From the Inside Looking Out is our opportunity to have those involved within the music world tell us a bit about things from their point of view. This time around, we have Daniel Neely from the New York Musicians Index and Archive over at the ARChive of Contemporary Music talking about the NYMIA and the New York State Black Sabbath Covers Project.

At some point during the summer of 2002, my mother-in-law sat my wife, her sister and I down to tell us how she “just loved that Ozzy Osmond and his wife Sharon,” because they took such good care of their kids. It was around the time the Osbournes reality show was getting popular and I think it was her way of being hip with the kids. It was probably the lounge-y version of “Crazy Train” they used for the theme that drew her in. Anyhow, two weeks later, we had finally stopped laughing about “Ozzy Osmond” and it began to dawn on us that Ozzy and his music had become more mainstream than we had realized.

This didn’t strike me as a bad thing. I grew up playing guitar and on occasion–like every adolescent boy with six strings and a dream–my friends and I would get together on Sabbath tunes. In fact, every kid in every band I knew growing up played Sabbath tunes. It was a kind of rite-of-passage that everyone went through. In my work Directing the New York State Musicians Index and Archive (NYMIA), I’ve come to notice that this hasn’t changed, so I started up a little project I call the “New York Black Sabbath Covers Project”. Here’s how it came about.

A couple of years back Bob George, the Director of the ARChive of Contemporary Music came up with an idea to catalog every aspect of the music industry in New York State. He applied for and received a New York State Music Fund Grant to create the New York State Musicians Index and Archive (NYMIA). To build it, he hired Jon, Bryan and me and in the last year and a half we’ve built a database that will facilitate the business of making music in New York. It’s a resource all musicians should know about.

An important part of this work has consisted of building the ARChive’s social network on MySpace so that when we finally launch the NYMIA (and we’re about there–the site’s now up in beta) we’ll be better able to reach the working musicians out there who we think will want to use it. Spending so much time on MySpace as of late, however, has had the unintended bonus of honing our sense of what’s going on musically in New York right now. Jon (SIT and DIE Co.) and I (The WSHSO) both play in New York bands and have been particularly fascinated by what we’ve heard and quite frankly, we’ve been surprised by some of what we’ve found. Who knew, for example, that Albany’s rock scene was so diverse? Or that there was a wicked cool guitar museum in New Hyde Park? Or that there were SO MANY radio stations out there? Also, there seems to be at least one festival to accommodate basically every musical taste and interest. Sometimes two.

Other things have been less surprising. For example, we sort of expected to find a disproportionate number of publicists living in New York City. We already KNEW that everyone’s a DJ and we could have guessed that there was a correlation between the proximity to magnetic north and the importance of southern rock.

We also could have guessed that Black Sabbath’s songs remain popular choices for cover and tribute bands throughout New York State, but we weren’t prepared to enjoy hearing all of them. Jon and I both love Black Sabbath, and whenever we’d come across a Sabbath cover we’d share it with each other. Some were good, others not so good, but at some point a few months ago we started to bookmark the MySpace pages of bands that played Sabbath’s music and later come back to them for entertainment’s sake.

Then, last week I thought to put them all on a map to see what this sort of visual representation might say about contemporary music making in New York State, and from that the New York Black Sabbath Covers Project was born. Not surprisingly, there are lots of bands in the metropolitan New York area. However, we’re a little surprised we haven’t come across any in western New York and perhaps a little sad that there seems to be no band covering Sabbath in Cortland, New York, the boyhood home of onetime Sabbath front man Ronnie James Dio.

We decided that there HAVE to be more bands out there — we just can’t find them. With this in mind, we’ve set ourself some modest goals: we want to find every band in New York and immediate environs that play Black Sabbath’s music and put them into our map. We want to do this in order to draw attention to the bands that work and play in New York State to say to everyone “check it out, New York’s got a lot to offer.”

But we need help! If you’re reading this and you’re an artist or in a band in New York or active along the New York border of Vermont, Connecticut New Jersey or Pennsylvania and you’ve played a Sabbath song in New York, we want to put you on the map. Style is unimportant — a dance remix of “Iron Man”, jam band grooving on “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”, a hip hop version of “The Wizard”, a dub version of “Sweet Leaf”, a plena version of “War Pigs” — whatever. Have you made a mashup? Great. To be included, go to the New York Black Sabbath Covers Project page, leave a comment on the page describing your band, what city you’re based in (so we can map it properly) and a link to your website or MySpace (where you’ll hopefully have a musical example) and we’ll put you in.

above image found HERE

Visit the New York Black Sabbath Covers Project site.

If you’re a musician who would like to contribute to this feature in the future, please get in touch.