Hello friends!


Here is a quick update: 

• The JUST GIMME INDIE ROCK! movie trailer is complete and ready to submit to potential executive producers/financiers. Until we have all the rights to the historic footage, we can't post it publicly, but we can email the link to individuals. Please contact Producer/Director Brad Katz at aristokatz@gmail.com or communications manager amykatz@justgimmeindierock.com if you or someone you know would be interested in seeing the trailer and coming on board as a major funder!
• We have some exciting interviews lined up with your favorite indie bands: clips coming to you soon!
• We are considering running another Kickstarter campaign. Asking friends, family and strangers for $$$ to support our dream, especially when Indie Rock may not have been their thing, is a hard thing to do. Yet, spreading our love and appreciation for this genre is largely what this film is all about. Our first campaign brought in amazingly generous pledges of nearly $10,000. Yet, it took awhile to get the word out and so we didn't raise all $75,000, which means we weren't able to accept any of the donations (one of the drawbacks of the kickstarter.com fan funding site.) Yet, in the last few months, we have had 11,000 people visit this blog alone; thousands more have viewed our clips on youtube.com of the exclusive interviews we did with  Merritt, Barlow and the Submarines (scroll down for earlier posts to see these.) The majority of visitors to these sites found us after our fundraising campaign ended. Your continued attention and support keeps us going emotionally. Now, if only we can find some serious money, we can launch full speed ahead into non-stop production! 

MORE SOON!

VISIT OUR KICKSTARTER PAGE TO SEE THE NEWEST JGIR VIDEO & BECOME A PRODUCER!

www.indierockmovie.com

JGIR! INDIE INDEPENDENCE MONTH CONCERT SERIES KICKSOFFS IN HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA

HUGE THANKS TO VOLUNTEER CONCERT PRODUCER NATHAN BARNETT FOR ORGANIZING FIVE LOCAL FUNDRAISING INDIE ROCK MUSIC CONCERTS! 

Video: "Or the Children's Crusade" plays "Comfort"

JGIR! CONCERT SERIES, JULY 2011 

July 9th : 1302 Wells Ave. Huntsville, AL 35801 : 7pm

Trees and Democrats presents:

Alex Wright
The Detestable D. Bramble
Helen Keller’s Ukulele

July 10th :  1304 Stevens Ave. Huntsville, AL 35801 : 8pm

The Peter Cat presents:

Blac Bloc
Iron Hands
Panther Modern
Oto Benga
Exalted Ruler 1998


July 15th : Option Friday!

1304 Stevens Ave. Huntsville, AL 35801 : 7pm
The Peter Cat presents:
Lizard Nixon
Four Mile Circus
Nick Robey


2020 Sewanee Rd. Huntsville, AL 35801 : 8pm
Helen Keller’s Ukulele presents:
Sam McElroy
Freeman Gray
Colin Bugbee

July 27th : 1304 Stevens Ave. Huntsville, AL 35801 : 7pm

The Peter Cat presents:

Lafayette
Hawking’s Horse
or The Children’s Crusade 

IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE ANYWHERE NEAR HUNTSVILLE, PLEASE STOP IN TO SUPPORT THESE UP AND COMING BANDS & JGIR! We'll post links to the participating bands videos/sites shortly, and showcase each concert on the www.justgimmeindierock.com website. 

Other shows are currently being planned across the country! If you'd like to help organize one, or several, please contact us ASAP!

Kickstarter.com campaign has launched!

If you read my last post, then you have been waiting a good long time now for that promised opportunity to part with your dollars and fork em over to JUST GIMME INDIE ROCK!  Well the wait is over, you can start giving now!  As your humble host says in our KICKSTARTER.COM pitch video: "Give till it hurts, and spread the pain across Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest!"  See that video, read our plea, give and share at www.indierockmovie.com

Kickstarter is a fan funding site open to all creative projects, not just films, and it's quickly becoming as ubiquitous as google is for search or youtube for video.  Its a wonderland of innovation and ideas that draws millions of altruistic "fans" to their site just for a chance to donate a few dollars and see the projects they love become a reality.   We are very excited to be part of what they have going on, it is a perfect representation of the indie/ DIY ideal, and a perfect fit for JUST GIMME INDIE ROCK!  If you're not familiar with Kickstarter or fan funding their site explains it way better than I can, just check out their FAQs or click around and it becomes apparent really fast how it works.  We hope you will give, but just as important, we hope you will spread the word as far and wide as you can.  The more places people can learn about JUST GIMME INDIE ROCK! and our Kickstarter.com campaign for fan funding, the more likely we will get the money we need to make the documentary of our generation a reality! 

