Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has voiced his support of a pilot program that seeks to modify parking spots near a handful of music venues as designated zones for bands to load and unload equipment.
Translated: Seattle is trying to make being a musician in Seattle less of a hassle.
Boston should adapt a similar program immediately, if not yesterday.
For those unaware, instruments aren’t exactly light. The only thing heavier than a guitar riff howling through an amplifier is an amplifier itself. Musicians know this. They’re tasked with lugging those bad boys – and other instruments that are also not at all featherweight – in and out of venues every night, quite often through snow, or other crappy weather.
This can be hard in a city like Boston where parking worry-free for more than five minutes at a time is a gigantic, unmitigated pain in the ass. Not to mention, leaving a van loaded with expensive equipment more than a block away could create its own worries for obvious reasons.
Should the city and music venues work together on a program similar to the one in Seattle, Boston would prove that it not only is devoted to the arts the way it claims to be, but that it understands even some of the smallest minutiae that impacts artists for better or worse.
After all, this is the same city that not long ago thought it necessary to stop mosh pits from happening.
[Photo Credit: Bradford Thomas/truth revolt]
