Another great article

No new news: we're still waiting for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals to issue a briefing order so we can get on with the appeal after the voluntary mediation process yielded no results. But there's a great new article on house concerts that includes an interview with me as well as with several other house concert hosts. Check it out at Musician's Atlas

New article discusses house concert issues

The current issue of .::dragonfire::. has an extensive article describing the situation faced by Greg and Debbie Ching and their Boulder-based Aspen Meadows House Concerts. I was also interviewed for this article, as were other house concert hosts, and our perspective is included in the article.

Visible means of support

I've had some great responses to the opening of the Music Right Next Door Legal Fund, and I thank all of you who have been so supportive. Financial support is wonderful, of course, but now there's another way you can help: you can tell other people about this attempt to restrict our Constitutional rights and encourage them to read up on the details and support our efforts. My wonderfully creative friend Ivan Stiles has created the great icon you see here and donated its use to us. What we'd love is if you'd take that graphic, add it to your own web site or blog, and link to this blog or to the MRNDLF site at http://livingroommusic.googlepages.com . You can copy the icon from this page, or download it from http://pages.prodigy.net/cah/concert/graphics/MusicNextDoor200.jpg . And if you do that, please drop me a note to let me know that you're on board, and I'll periodically put up a list of all our friends with backlinks.

On the news front, no new news from our recent mediation session with O'Hara Township. But there's now another family that's running into very similar unconstitutional restriction of their rights to host parties with live music in the Boulder, Colorado area. Greg and Debbie Ching recently lost their appeal of a cease and desist order that prevents them from hosting a party with live music if and only if people chip in to help pay for the music. Greg tells me that the commissioners have determined that it's perfectly ok for them to host a Valentine's Day party or a Halloween party that has live music, but if people chip in for the party, it's no longer legal. I'm still scratching my head and wondering exactly how the commissioners expect to enforce such a restriction. Suppose the Chings host a May Day party with live music, don't set out a basket or ask for donations, but individuals who attend the party privately stuff cash into the refrigerator, the sugar bowl, or Greg's jacket pocket when he's not looking. Then a neighbor complains about the party and an officer shows up asking "Excuse me, where did you get the money to pay your performer?" If Greg says "From my checkbook" (because he wrote a check) is he telling the truth? If he says "I found it in my pocket and my sugar bowl" has he violated the cease and desist order? And (most important) do the local authorties even have the right to ask that question if there's no search warrant or any reason to expect that the money came from an "illegal" source? Check out Greg and Debbie's web site and read some of the linked articles -- it would be pretty funny stuff if it wasn't so sad.

Music Right Next Door Legal Fund

I'm going to skip a few chapters here and note that our Federal Civil Rights complaint against O'Hara Township is currently on appeal to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. As you might imagine, we've spent quite a bit on lawyers and are anticipating that this will continue for some time. So now we're asking for help from you. We've established the "Music Right Next Door Legal Fund" to collect contributions from the general public to support the ongoing litigation. The web site contains detailed information about the fund including the agreement that details how the funds will be administered. We've registered the name of the fund as a fictitious name, hired an independent accountant to collect and administer the funds, and a voluntary filing with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Charitable Organizations is pending. This is serious business, and we want to make sure that everyone who contributes knows exactly how their contributions are going to be used.

We would appreciate it if everyone who cares about ensuring that local zoning laws respect our Constitutional rights at least enough to permit a citizen to host a party with live music in his/her home would contribute. Thanks again for your support up to this point, and in advance for your future support.

Three More Great Articles

In the May 21, 2006 New York Times:

Move the Furniture, the Band Is Here

In the February 12, 2006 Omaha World Herald:

House concerts offer music, friendship in cozy setting

In "The Wave" Magazine:

Open House

No time to write in detail about the status of our complaint, but suffice it to say that things are progressing and I expect we'll have a chance to sit and talk in the near future. Sure would beat watching lawyers trade briefs....

Entering the Zone

The day of our appeal hearing in front of the Zoning Hearing Board in April, 2003, my friendly volunteer advisors, Peg and Tom, came over to the house to help me strategize. Ideally we would have liked the ZHB to overturn the cease and desist order, but we also recognized that this was not likely given the problems with the way the ordinance was written. So the real strategy was to make sure that we got the ZHB to state clearly the basis for the C&D order. It was impossible to tell from the original document exactly what it was that we were doing that constituted a violation of the zoning ordinance. Was it the parties themselves? Was it that these events were "commercial activity"? And if our parties were "commercial activity" what made them such? Would it be possible to hold a house concert party that would not be viewed as a violation of the zoning ordinance? All of these issues needed to be clarified.

