Editor’s note: Dave Karlotski and Karen Marzloff are former co-owners of The Wire newspaper and co-organizers of the RPM Challenge. While gearing up for the 10th annual challenge, they took some time to look back on the RPM legacy.
A look behind the scenes as the RPM Challenge celebrates a decade of making music
by Dave Karlotski and Karen Marzloff
The real history of the RPM Challenge is in the music: every song, every album, every band that ever recorded a track tells part of the story. More than 40,000 songs have been created for the RPM Challenge over the past decade. Some musicians participated once and some have done it every year, like a glorious ritual of music. Every musician who has participated has a story as rich and surprising as their own lives.
But if you’ve ever wondered how things look from behind the scenes when a local music event goes global, it’s something like this.
More music, please
In the winter of 2005, The Wire newspaper was only two years old, but those years had already been full of music. We’d put together two compilation CDs featuring Seacoast-area bands across all genres and gave them away free in every copy of The Wire, almost 20,000 CDs in total. We helped put together a jazz and poetry CD for the Jazzmouth festival, and ran an around-the-clock audio stream of local music served off a computer that sat in a corner of the office, humming quietly as it sang to the world. We also hosted a second audio stream for Portsmouth Community Radio, and co-created and curated Summer in the Street, a downtown concert series, with Pro Portsmouth. But even that was not enough. The Seacoast music scene had so much talent and energy. What more could we do?
What if?
Our music editor, Jon Nolan, a longtime member of the band Say Zuzu, had an idea. Inspired by challenges like NaNoWriMo and February Album Writing Month, he wondered: What if we issued a creative challenge to our own community? What if we encouraged people to not worry about making it perfect, and let loose the creative impulse? It would be great to have a deadline — even better, a deadline that your friends were all on, too.
It seemed like a great project. We sussed out the details — 10 songs or 35 minutes of original music, written and recorded in February. Not a contest. We put the word out in The Wire and set up a website.
But we worried no one would take up the challenge. We discreetly reached out to a few musicians we knew, just to make sure the challenge didn’t fall flat on its face.
Within the first few days, we met our internal goal of 20 participants. By Feb. 1, more than 200 bands had signed up.
How to measure a music scene
Two hundred bands? The number so greatly exceeded our expectations that it was hard to fathom. Portsmouth was a city of only 20,000 people; even counting surrounding towns, there were only 100,000 residents. There simply were not 200 bands in the Seacoast.
At least, not until RPM. We had to recalibrate how we thought of our local music scene, and stop defining it by the few dozen bands that played out regularly. A community’s music runs as deep as every musician in the region, whether they are active or dormant, professional or amateur. Everyone who cared enough to make music was part of the scene, and they demonstrated that by showing up.
At the end of February, the night before the deadline, we stayed at the office until 9 p.m., receiving 90 freshly made CDs. Every musician who walked through the door was like a bedraggled Santa Claus bearing the gift of hand-made music. We were wholly overwhelmed by the response.
The next morning, another 75 CDs came in. Reading through the liner notes, we counted just over 500 individual musicians who had participated. Some were people we knew from local bands, but most were new to us. They included an older guy who hadn’t played music in years but dug out his 8-track machine to record an RPM album. Two young brothers had been encouraged by their parents. Several women who had never played with bands wrote and performed a full album, and then some. There was a father-daughter duo. And on and on.
Stacks of finished RPM CDs.
Hello, world
We decided it would be selfish to keep this much fun to ourselves. In 2007, we opened up registration to the world, and the world liked it. We watched, incredulous, as musicians signed up from one unexpected country after another. When an act signed up from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, we officially had participants on all seven continents. By February, more than 2,000 bands had signed up. RPM was a global creative challenge modeled on our own community.
Listening and partying
From the first year, we knew we had to have some sort of party to celebrate, but the scale of the response had thrown us off. Enthusiastic organizer, participant, and local songwriter Chris Greiner hit on the idea of a listening party our first year — we’d play music from every disc received.
But even if we only played one song from each completed CD, that would still be 14 hours of music — far too much to play at one event. So we started at The Music Hall, then fanned out to four simultaneous listening rooms across Portsmouth. Musicians migrated from one event to another in the March night, hailing longtime musical friends and congratulating each other. It was as if the working musicians who had served the Seacoast so well for so long had finally taken over the town and were treating each other like celebrities.
In later years, it wasn’t possible to fit all that music into one town, so we encouraged people to host their own listening parties wherever they were. There have been listening parties in Oakland, Calif.; Jackson, Miss.; Athens, Ga.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Brooklyn, N.Y.; and St. John’s, Newfoundland, among others. There was even a virtual listening party in Second Life.
RPM Challenge participants celebrate at The Music Hall in Portsmouth in 2010. photo by Scott Yates
Hear and the future
We have had an indecent amount of fun celebrating the music created for RPM over the past 10 years. At the fifth listening party, we hung all the CDs from all five years in long, glittering curtains around The Music Hall stage. One year, we invited everyone onstage for a colossally fun jam.
Every year, we can scarcely believe our luck. Many people go their whole lives without a chance to be involved in a project like this. We get to host ground zero of a music explosion every year.
Even though The Wire ceased publication in the spring of 2014, RPM continues because of its extraordinary group of volunteers. Maintaining the website, building and rebuilding the jukebox, publicity, planning, graphics, events, making movies and sorting through thousands of new CDs — it’s all powered by volunteers. RPM is an event that builds community, which is built by a community, both local and online.
We can’t wait to hear what happens next.
The RPM Challenge begins on Feb. 1. To sign up, visit rpmchallenge.com.