THE GENIUS OF IDIOCY

Forums spell big crowds for Lafayette bands.

Making a lasting mark on your local music scene takes some doing. If you want your name repeated after you are gone, you better rock and rock hard. Long after Told by an Idiot, an admittedly short-term project, is kaput, chances are that name will remain stitched in the memories and bookmarks of many a Lafayette musician and fan alike.

Even before there was a Told by an Idiot, there was the beginnings of Toldbyanidiot.com, an all-forum site that created a Tower of Babel in Lafayette's underground music scene. In this one site, voices in languages as diverse as hardcore punk, progressive rock and ska all come together to be heard. With a member count closing in on 300, there are close to 13,000 posts (52 a day) and around 6,000 unique visitors a month. In the forums, 20-plus bands operate their own forums. Told by an Idiot recruited the first few, but the majority approached them. In the more generalized forums, bands plan gigs and plot semi-clandestine music festivals.

The site, originally named grendelsbluesmachine.com, is the brainchild of the band's guitarist Paul Darby and the two band members he left Grendel's Blues Machine with - guitarist and vocalist Justin Guidry and drummer Austin Keller. What's more impressive than what a guest will see on the site is what they will not find. When it came to promoting the band, Darby ventured a new tactic then, throwing up audio clips, a bio and a few stale rock poses.

"The Web site was entirely my doing ... that was my evil plan," says Internet entrepreneur and University of Louisiana at Lafayette student Darby, who put the site up at least a month before the band's three members shed a few members of Grendel. "Basically, what it amounts to was we are all busy guys. We were in a band before and we were all busy guys before, but we didn't really have any connections. We didn't really know anybody in the scene. The idea of going around flyering the entire town didn't really appeal to us. So I had this evil genius plan to basically just draw everybody to us, get them all to interact with the music scene."

The trees and lamp posts were safe, but Told by an Idiot did hand a few advertisements to a few people around town, letting the site take off on the pre-existing spoken network of musicians and fans. After the site launched, the trio met various members of Lafayette's underground rock scene and started building relationships. Before the site, they did not know the Frames of Reference; now they share a roomy storage shed with them.

"The idea behind it was to get everybody in the community together. Of course, an obvious by-product of that was everybody in the community would also know who we were," continues Darby.

Their scheme worked. At their first gig, they played to a solid crowd. Says former anthropology major Keller, "I was pretty pleased to see the enthusiasm of getting something like this together. There has been stuff around Louisiana that tried to work along the same lines. They just have done the Phoenix thing with no rebirth, burn really bright then crumbling really quickly."

What could have also led to their successful gigs and respect among fellow musicians is their unique approach to their music. For those who don't follow the Bard, Told by an Idiot is a Macbeth reference and a name of a paper Guidry, an English and history major, penned on Whitman and existentialism. "That soliloquy from Macbeth is probably the first existential type writing we have in the English language." At first, Guidry wanted to name their first song after the quote, but Keller says he thought it made a better name for a band and Darby says he thought it made a great name of a music forum.

The name is indicative of their musical styling. As heavily influenced by T.S. Eliot as the mix of progressive rock and surf that provides their musical backdrop, one of their first sets sprang out of a five-song suite based on movements in "Wasteland."

Despite the fervor they launched with, admittedly the site eclipses the girth of the band. "We play orgasmic spurts," says Keller. "We will not play for a month and half, then we will play five gigs in five days."

Sadly enough, this could be the prime of their tenure together. With the fall approaching, Guidry looks to Baton Rouge for furthering his education, as will Darby in another year. Although they say they will play as Told by an Idiot, they disclose it will not be as much as it is now.

"As far as the relative size of Told by an Idiot, the site and the band, obviously, these guys are more or less 100 percent committed to the band, and I have my loyalties torn a little bit," says Darby. "To put it as bluntly as possible, we've got what we needed to out of the site. It helped us build the community. It helped us build the fanbase. The site is definitely going to be bigger than us no matter what. And I'm perfectly fine with that. The point is, had the site not existed, there is no way in hell we would have had nearly as big of crowds for any of our gigs."

Guidry and Keller agree, but they do wonder what Told by an Idiot would have been without Toldbyanidiot.com. Guidry hopes it would have blown up just the same, he says, but Keller confesses, "It would have been much more of a struggle."

As for why not do more upfront promoting of the band, the answer is clear to Guidry.

"I think for me, at least, the biggest reason it makes sense not to do it is because we really don't want to immediately impress you that, while you are on this site, this is a site for Told by an Idiot," Guidry says. "We really want to give the impression this is a site for everybody and that Told by an Idiot just happens to share a name. We have a forum just like everybody else."