Taylor Morden, creator of the Eugene Rock Music Web site, has been playing music in Eugene long enough to remember better days in the city’s music scene.
“When I started playing music here around ’98-’99, there was more of a local scene,” he said. “There was a really good vibe about everything and then in 2001-02, everything sort of went downhill.”
Morden, a 23-year-old University multimedia design major and seven year veteran of the Eugene music scene, created a local music Web site, www.eugenerockmusic.com, as a cohesive resource for local bands and anyone interested in local music.
“It’s been fairly successful,” Morden said. “At the very beginning, I made the bands’ page and I put on the bands that
I knew.”
What began as a design assignment for class quickly blossomed into a much bigger project. Morden began seeking out local bands and asking them for biographical information for the Web site. Now there are more than 100 different bands on the site, which also contains a calendar of local shows, a message board, and lists of venues, labels, recording studios and other pertinent information.
And what began as a Web site is becoming a local entity. Morden compiled a $2 CD of different local bands, which has sold between
200 and 250 copies, and a second compilation is in the works. In addition, Eugene Rock Music now hosts monthly local music showcases at the WOW Hall, the third of which will take place March 4.
“They’re five bucks to get in and it takes 80 people to break even on the show cost,” Morden said. “The last few we’ve had over 200 people come.”
Morden gives the extra profits — usually $600 to $700 — to the WOW Hall, which is used for maintenance costs not covered by the cover charge for its regular shows.
“We get up to four or five local bands that wouldn’t normally get to play a nice stage, we get to give them a show every month and the WOW Hall gets to fix everything that’s broken and keep themselves running efficiently,” he said.
Morden currently plays in two bands, alterEGO and F. Capone, and has a lot of experience on and off the stage. He has been involved in many aspects of the music scene, including promoting and volunteering at the WOW Hall. Morden figured that his experiences could help new bands with two of the main problems in the local music scene: show attendance and the lack of all-ages venues.
“Bowling for Soup just came to town and I had to work at that show and it was completely sold out,” Morden said. “A good local band would play the next day and there would be 10 people there. That’s backwards. The people in this town don’t really appreciate all the local talent that there is.”
Morden added that there are few dedicated all-ages venues.
“There’s just bars,” he said. “And it’s not very fun to play at bars.”
Ron Bullard, who was a member of the now-defunct Courtesy Clerks and is the current drummer in the Sawyer Family, echoes the sentiment.
“Basically, you have the WOW Hall or you have a party, and for not being 21 that sucks because you know you can’t go out and see a band,” Bullard said. “If you’re 21, you’ve got probably five or six clubs on the weekends that you can see live music at, but if you’re 20 you got to wait for the right show to come at the WOW.”
Morden’s main goal in creating Eugene Rock Music was to help unify the scene and increase support for local music.
“I remembered when there was a better scene, when there was a better atmosphere for playing music in this town, and I wanted to try to bring that back and do things to help out the younger bands,” he said.
“It’s hard to get gigs, it’s hard to get people to listen to your music, and I thought maybe I was in a position
after all this time and all the connections that I have to do something
to help.”