Craig Marquardo has been accused of being, and not being, a lot of things, but give him this: his enthusiasm for the Portland Music Awards, his most recent brainchild, is 100% authentic. Now in its third year, the 2010 installment of the PMAs will take place this Thursday at the Crystal Ballroom, and though the event is still in its infancy, the number of ballots submitted, according to Marquardo, has increased exponentially since year one. Does this mean the fledgling award show has attained the legitimacy its controversial founder envisions for it? Marquardo himself doesn’t have an answer, but in a recent conversation with melophobe, he explains his vision for the PMAs, what they can become, and why you should care.
melophobe: What was your initial concept in starting the Portland Music Awards?
Craig: The whole notion behind the show was that, as much as Portlanders love to talk about their great music scene, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of respect within the Portland music scene for a lot of the artists that are here. There doesn’t even seem to be a whole lot of knowledge about the music that’s here. You can’t read the Willamette Week or the Mercury or the Oregonian to really get a good sense. It usually depends on tastes in music. There are bands who are in classical music or blues or jazz who just don’t have the mass market appeal. They’re not going to sign record deals, they’re not going to make a million dollars, they may never ever play music for money fulltime, because they just can’t sustain themselves financially because of the type of music they play. So it gives an opportunity to shine a light in an area most people don’t get to see.
melophobe: Do you have any success stories with that?
Craig: Well, look at a guy like Chris Margolin, who was nominated for Best Male Artist this year. He was just on AM Northwest last week. The guy’s a school teacher. It was the first time he’s ever been on television. It was the first time he’s had any kind of real press. And he’s excited. If he doesn’t win, then he’s had a lot of firsts, and a lot of things that happened to him because of being involved in the nominations.
melophobe: What do you see in Portland versus other music scenes?
Craig: There are markets that a really good band can dominate, the problem is that when a really good band in Cleveland starts blowing the doors off, they move to New York. But if you’re a record label and you say, “We want to sign the best band in Portland”? Yeah, good luck with that. You go to other cities that don’t have that strong of a market, then there’ll usually be that consensus.
melophobe: Then what’s the upside?
Craig: Well, you can be assured if there’s that many bands then there’s a hell of a lot of good players around here.
melophobe: You’ve said you were going to give yourself five years on this project and see how it went. What’s your progress report as of year three?
Craig: I would say that it’s much better than anticipated, but that said, I didn’t really know what year three was going to look like. I know what year one was, and I have in mind what I’d like year five to look like. This year is the first year we’re going to break even. I lost $20,000 in the first year, and then last year I lost $12,000. This year, in September, I created the Portland Arts Foundation, of which I’m the Executive Director. The Foundation is a nonprofit organization that will promote arts in Portland, and this event is one of several that we’re going to do.
melophobe: What are you looking forward to most about the 2010 show?
Craig: There’s a number of surprises that we’re planning for this show. There’s an audio/video component that’s pretty fantastic. There’s a few surprise guests that we’re going to bring out that are really going to be phenomenal, and you’ll know as soon as it happens, you’re gonna say, “that’s what he was talking about.”
melophobe: Any last thoughts?
Craig: Portland won’t see many events like this—Portland as a community tries to shun this type of image. We’re independent, we do our own thing, we’re free thinkers, we don’t care about celebrities, we grow our beards and have our little funny hats . . . but that’s not really true. That’s the image that we put out, but we still watch reality TV shows, people still buy People Magazine. So people do care, and we pretend that we don’t and we can shun it all we want, but it’s because those things weren’t about us. And this one is about us. This one gives Portland an opportunity to be the spotlight.