From Grammies to Bammies to Hubbies

FIRST THERE WERE the Grammies, an awards ceremony that honors merely whoever is topping the pop charts this year. Then came the more localized Bammies, or Bay Area Music Awards, honoring similarly lackluster of musicians from the once-trendsetting city of San Francisco. Other cities of equally dubious musical importance followed suit. Last week, Boston, a city whose own popular music heritage is schizophrenic at best, jumped on the bandwagon, so to speak, with its own ceremony, cleverly titled The Boston Music Awards. Granted, Boston's music scene is vital enough to deserve recognition, and some of its local artists may even be of national caliber, but the idea of adequately acknowledging every musician who ever played or was born in Boston seems ultimately futile.

Boston's musical past suggests why an attempt to recognize Boston's music scene and to attribute such importance to it is unlikely to succeed. Twenty years ago, when San Francisco was hailed as the breeding ground for innovative rock music, record executives had similar success in mind for Boston, for no particularly good reason. They convinced Boston musicians--and themselves--that the "Bosstown Sound" was going to be the Next Big Thing. The public didn't buy it, though, and such memorable local bands as Phluph, Ultimate Spinach, and Beacon Street Union found themselves millionaires one month and broke the next.

PERHAPS IN AN attempt to remedy the situation, local impresarios Candace Avery and Peter Gold created the Boston Music Awards. The idea was to "draw national attention to the area's great well of talent," says Avery, whose ex-husband's band, New Man, was nominated in five categories. "I sincerely believe there's no greater music city in the country," Gold says.

So Avery-Gold Productions, with help from local radio giant WBCN-FM, the Boston Phoenix, and even MTV--three organizations largely responsible for the promotion of many Boston acts and the neglect of many others-undertook this ambitious if quixotic effort to recognize virtually everyone in every facet of the Boston music scene, in a single evening's ceremony last week.

Such an all-encompassing enterprise, composed of pieces that don't quite fit together, was bound to become a Frankenstein monster with multiple personalities. Altogether, there were 44 award categories, representing everyone from Brother Blue to Bim Skala Bim, from the obscure to the nationally famous, from singles to albums to videos, from folk to country to jazz to reggae to rock to hardcore.

EVEN WITH THIS many categories, some of the musicians still got shortchanged. Hardcore and heavy metal acts were lumped together in a single category. Local musicians competed against their national counterparts. Jazz, rock, pop, blues, and country instrumentalists vied for the same awards.

With so many awards, it came as no surprise that the ceremony was a long, drawn-out affair. The presentation of all the four-inch plastic plaques, the occasional two-song performances by various local bands, the inevitable acceptance speeches, time-killing exchanges of (ideally) humorous repartee between the two emcees (local comedian Kevin Meany and WBCN DJ Charles Laquidara), and the 45-minute-late starting time that is a tradition of all events involving the appearance of nationally famous rock stars, made the ceremony even longer than the Oscars.

In fact, the Boston Music Awards resembled the Oscars in many other ways as well. Despite rousing performances by Barrence Whitfield and the Savages, the Lyres, and Face to Face, the ceremony had about as much--or as little--entertainment value as the annual Oscars telecast. Like that show, much of the entertainment came from the parade of flamboyant fashions and hairstyles of all shapes, colors, and sizes, both onstage and in the audience. "I'm seeing clothes I've never seen before," said a member of the band Scruffy the Cat, who were anything but scruffy.

But the Boston Music Awards were most like the Oscars in that the list of winners was so predictable. In interviews during and after the ceremony, band after band remarked how unsurprised they were as to who had been winning. No one raised eyebrows at such choices as 'til tuesday as Act of the Year, the Lyres as Best Garage Band, or Throwing Muses as Best Independent-label Debut Act.

One wonders, though, if these awards are any more than what singer Aimee Mann called "patting each other on the back," or if the black lucite plaques the winners received will mean national attention for them or for the hundreds of struggling bands whom the Awards overlooked. If the Boston Music Awards does become a permanent annual event, the awards ought to mean something. The least they can do is give them a good nickname, say "the Bommies", or "the Hubbies."