house concerts and 21st century touring

South Florida-based singer, guitarist and songwriter Rod MacDonald has achieved practically everything but fame during a 35-year career filled with detours not usually associated with musicians.

MacDonald has a history degree from the University of Virginia; a law degree from Columbia University, and experience as a correspondent for Newsweek. All fuel his thought-provoking lyrics, which helped his ascension in the Greenwich Village folk scene throughout the 1980s. He’s released nine CDs; toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe, and has more songs, 27, in Smithsonian Folkways’ compiled recordings of its Fast Folk Music Collection than any other songwriter.

In essence, MacDonald, 59, has done everything but become a household name. However, he’s become more than a name in numerous households during the past 15 years, during which time he speculates he’s played more than 100 house concerts.

“I do them all the time now, both in America and overseas,” he says. “For the last three or four years, I’ve probably averaged between 20 and 30 per year, and I really like doing them. They’re popular with people who really just want to sit and listen to the music; people who aren’t concerned with the ’scene’ of standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a rock club. House concerts are a great setting for a singer/songwriter, and being a member of an organization like ConcertsInYourHome.com is also a great way to get a list of the names of people who organize house concerts.”

MacDonald is one of the few singer/songwriters who are able to make a living playing original material while based in cover-happy South Florida, partially because he’s always seen the big picture musically. More than two-dozen other artists have covered his compositions, resulting in additional royalty checks. He sees house concerts as a lasting phenomenon, not a fad.

“House concerts have become popular because they work,” MacDonald says. “They offer an audience for acoustic music something they really can’t get anywhere else — a really quiet environment, and an intimate musical performance, as opposed to a club. Plus, they’re sometimes staged in places where there’s no possibility of there being a club. I often play in really small towns with 30 or so people, and they have a concert a month. Those towns can’t sustain a club. There’s not enough business. So house concerts allow those people to have live music without having to travel an hour to hear it, and it gives them a stronger sense of community through music.”

Now based in Delray Beach, Florida, MacDonald was born in rural Connecticut in 1948. A natural troubadour, he’s since lived in Virginia, Michigan, Georgia, Washington, D.C.; Chicago, New York City and Italy. His wide range of talents took him to separate career crossroads at both the University of Virginia (which he graduated from in 1970) and Columbia University (1973).

“Newsweek hired me to cover the 1969 peace march on Washington, D.C.,” MacDonald says, “and I worked the following two summers for them in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. I started hanging out in the Village while I was attending Columbia in the early ’70s, and was playing in coffee houses all over the city while I was in my last year of law school.”

MacDonald never took the bar exam after graduating from Columbia, deciding to switch his focus to music, the road, and eventually house concerts.

“I spent three of four years hitch-hiking around the country, dropping in on New York occasionally,” he says. “In the late ’70s, I moved back and actually got an apartment in the Village. I was living there when I played one of my very first house concerts, if not the first, in the Log Cabin Concerts series in New Jersey in the early 1990s. A couple there started putting on occasional shows in an old log cabin house, and I was one of the very first people they asked to play. They charged $20, and only allowed 30 people to come, with no microphones allowed. They stopped the series a couple years ago, and by that time, they were up to two shows a day.”

Before relocating to Florida in 1995, MacDonald spent more than 15 years as one of the prolific singer/songwriters in New York City. He co-founded the Greenwich Village Folk Festival; wrote epic compositions like “American Jerusalem” and “Sailor’s Prayer,” and released the classic albums No Commercial Traffic and White Buffalo.

MacDonald hardly came to Florida to retire, though. He formed the Bob Dylan cover band Big Brass Bed in 2002; was a finalist in the 2003 USA Songwriting Competition, and has taught songwriting courses for several years at Florida Atlantic University. His latest two CDs, Recognition and A Tale of Two Americas, have featured politically-charged favorites like “My Neighbors in Delray” and “Terror” that sound right at home in concert next to his earlier gems.MacDonald says that house concerts are the perfect vehicle for such lyric-driven material.”

House concerts have no background noise,” he says. “They’re very quiet, and usually unamplified. It’s very natural; like going to someone’s house where they bring out their guitar and say, ‘Hey, let me play you a song.’ Everybody’s listening, as opposed to a bar, where there’s a built-in level of noise that makes it hard for people to catch the musical subtleties.There’s also casual aspects of a party built into a house concert, which is part of the popularity, I think. There’s often a pot-luck dinner before the concert, and the food’s usually really good. And that gives the patrons the opportunity to meet the artist beforehand.”

MacDonald has also found other value in his house concert experience.

“I was playing a gig recently in Middletown, New York at a place called The Mansion,” he says. “It was for a concert series that takes place in a beautiful old oak lobby of a literal mansion. Great acoustics, and a very nice PA system. But I played three songs, and their PA died. So I stepped away from the microphones, and played and sang totally acoustic for 90 minutes. I think my house concert background made that easy for me to do.”

Perhaps MacDonald’s favorite value in house concerts, though, is the bottom line.

“House concerts generally pay as well or better than club gigs,” he says, “partly because they don’t have any overhead costs. You don’t need a PA; nobody’s paying any rent or selling drinks, there’s no background noise or ASCAP fees, and people sit right in front of you and get what they want — to be able to listen to music without being distracted. And as an artist, you get all the money. The organizers don’t tend to keep any of it, because they don’t want to deal with taxes. It’s a win-win situation for everyone. I think house concerts have filled a legitimate niche in the music business.”

– Bill Meredith, regular contributor to the Palm Beach Post, JazzTimes and Jazziz.

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