By George Petersen

ONE OF THE CHORES OF RUNNING A SMALL LABEL is promotion, and when you don’t have a lot of money, you need to look into all kinds of outlets to get the word out about your artists—ALL KINDS…

Last weekend, I went to The Expo 2007, described as the San Francisco “Bay Area’s grassroots connection fair for independent arts, music and culture.” It was a pastiche of free workshops, music performances, art show and bizarre bazaar—all wrapped up into a one-day event. I was there to help promote Chelle & Friends, a group that does an amazing blend of R&B/spiritual/gospel/jazz vocals that cross genres and decades. As they were among the featured acts, we went along to hawk CDs, t-shirts and merch.

It was everything I expected—more or less. It was a very San Francisco event, more from the diversity of experiences offered, from the publishers selling underground picto-novels and photo essays on extreme piercings and body fluids—not for the squeamish—to painters, sculpturers, radio stations, a couple small record labels (us included) and several arts groups/schools, including the Women’s Audio Mission. A worthy non-profit organization, the San Francisco-based Women’s Audio Mission is dedicated to the advancement of women in the recording arts, with access to audio technology, and training in its use to record sound for music, radio, film, television and the Internet for women and girls.

In the long-cherished local tradition of hippie-dippiedom, the turnout for the event was sparse. It was well-underpromoted—signage at the site was almost nonexistent, so even finding the place if you were looking for it was difficult. At the same time, there was a huge, packed home-improvement show in the Gift Center pavillion across the street. I’m sure that some of those attendees could have been persuaded to check out the cool art/music festival just 50 yards away—if for only to pay the modest $2 admission and kick back, have a beer and listen to some music during their lunch break—had they known about it.

But attendance aside, there was a bright side here. Yeah, we moved enough CDs and merch to make it worthwhile, picked up a couple of future gig bookings, and I even had a chance to check out some of the other acts, which leaned toward punk-folk, some blues and a few I will never have the words to describe. One interesting act in the latter category was the Hobo Gobbelins, a “troglodyte jug band” that offered an intriguing blend of eerie vocals and instruments (banjo/dobro/accordion/tuba/fiddle/ukelele/washboard) and green/black face painting with some delightfully fun—and yeah, pretty dark—songs about rats, eating brains, decapitations and such. I bet they’ve got Halloween gigs booked up through the next millennium! But they were a fun diversion: Somebody needs to sign these guys—they’ve cornered the market on the hillbilly gobelin genre. Only in San Francisco…

When not working on Mix stuff, George Petersen records and performs with the SF Bay Area-based rock band ARIEL. Click here www.jenpet.com and check ‘em out.

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