anyone had a cooking pot so he could make some ramen.

We kept our online ‘zine going for over four years, which is a really long time in the internet world. We met a lot of musicians and made some really great friends (and a couple enemies). They were some of the best years of our lives, in all honesty.

My sister and I always loved music, which I attribute to our parents who raised us appreciating classic rock. Every year for Christmas, we asked for concert tickets, but as our parents had some experience in the live music world, they never let us go. Then when we were adults, we lived a few hours apart, so when we came back together as adults, I think we just decided to go nuts with going to see live bands. Local shows were way cheaper than seeing national bands at arenas, so we’d plan for at least two every weekend. When we’d see three or more, we’d call it “Deaf by Sunday” tours (though we wore earplugs to all the shows) because by the end, we could hear music when we were trying to sleep. For a while there, we lived off of energy drinks, because although we went to quite a few bars to see bands, we very rarely drank alcohol.

As business owners, we were pretty terrible. We focused so much on the creative aspect of the business, writing and photography, and sort of neglected the side where the intention was to make money, at least enough to cover our own expenses. We never made a profit, and actually lost quite a bit over the years, but in the end, it was worth it.

We got to act like silly fangirls all the time. Every girl dreams about hanging out with rock stars and musicians, and we got to live that dream. We had endless crushes on rock stars we could see every weekend. (You know, healthy crushes where we admired them from a distance, let them have their own lives, and we went home to our husbands) We’d find things to do to pass the time in between bands or when we showed up hours early (which happened a lot. Venues aren’t always accurate with show times and bands are notoriously late) like coming up with lists of band names, just in case bands ever asked for our opinion. That did happen once, and we gave them our list of a few hundred suggestions, but I don’t think they ended up going with any of them. Half of them were jokes. Maybe all of them. We came up with top ten lists, “rules” we felt cover bands should follow (never, ever play “Stairway to Heaven” for instance), and just thought about anything we could, usually related to the music world. Usually on the ride home from shows (which were anywhere from an hour to two or more), I’d start looking through the hundreds of photos I’d taken that evening.

It started getting later and later that we’d get home. Bar shows ended by 2am, but if you knew the band (which we often did), you could stay later, chatting with the band members as they packed up their equipment. We often wouldn’t leave until almost 3am and then wouldn’t get home until 4am or later. That’s where the Red Bull came in.

It was our lives for a while, which wasn’t always a good thing. I missed family events, and definitely missed out on a lot of time with my husband, because I had to go out to a show every Friday and Saturday night. I had obligations at times (like judging battle of the band competitions or interviewing bands), but mostly it was because I wanted to get out and get away from my normal life for a while. It was like a fantasy world that I got to be a part of. We went on tour with a band, without actually going on the road with them, by supporting their Pennsylvania shows. We celebrated many holidays with band members instead of our own families. We didn’t go unappreciated by most band members, though. They definitely noticed us at their shows, up front cheering and taking photos. I think they really appreciated that we were actual fans, trying to spread the word about them, not just journalists looking to make money.

That’s what made us successful and unsuccessful at the same time. We eventually had monthly online issues, where we featured a new band every month, and had new CD reviews and interviews each month, and after doing that for a while, we printed our magazine. We looked into professional printers, but the prices were just way out of our range, even if we busted our butts trying to sell advertising (something we knew we wouldn’t really do in the end), so we printed it and distributed it ourselves. We didn’t have many subscriptions, obviously. Eventually, we couldn’t afford to print them anymore, and we just started getting tired of the lifestyle. Most of the bands were followed regularly broke up or just weren’t playing anymore, and it just seemed like it was time to end it. It was a great run while it lasted, and it left us with a ton of great memories and laughs.

We do still go out from time to time to catch a show, but it’s no longer a marathon of how many shows we can cram into one weekend. I think having three jobs at once caught up with me, too. I was tired quite often, even though it was emotionally fulfilling. It just got to be too much. Unfortunately, we had to shut down our website, and I like to think that people miss it. I still think we filled a void the other music ‘zines didn’t. Not only did we list shows by doing our own research, we really cared about the bands and the music, regardless of what our critics thought.

We had bands tell us that we really understood them and their music, and we had bands tell us we weren’t good at what we were doing (and in one case, we had a band member’s mother yell at us), and we had other writers tell us our ‘zine was boring. In the end, we thought (and still think) it was successful. We did what we set out to do and that was to support our local musicians and bands.



So one side of our DIY ‘zine business was going to shows, interviewing bands, and having fun. The other side of it was running the website, which was far less fun and glamorous. There were a few bands and venues which emailed their schedules to me either through personal contact or through e-newsletters. Mostly, however, I visited each venue’s website and copied their schedules into our website. I used Microsoft FrontPage to publish our website, and I knew very little about it. Even after using it for years, I still don’t know much about web design, and that was probably evident to our site visitors. Still, we got the basic information across, so I think it was useful. We could have paid someone else to run the website, but again, we made no profit on the site, so we couldn’t afford it.

It took me hours and hours a day to keep up with our website, listing new shows and new articles. It was fun for a while, but it got tedious eventually. Going out to see live shows was much more fun.

We tried working with other writers and local music supporters, but I was just never satisfied with their level of commitment. For me, who worked devoted hours per day to the business, they just never seemed to want to put in an effort. I can’t say I blame them, as we couldn’t actually pay them anything, so where’s their motivation to put in the amount of work that we, the business owners, were willing to put in.

It was just the two of us running the show, with occasional artistic input from my husband, who was supportive through the entire thing, although he missed spending time with me. It seemed like I was always leaving just as he was getting home from work. And growing up with a famous musician for a father, he wasn’t exactly excited about getting involved in the music scene. It does wear you out after a while.

It felt like we never really got to know a lot of the musicians and people involved with the music scene. Everyone put on a front. The musicians want to be likable to everyone, but you don’t get to know them as people usually. There were some exceptions, of course, but overall, it’s an industry of fake people who can’t show their real sides to anyone. I can understand that on a national and international level, but it’s sad to see in the local scene.

Most of the shows we went to were about an hour away. We’re lucky enough to live in the center, about an hour away from a bunch of major areas for music. We could reach Wilkes-Barre, Reading, Allentown, and Williamsport all within an hour. We did travel farther than that a few times, even taking out-of-state bus trips to support local bands as they played in other states. We also interviewed out-of-state bands when they came to play in our state. We even interviewed some international bands, including a metal band from Spain that was thrilled to have an interview on our website.

We kept explaining to bands that we were very DIY (i.e., cheap with not a very large distribution or viewership), but they didn’t care about that. They were just happy that someone was willing to give them some publicity. See, a lot of our competitors were in it for profit, as well as maybe helping the local bands. But many of them required bands to pay for advertising space in their magazines (sometimes thousands of dollars for ads over months and months) before they would consider giving them an interview (it took even more to get on the cover). We didn’t do that. We never made a band pay to be in our magazine or on our website. We chose bands that we liked, bands that played good music or put their hearts into what they did.

We rarely featured cover bands because we preferred original music. I don’t judge what cover bands do, I totally understand and accept it as a career choice, but personally, I prefer to hear original music, so that’s what we mainly supported. We weren’t restricted to one genre, either. Though most of the bands played mainstream rock music, we also covered bands that played other genres, too. (When a country band offered to drive us to their show, how could we say no?)

We weren’t the best journalists or online ‘zine out there, but we did what we did to the best of our ability. Like the bands, our whole hearts were invested in the music scene, and those were some of the best years of my life.