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Not Just Hippie Music: A look at some kinks and quirks of the Ithaca Music Scene

By David Gitlin and Owen Perry

It's cold outside. The wind is howling, the snow drifts are piled a yard high, and the best place to be on a night like tonight is inside, bunkered down until tomorrow. But 14 music fans trudge on. They have a calling, a mission. They want to see the best hardcore and punk rock bands come to their town, and they'll brave the arctic temperatures to make it happen.
This is Ithaca, N.Y., and these people make up the Ithaca Show Syndicate, a small grassroots network of young grassroots music fans from all kinds of young grassroots backgrounds working hard to hear the music they love.

Ithaca might as well be Grassroots, USA. Sure, the city is bordered by Cornell University to the East and Ithaca College to the South. Ithaca, however, is anything but a typical college town.

Based at the shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is as much known for its wealth of higher education opportunities as it is for its city-wide accepted socialist leanings. In the mid 70s, the city placed a sidewalk in the middle of its main street, to create a shopping, entertainment and residential district called “The Commons,” with the hope the city's population would gather for food, fun, and shopping. Weekends are littered with Wicca gatherings, Green Party demonstrations, and parades featuring “manly” men with chainsaws and the Volvo Ballet.

Clearly, this is a place that needs a music scene as difficult and distinctive as the town itself.
Consider I-Town Records, the hub of all great Ithacan music, or so says Kevin Kinsella, the label's founder. “I-Town Records is a collective, a circle. It is not a pyramid-shaped hierarchy,” he writes on the I-Town Website, www.itownrecords.com. “The basic tenets of the label are that in unity there is strength and that cooperation means progress.”

Kinsella's vision is one of unity and cooperation - togetherness and love and musical peace. The bands on the I-Town label aren't simply playing music for themselves or their friends. They're contributing to a greater musical dream, a utopia of rock music shared amongst the city of Ithaca and I-Town Records.

Under this vision, I-Town would be the centralized base for Ithaca bands. All bands in Ithaca would become I- Town bands, and they would share the banner of the label and the music, or something like that. The message is socialism, or “practical socialism” according to Kinsella. “The label takes the 'middleman' aspect out of the so-called 'Music Industry.”
It would stand to reason a socialist town would beget a socialist record label - “a new paradigm,” according to Kinsella. “All bands under one label” because “great artists and great bands arise from a fertile music scene” and unite under I-Town.

So what do they get?
For a $100 entry fee to be on the label, a band or artist accepts the following conditions:
1) An I-Town logo on the back of their CD.
2) They give one dollar to the label for each CD sold.
3) They show up to I-Town meetings.

In return the label helps to promote shows and put out albums. I-Town. Where I-Town bands go, they spread the word about other bands on the label.

Fairly straight-forward, right? I-Town carries its socially minded label ideal even further.
Kinsella wants to branch I-Town's benefits further, to include health insurance and a scholarship fund for community members.

I-Town is “a valid alternative” to any other indie label, says Folk musician Patti Witten, who is on the label. She gets her music out, and when she promotes the label, she is promoting herself, and vice versa.

I-Town bands play shows but trumpet the I-Town name louder than their own. When an I-Town band releases an album on another label, as Kinella's own John Brown's Body did (“Spirits All Around Us” was released on Shanachie Records), it's expected they place an I-Town logo on the back of the CD. The band profits, the label profits, the city profits, and the cycle of the scene continues.

The I-Town ideal seems to work. Patti Witten has won honors in major songwriting competitions sponsored by Billboard, Mid-Atlantic and the Woody Guthrie Song Contest. John Brown's Body has received publicity in the Village Voice, and the band frequently tours the United States. Sunny Weather is currently touring the United States, stopping in Cleveland, Tampa, and Charleston, S.C.

The bands are out, people are paying attention, and I-Town is growing.

But what about the Ithaca bands that don't quite make it to I-Town, or don't want to be part of the I-Town socialist mold? One avenue is Cipher Records and Studios, run by Cornell University student David Rand, concentrating on hardcore and rock music.
Cipher Records is a non-profit, Ithaca-based record label that does networking, promotion, and sets up the occasional show.

Cipher Studios is a non-profit digital multitrack recording studio, offering anyone $8/hr recording, or less if people really can't afford it.

Cipher Records and Studios offers a great service for the musician strapped for cash, of which there are many. There are currently 22 bands on Cipher Records, among them the Cornell Republicans and Drunken War.

These bands make up the core of the rock scene in Ithaca, yet over the past couple years some have noticed a decline in that genre in Ithaca. They're doing something about it.

Two years ago, Aaron Scott was living in New York City and fronting the punk band De La Hoya. When the band broke up, he moved to Ithaca, a town he'd developed an attachment to after De La Hoya had played numerous shows here, he said.

Starting in the fall of 1998, Scott said, “I'd say we were here once every three or four months after that for about three and a half years, and in that time I met a lot of great people here, many of whom left.”

He explained that because Ithaca is a college town people are usually only here for a few years. Still, Scott says he's made friends who've remained in Ithaca.

“We were this out-of-town group coming here and finding it very warm and welcome every time we came,” he recalls. When the group broke up in 2001 Scott decided to leave the City and Ithaca was the place where he knew the most people basically because of the nature of the music scene here.

Much of that knowledge came from interactions with local bands like I Farm in the late 90s. “Basically every time they played they'd end up having a house party at the end,” said Scott. He said the house parties came to be called the Fan Club.

Scott said that those parties created a community where everyone was welcomed. He recalls an I Farm album cover which includes a “picture from their house and it's filled with what's got to be more than a hundred people, and I can recognize so many of those faces from people who were at shows.”

But now things have changed. Scott claims the kids are there and willing to come out.
The question is, how? After a conversation in August, Scott and some friends decided to try to figure out the answer. What they came up with was the Ithaca Show Syndicate.

They have been meeting now for about six months. In that time they have created a website for bands to post shows and find contacts; built a network of bands, promoters and fans to share information on what is going on; and attempted to create and all-ages showspace in face bands to play.

The majority of ISS's initial work was toward creating a listserv and a Website, which provides a centralized informational resource for Ithaca shows, says Scott. Their current work is to get more bands to come to Ithaca and more people to attend the shows.

What have they accomplished? They've put on benefit shows all over Ithaca in clubs, cafes, art galleries, as well as, Cornell's dormitories. Each day ISS gets more and more bands asking for places to play. The work on finding a show space has progressed, as well.
The kids are happy, and the music is coming. And the music will be a part of Ithaca Forever.