Frank Zappa And The Vilnius Late Show

Lithuania isn’t and is never likely to be one of Europe’s major markets, with a population of around 3.2 million, but it does have people loath to give up on what they believe is a good idea.

One of the features of the weekend was a visit to the Frank Zappa monument, which is on a side street close to the city centre.

What’s Zappa got do with Vilnius or even Lithuania? Absolutely nothing.

However, a group of Zappa fans including a music journalist and someone who now works in Vilnius City Hall, weren’t deterred by the local authority – which also didn’t grasp Zappa’s connection to Vilnius – opposing the idea of building a monument to him.

They falsified evidence, such as letters they claimed came from Zappa, handwritten lyric sheets they’d received from him and even a signed guitar.

City Hall’s opposition crumbled under this apparent “evidence” of Zappa’s apparent closeness to the city and a bust was unveiled in 1995, the world’s first Zappa monument. It’s a bronze cast of Zappa’s head on top of a stainless steel pole.

Most of those involved in the scam were also responsible for the funding of the Zappa monument that was unveiled in his home city of Baltimore in 2010.

The opening address of the Vilnius Music Week conference came from Algirdas Kaušpedas, a member of Antis, arguably the country’s first major rock act.

Over time the band’s name morphed into AntiS, with the capital S on the end apparently signifying the act was anti-Soviet.

Although this was a dangerous tag to have in the mid-’80s, when there was a very heavy KGB presence in Lithuania, it increased the band’s popularity because by that time most of the population was anti-Soviet.

A few hours after his opening address, Kaušpedas was presented with the freedom of the city of Vilnius by local mayor Arturas Zuokas.

Zuokas is a colourful character and last August gained an international profile when a Swedish TV news story about his novel method of dealing with unlawful parking went global.

Bloomberg and social-networking sites also carried film of him driving a tank over a Mercedes that had been left in the city’s cycle lane.

To encourage people to leave their cars at home he also instigated a scheme to supply the city with 600 free bicycles. The idea was that people got on one of the bikes and pedaled off to wherever they needed to go, and then left it for someone else to use.

The upshot of this was that all 600 bikes disappeared from the streets of Vilnius within 48 hours.

Despite the undoubted charm of this tiny Baltic state, there must be a question over whether it can sustain its own annual music business gathering. The first was bolted on to Vilnius’s annual “City Days,” which has free concerts staged in the major squares around the city centre.

It’s true that near neighbour Estonia – which has a population of only 1.3 million – has successfully grown Tallinn Music Week over the last four years, but President Toomas Ilves is a keen music fan and the event has received government backing.

Vilnius Music Week organiser Lauras Luciunas says the Lithuanian government doesn’t have that sort of money, which meant the first Vilnius Music Week happened because his team attracted sponsorship from major corporates including the country’s independent TV channel.

Latvia, the third Baltic state and with a population of a little more than 2 million, used to stage a similar event called Fort Riga, but that fell by the wayside over a decade ago.

The argument that the three countries should take it in turns to stage an annual Baltic Music Week is unlikely to find much favour in the region, although their combined population of 6.5 million is less than that of cities such as London, New York or Moscow.

Georgia, which has 4.6 million people, is reportedly starting its own Music Week in 2013. Maybe similar plans are afoot in Belarus, Ukraine or even Azerbaijan.

It’s hard to see how so many small territories in roughly the same region can each run their own programmes and attract international delegates to all of them.

The size of the Lithuanian market was best summed up by local indie label chief Vaidas Stackevicius, who told his session that the country’s top-selling acts would struggle to shift 5,000 units.

His electronic label, which is called Silence, also stages an annual arena concert featuring several of its acts. It has pulled as many as 4,000 people and makes more money than the label makes in a year.

Through necessity Stackevicius has built a 360-degree business model and is also agent and promoter for the Silence roster, although running an indie label in Lithuania still looks to be an expensive hobby.

There were other discussion sessions including one with former Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner, another on the future of music journalism, plus panels on how to make a good song for radio, a case study of Brainstorm (a successful Latvian act), and a discussion on the general state of the Baltic market.

The main problem with the panels, which could be down to a first-year glitch, was that they didn’t run to the timetable. On the first day the sessions due to start at 4 p.m. were barely under way by 5 p.m. At times it was difficult to figure when things were going to happen.

However, this is likely to be viewed as nothing more than a technical hitch by a group of Lithuanians trying to build a monument.

Vilnius Music Week was Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.