Scream like you mean it

Beneath the Midtown Hilton's three-tiered chandeliers that shower its marbled lobby and its wall-to-wall carpeting in dim warm lighting, the handfuls of people anxiously milling around discussing music seems anachronistic and misplaced.

The fans, label reps and bands who have come to register for the beginning of the four day Music Marathon - dressed in faded denim, vintage leather boots and homemade shirts - seem to have been transplanted from another world, another time.

Theirs is not this place.

No, they've come to this 6th Avenue tower to register for passes that will take them to wooden barrooms and underground dives light years from the clean glass storefronts and buildings that spike towards the sky for football fields of distance.

Tables and booths have been arranged conference-style, offering free merchandise and information about products and publications. A stage stands in the middle, surrounded by kids sitting at tables waiting for friends to arrive so the nighttime revelry can begin. Glances dart about at individual festival badges scanning to see where others have come from, what they are bringing to the table.

The thousands of dedicated fans from San Francisco State and NYU - and radio stations all the way in between - have driven through the night in crowded vans or dropped hundreds to fly in. Now they wait anxiously for a different excitement - the normal Manhattan bustle run through a fuzz peddle and routed into the amplifiers and microphones that will grind throughout the night among hyperactive listeners desperate for something new.

Thursday, 12:15. Warsaw, 261 Driggs Ave., Brooklyn

Arthur Lee returns to the five-foot wooden stage still dressed in his black top hat, his tight black jeans and his yellow cowboy boots. Drenched in sweat and smiling, the frontman for the legendary acid rock band, Love, simply waves and introduces his newest song, appropriately titled "Rainbow In the Storm," to a roar of fans who have waited eagerly for the day when he would return again from the artistic dead.

He laughs, adjusting his microphone cord, musing that the event feels sort of historic.

As the trumpets and string section start their staccato runs, the lights glare over row after row of a crowd that spans generations. The garage rock revolution - what the New York Times Magazine has called the "Neo-Seventies" - has kept the band's reputation alive, though the last album was released thirty years prior.

Old and young, the fans happily sway as one unit under the psychedelic patterns climbing over the white walls and the arched ceiling 20 feet overhead. Most look alike despite the generation gap; clad in versions of faded denim and leather that became uniform in the rock 'n' roll popularized over the last five decades.

Most, if asked candidly, would also agree that rock 'n' roll has lost something with the RIAA lobbying, the commercialism and homogenization of a radio sound that has become so powerful that little else seems possible.

Among the Warsaw's atmosphere of sauerkraut and imported beer, the crowd seems able to live and let live, content to dance - forgetting what has been lost and simply agreeing that, even now, not all has been lost this cold night in Brooklyn. Here in New York they hope the sacredness might transcend, slip through the cracks of the marketers and wind up in records from their contemporaries. Music that might once again mean something.

No city is more appropriate for a large-scale music celebration that highlights the music that defines people's lives. New York City truly never sleeps, tuned to a soundtrack that has no end. Open the doors to the subway and in with the commuters comes a transplanted Mariachi band. The music pours into the train like water over a broken floodgate.

Each borough is dotted with venues that have over the years created their own scene which has made resulting waves across the world. CBGB's on the Lower East Side. Maxwell's in Hoboken.

This is why the Music Marathon has remained here since its inception over two decades ago. The symbiosis is this: New York provides reason enough to lure fans from all over the country eager for new music, and the festival provides the opportunity to visit all the places in the city where one's idols grew up playing.

Nor is a place so suited for a festival of people who have dedicated a significant portion of their lives to keeping music alive no matter the cost. The five boroughs of New York have birthed a thousand sonic revolutions - from the Ramones to Run DMC, the New York Dolls to the Strokes - with the efforts of producers, musicians and fans who knew only when they started that something was missing.

So it is too with those at the Marathon, which is largely a conference for those already invested somehow into independent music, a genre rife with political overtones.

Making any record outside of the dominant shareholders of the multi-billion dollar industry is inherently political, and the those at the Marathon know that - in indie rock at least - the music that is produced cannot be separated from how it is produced.

Thus, the daytime is all business, and if the festival works, it works because it is holistic, combining shows at night with informative conferences starting early in the day.

Those at the festival interested in new information and strategies about how to make the nighttime magic happen by themselves tread back to the conference rooms at the Hilton nursing hangovers and drinking coffee.

In the hotel's multi-sectioned conference space, panels about using contemporary media to promote new bands follow "talkshops" about when to get a manager. Workshops on how to set up out of town gigs sit next to discussions with those who have gone through the same process, sharing tips and giving advise about the pitfalls of a very tricky business.