BA Everywhere !!?
By A Reader | February 3, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Monday and Tuesday nights I lug my guitar to work at eight in the morning. I wear it as a backpack, and ride my bike to work. I do this because the alternative music scene I am in has two open mic's at the beginning of every week, and I attend them directly after work.
The people who play these two open mic's are more into ideas and inspiration than virtuoso performances and big rock amps, and they tend to work outside the traditional club venues.
For this reason I thought bringing BA into the mix was a good idea. I started by handing out post cards with BA (Bob Avakian) quotes on them. One was the quote, "You can not break all the chains, except one." Another was a flyer for the DVD—BA Speaks: Revolution--Nothing Less! and a third, the promotion for the premier celebration of the film Stepping Into the Future: On the Occasion of the Publication of BAsics: A Celebration of Revolution and the Vision of a New World. I dropped flyers on tables and posted them on bulletin boards every Monday and Tuesday for about four months.
I was at the Monday open mic last week getting ready to play my two songs when a rapper took the stage. The MC announces who will be next three at a time, he read my name and I found the rapper was three musicians ahead of me.
As I started to tune up in the side room, I heard the rapper say: "Who is this Bob Avakian guy? I see his name every week." I looked up the stairs and into the performance room and saw an acquaintance of mine answering him. He said something to the rapper, but I could not hear because unlike the performer he did not have a microphone and the room was packed.
I felt good about the promotion of BA that night. To have a musician use his open mic time to actually ask a question about BA to a crowded room of musicians was a BA Everywhere success for me.
The experience reminded me of some customer service advice I received at one of the many jobs I've held over the years. The manager had told me that for every one complaint we get verbally from a customer, ten to twenty customers had thought the same complaint valid, but did not have the energy to actually bring it to our attention.
Now, I had a question: if this was true about cold coffee being served or way too crispy french fries going out unchecked, then could this be true about my BA Everywhere experience? If that rapper actually projected his question about BA through a microphone to a room full of people, including a group of reporters from a major newspaper doing a piece on the downtown open mic scene, than did that mean that ten to twenty other people had thought the same question, "Who is Bob Avakian?"
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