The other piece of our strategy was to make clear that we would view any attempt to enforce the C&D order as a violation of our rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the US Constitution. So Peg and Tom helped me craft a statement to the effect that we believed that the order violated our civil rights under the Constitution and that if the ZHB left it in place and the Township chose to enforce it, we would take action to defend those rights. I was instructed to make sure to read this statement into the record before the ZHB took a vote.

The hearing itself was interesting in the way that small town business proceedings are always interesting. The essence of the neighbors’ complaints was that our house concerts were commercial activity that was bringing dangerous strangers and too much traffic into the neighborhood. "Dangerous strangers?" That was an interesting concept. Certainly the people who were coming to our house were strangers to everyone else. But they weren't strangers to us, unless you count someone who we were meeting for the first time because they'd been brought along by someone who we'd invited. And I had to chuckle a bit sadly about the adjective "dangerous" applied to the doctors, lawyers, accountants, computer geeks, writers, teachers and friends of my daughters who tended to populate our parties.

I stood up and talked about what was actually happening in our living room. We were using an e-mail list, jointly maintained by myself and a friend who was hosting similar parties in nearby Mt. Lebanon, to issue invitations. We maintained the list together because we had many friends in common and didn't want them to be bothered with two or more copies of the same invitation -- before we merged our lists, Annie and I had been sending our invitations to each other and re-mailing them to our personal lists. Our merged list had about 400 names on it at the time, and either Annie or I knew everyone on the list by face and name. We always asked people to RSVP so that we'd know how many were coming and could buy food and supplies and set up chairs for the party. We did not do any other advertising. The article in the paper had been a happenstance thing -- the PG reporter was looking for interesting things happening in the area on Superbowl Sunday and a friend had passed along our e-mail about the upcoming "Avoid the Superbowl" party which happened to feature three interesting musicians who had been traveling together across the US doing "The Great American House Concert Tour." He asked for permission to print something about it, and I had given it to him with the proviso that he list "an undisclosed location in O'Hara Township" and our phone number rather than an address. I actually received only three calls as a result of that published item, and none of those who called ended up coming to the party. We did not sell tickets, but we did ask people to throw $10 per person into a basket to help pay for the music.

Others who spoke during the hearing were concerned that because our performers stayed overnight at our house it looked like we might be running a bed and breakfast in our home. We explained that it was true that performers stayed overnight, but since all but a very few who performed in our living room were friends I'd gotten to know well in my other life as a folk musician, we didn't understand why anyone in the neighborhood should have any concerns about us hosting them overnight. They may have been strangers to our neighbors, but they were definitely our friends and we were happy to put them up for a night and feed them. In fact, one of the main reasons we started hosting concerts was to give my musical friends and I an excuse to visit and hang out together in between bumping into each other at summer festivals and workshops. They were traveling, Pittsburgh was along the way, and being able to share their wonderful music with my friends when they stopped to visit was a big bonus and a lot of fun for all.

In response to a question about how I booked performers, I told how several weeks earlier I'd spent a week in a dulcimer workshop with Lorraine Lee Hammonds, a fabulous musician who is well known in the dulcimer world, but hardly at all outside of that small group. Since there were only 10 of us in Lorraine's class, we got to know each other pretty well, and while chatting with Lorraine later in the week I mentioned that if she ever was passing through Pittsburgh, she'd be welcome to stay over with me and do a house concert. We had exchanged contact info, and I fully expected that at some point she'd come to Pittsburgh and my friends would be able to hear the great music Lorraine makes. I concluded by pointing out that nearly all the performers in my living room were musical friends like Lorraine -- I'd played with them, gotten to know them pretty well, and felt comfortable enough with them that I would be happy to welcome them into my home.

The ZHB chairman decided at that point that it was time to take a vote, but it wasn't quite over yet. The ZHB's lawyer added that before they voted, the ZHB members needed to realize that this was not like a request for a zoning variance where they could allow the variance with modifications. They had to either vote to leave the cease and desist order in place or strike it down. He then went on to advise that he saw five things that we had been doing that were not commercial activity in and of themselves, but that he felt taken together indicated possible commercial activity. The five were:

1. Frequency: we had hosted a concert about once a month over the previous six months.
2. Traffic: 30-40 people at our parties meant a lot of cars parked in the street
3. Advertising: the web pages for the concert could be viewed as advertising
4. Publicity: the item in the Post Gazette could be viewed as publicity
5. Ticket sales: the lawyer stated that he could not believe that tossing money into the basket was voluntary, so we must be selling tickets

The lawyer then advised the ZHB to vote to uphold the cease and desist order. I asked for a moment to read my statement about the relationship between the C&D and our civil rights into the record, and did so. The ZHB then took a vote and decided to uphold the cease and desist order. What that meant was that we had to cease holding the house concerts as they were presently constituted.

More about what we did after that shortly.