I just launched today, May 25th and we are starting to email our friends, family, and colleagues.  We hope to hit some kind of momentum in the next few weeks, and of course,  the idea is to go insanely viral before our campaign is up.  Ill be blogging about our progress, thanks for your interest, and as always, we appreciate your thoughts, ideas, replies here at indierockdoc.com- they will ultimately help shape the future of indie rock history...

A message from your blogsmith

JUST GIMME INDIE ROCK began its life over a decade ago when I produced a television segment called “The Kids Are All White: The State of Indie Rock 1999 (or whatever the hell you want to call it)”. It featured 90’s indie rock heavyweights Pavement and Built To Spill, cheekily focusing on the confusion around what indie rock was or wasn’t at the time, the differing opinions of the very bands and fans that assembled its world, and indie’s dubious significance as its world seemed to be spinning down at the end of the century.  

At the time, summarizing with “So what is indie rock?  I guess we’ll never know” might have seemed like lazy journalism, a punkish admission that we had just wasted the past eight minutes of your life.  A dozen years later, “never” never seemed more appropriate.  Indie’s world hasn’t faded away but supernova-ed into a much larger celestial body, visible in the bright light of day, from across all corners of the globe.  Yet even as indie rock has evolved and expanded through time and space, our cultural understanding of it remains in the dark ages.  The creation of America’s independent label scene is thirty years behind us, a mainstream pop-culture indie-pop juggernaut stretches out before us, and still it seems the only possible way to approach such a documentary is to once again ask: “What is indie rock?”

The answer to that question is, of course: subjective.  Truly, objectively, uselessly, subjective.
When I say “indie rock” the shape and texture those two words conjure in your mind’s eye depends on where, when, and how you live/ came of age/ experience music and culture.  What indie is, is up to you and the only thing we have to agree on is to disagree.  But does it have to be? If we assemble all those unique individual snowflakes of ideas and perspectives, might they snowball into something grand and singular?  What if we take the 80’s independent label scene, 90’s indie rock, and today’s indie-pop, and view them not as competing ideas, but as beginning, middle, and end?  I don't want to give away all the juicy bits our forthcoming documentary has in store for you quite yet, but I can tell you that when looked at through this wide angle lens, from this vantage point of history, the indie rock landscape is full of revelations and wonder.

Here's a few minutes of interviews we have shot so far. We haven't started editing the documentary yet, but I thought I'd cut something presentable for you folks, as opposed to just posting raw footage. You will see, the ideas start flowing pretty quickly when people are asked to ponder indie rock.  And these are just tiny bits of hours we have shot so far.  We're excited, let us know what you think...

First up is Lou Barlow and a recent live performance from Sebadoh.  Lou was there at the beginning of indie with Dinosaur Jr in the 80's, and then, as Sebadoh, sealed indie rocks fate with the 1991 historical epic Gimme Indie Rock.  The song featured here is Rebound from the Bakesale LP...

Next is one of 90's indie rock's most prolific artists, and least fond of the term "indie rock", Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, Gothic Archies, 6ths, etc...

And then we have the amazing Submarines. These indie rock veterans take us through the ins and outs of working and playing in this strange new land we call Today...

And Ill have a clip up soon from the great Henry Rollins....

If opinions about indie rock are like snowflakes, JUST GIMME INDIE ROCK! is a goddamn avalanche. If you would like to see indie rock given the proper celebration and consideration it deserves, then please help us get the ball rolling.  Contribute your ideas, stories, theories, opinions, diatribes, good wishes, and mean spirited fuck yous (its the interweb, just being realistic) here, on twitter, or facebook.  

Perhaps most importantly, we need your donations.  Indie rock is a grassroots movement, the American do-it-yourself spirit incarnate, the battle of art against a cynical commercial machine, and we choose to forge ahead in that same tradition.  Go to kickstarter.com and truly become part of the JUST GIMME INDIE ROCK! experience.  Spread the word, contribute your thoughts, and donate your dollars to help us tell the epic story of indie and join us in making rock and roll history.

Brad Katz