When Squeaky was young, in our twenties and relatively free of responsibilities, we put a lot of effort into flyering for our shows. In the nineties, before myspace, before gainesvillebands.com, fliers were the main method of advertising for shows. Telephone poles were the main venue for these fliers. As you drove or biked around town, we'd check the poles to see which bands were coming to town, which friends of ours were playing shows. If the flier was cool, I'd rip one off and take it home, or put it up on the wall at the practice space. The Covered Dish and the Hardback, the 2 main venues of the time, printed hundreds of flyers and handbills for every show, and they were all over town, as well as top of pizza boxes. You could tell when it was holiday-time because there were hardly any fliers up. The number of fliers up at any given time was a good measure of what was going on.
It looked chaotic as hell, but there was a system, a "code", if you will. One never posted a flier over another flier unless the show had already happened. Or unless there were already a lot of fliers for the show already up. There was a general feeling that you had to be cool about how you put up your fliers, or else other bands wouldn't treat your fliers with the same respect.
The world of flyering changed around 2000, due to a lot of legal machinations. The Gainesville Iguana has a couple of good articles about the history here and here. I don't remember all the details, but the end result was the placement of several wooden "kiosks", strategically placed around downtown, attempting to create a clean, organized area for flier placement. And now, for better or worse, in 2007, bands and clubs generally put fliers up on the kiosks if they do it at all.
I don't want to get into the politics of this (although, I personally liked the way it was much better), I want to talk about flier etiquette here in 2007. People are fucking dicks about fliers these days! I went out to put up fliers for our show on Saturday, and I found a fucking sad state of affairs in flyeringworld. Kiosks were either totally empty or completely covered by ads for one show. I'm talking 40 or 50 fliers for the same show on one kiosk! I felt justified in covering over 5 or so of those fliers in order to put up some Squeaky fliers. I did find myself wondering where all the fliers were. Anyway, less than 24 hours later, all the fliers on all the kiosks were covered over by Common Grounds fliers. Fliers for the same show! And if they weren't covered by CG fliers, they were covered by fliers which were advertisements for a t-shirt company. I'm not against small businesses using the kiosks for fliers, but leave some room for other fliers, for fuck's sake!
Gainesville, know your history! Fliers are a time-honored system of informal communication, and they're important. Fliers are made by bands directly - they're a unique way to see how a band presents itself to the rest of the world. You can hold them in your hands, not like a mass email. Don't mess it up by being inconsiderate and ignorant.
Maybe I sound like a "it was better in the old days" crotchity old fart, but I really just think that some common consideration is in order. Maybe I should just be IM'ing and Myspacing everyone about Squeaky shows, but I still believe in fliers.
If you're covering over other people's fliers, fuck you.
H/Sq
No comments:
Post a Comment