The Muzak that plays downtown: who’s in charge of it and where does it come from?

    Editor’s note: V1 did an article on this very subject in the Dec. 2003 issue.

Thanks for asking! It comes from a windowless bunker underneath what’s laughingly called the Opera House building (Barstow, Main, and Graham). I say laughingly because if you’ve ever seen a photo of the original Grand Opera House, you’ll know that using that name for this replacement is a cruel joke.

Worse, there was nothing wrong with the Grand. The wrecking ball took a whole week, the building was so massive, so solid, in such perfect shape. It used 350,000 bricks, each roof truss ran 72 feet, its proscenium was the size of a modest ranch home. The lot sat empty for 20 years as if its destroyers, like the Romans at Carthage, had planted salt so nothing would grow there again.

But I digress. The music gets to that basement room from Charter Media at about 80 bucks a month. It’s the same music you can play at home in the 900 channels, meaning downtown could have “Reggae,” “Arena Rock,” or “Musica Urbana.” Downtown chooses “Easy Listening.” I don’t know how you feel about choosing piped-in easy listening. Find it relaxing? Deeply disturbing? (Muzak has been used to keep people from loitering…) Energizing? Enraging? For me, it’s campy retro, a kind of Breakfast at Tiffany’s vibe.

Who, exactly, does the choosing? The Downtown Business Improvement District, or the Downtown BID for short, a 15-member committee of business folks. (The music, and the flowers downtown, are funded by the city budget.) Mainly, as I understand it, the committee leaves the programming up to Dan Goelzer of the Calico Shoppe.

Downtown Eau Claire, Inc. (DECI), a separate but not unrelated arm of the city government does commandeer the system occasionally, playing holiday tunes at the holidays, for example. This Muzak Bunker has a CD player, so a person could play Appetite for Destruction or Rhino Records’ “Scary Sound Effects” at will.

As part of the downtown re-branding effort, DECI hopes to bring the music more into concert with what’s happening. If Bon Iver is playing the State, then play some Bon Iver in the weeks before. If the CVTG is staging “Oklahoma,” play some Rodgers and Hammerstein. If the Drunk Drivers have a gig at the Stones Throw, well, you can probably only push it so far.

Of course we don’t generally think of “background music” as Charter Media. We think of it as Muzak. So I should say, incidentally, the official Muzak now broadcasts from space on a geostationary satellite, which hasn’t helped it survive the challenge of Sirius and XM (each has a “business” division). Muzak is a half-billion in debt, and I’m telling you, the federal government ain’t gonna bail it out.

In your last column, you wrote about all the former groceries in the Luther Hospital area, then said, “Now a guy’s gotta go clear to Mega West.” So, L’Oriental isn’t a grocery store?

It absolutely is. But you miss perhaps an even closer analog, the Kwik Trip just down the block. Sadly or not, convenience stores are really the corner groceries of today. When I wrote that, I meant, Where are you gonna get a brisket, some saltines, a box of kitchen matches, and a bottle of baby oil, all in one stop, as I so often do. And for that, these days, you’re talking a big-box on the outskirts of town.