Some folks were not made for retirement. Linda Walker, 77, spent decades behind the scenes of the music business in Atlanta but for the last eight years she has been front and center with her all-female band, The Vintage Vixens.
Her entrée to the music business was purely happenstance. In 1981, she was working as a reservations manager at a popular hotel and club in Hollywood, FL, where many of the musical acts of the time performed. When she told her friend Bill Pinckney of the original Drifters that she was moving to Atlanta, he suggested she see if she could line up some work for the group. He’d tell her what to say.
“He wrote up a script for me, and I made some calls,” she remembers. “I got them some gigs at a couple of country clubs. He told me to get a business license because I was now his booking agent, and he was going to pay me a commission.”
Walker had business cards made up and started handing them out. “I never looked back.”
Boomer party habits change
Over the years, Walker’s business flourished until she started noticing some changes in audiences’ entertainment habits about 20 years ago.
“I used to book a couple dozen bands for New Year’s Eve parties,” she explains. “Then people wanted DJs, and then it slowed down more. As people have aged, they have become less inclined to go out and party.”
What Walker discovered was that many in the Boomer demographic were moving to retirement communities “and it’s easier to party where you live.”
When the pandemic hit in 2020 and there were no events and no bookings, Walker says she discovered she liked not working so hard. Now she schedules just the Vixens and Mother’s Finest, a funk/rock band founded in 1970.
In fact, keeping the Vixens booked is a big part of her work. “My experience tells me that to keep a band together, you have to have gigs. If not, you just become a rehearsal band. My job is keeping the band on the road.”
Walker got out from behind a desk and in front of an audience after taking guitar lessons at age 70. She says she was “thunderstruck” at how much she loved it. “I started pulling up my favorite tunes on YouTube and taught myself to play them.” Forming a band seemed the next logical step.
When her husband, who is a drummer, declined to join her, she decided an all-female band was the way to go, and searched for band members on Craig’s List. Most of the Vixens have been with her from the very beginning.
“We’ve been very successful – we work a lot,” she says. Band members range in age from 57 to 77 and while the lead vocalist is retired, the rest work either part- or full-time jobs.
The group strives to put on an entertaining show with the stage decorated in 60s décor such as lava lamps. Band members dress in fringy vests, tie-dyes, bell bottoms and flowers in their hair. Sometimes, they have a video in the background with movie clips and famous faces from the 60s. They even have stage names: Star Shine, Moon Child and Wildflower.
“We found our niche audience in the upscale, 55+ communities in the Southeast,” Walker says. “We have a very large set list; we never run out of songs. We do covers because our audience likes to hear the songs as they remember them. We play for them, not us.”
The Vixens will be playing nearby when they take the stage at the Marigold Auditorium in Winterville on March 22. They’ll be playing hits by The Mamas & the Papas, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Drifters, Dusty Springfield, and more.
Musical matchmaker
Troy Aubrey can now join AARP. The long-time Athens booking agent for, most notably, Athfest, celebrates turning 55 and his 25th year lining up music for the iconic music festival.
“On one side you have the artists, the agents, managers, music and bands, and on the other a club, a festival, a private event,” Aubrey explains. “I’m the guy in the middle that puts the two parts together and makes the magic happen.”
The lifelong music fan has home movies showing him bouncing up and down holding onto his parents’ big stereo console that’s blasting music of the 60s. As a child, he played violin until he got a guitar, and then it was “bye-bye.”
Having bands in high school led to him organizing events for his East Cobb high school senior class, most notably, hiring the band that became the Black Crowes for the 1988 graduation party.
“That was the first real deal I’d ever done,” he recalls. When he joined his older brother at UGA, he continued to play in bands and continued to handle promotion, putting together cassette tapes, photos, and press releases. His brother had started Georgia Booking Associates and when he graduated, Aubrey took it over while he studied journalism and finished his degree in 1994.
Booking bands evolved into managing bands. Over nearly two decades he would finance albums, raise money for studio time, find transportation for tours, add employees to the team, line up club dates around the country, work with entertainment attorneys, and travel to Europe for band residencies in Paris and Madrid.
Then the industry began to change and evolve from CDs to downloads and then to streaming.
“It became too difficult to make money with recordings,” he explains. “Bands had to tour constantly, and it wears them down.” With marriage and children, Aubrey turned to a full-time job booking for the local venue then known as The Melting Point, now The Foundry.
Following the pandemic, Aubrey continued in the booking business on his own. He describes being a talent buyer as a “one-off” that keeps him fresh, developing new events and working with nonprofits to produce fundraising concerts. Now, as Aubrey Entertainment, he’s able to hire staff, provide jobs, and keep money locally. He’s become familiar with all types of music that weren’t his own “go-to” sound, ranging from hip-hop and smooth jazz to indie rock and blue- grass. In fact, he’s organized 96 concerts with smooth jazz afficionado Dwayne Segar, and has big plans for the 100th concert this year.
“I wanted to take what I knew to as many venues as I could and place the artist in the right venue with the right audience,” he says. “Initially, I was hesitant about booking tribute bands but in working at The Melting Point, I came to understand that people want to hear what they know and just enjoy a night of entertainment.”
“I bring joy to a lot of folks in the 50-to-80 age range. I love seeing folks come out and enjoy living life instead of sitting at home.”
A conversation about music
Marlene Stewart had been around the entertainment business at various times during her working life, ranging from television producer to record store owner. When she retired from the insurance business four years ago, she knew she wanted to be involved with the Athens music scene somehow.
“I love music, and I learned interviewing skills as a TV producer so the idea of a podcast kept bubbling up,” she says. The only problem was she didn’t have any of the technical skills for producing a podcast.
A podcast is described as the streaming age’s answer to radio. Essentially, it’s a digital audio file you can download to a phone, laptop, or computer or listen to on the internet. Podcasts are typically episodic. Stewart’s idea was to talk to local musicians about their music, their careers, and their lives, and to share these conversations with not just Athens’s residents but also far and wide given the city’s international reputation for musical ferment.
She’s titled the show, “AthCastMusic: The Music of Athens, Ga. Now and Then,” and features established artists and new talent. As she has learned the technical aspects of podcast hosting and distribution, she’s been working with Tweed Recording Audio Production School where she records the interviews, and then guides the editing process with an intern from UGA’s music business certificate program. So far, she has done three seasons and 34 interviews, which can be accessed through Spotify, Apple, RSS.com and other podcast directories.
Stewart’s proud of her passion project, noting that as word has spread, musicians are asking to be interviewed. Recently celebrating the 18th anniversary of a kidney transplant, she says she’s “living a grateful life.”
