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In 2007, Neumos co-owner Steven Severin was determined to keep a rabid bunch of dance fans from tearing down the Seattle venue. Capitol Hill Block Party — the annual three-day festival that takes over the neighborhood — had booked Girl Talk before he blew up on the dance scene, and now the 650-capacity Neumos, which was hosting the performance, was facing an overcrowded show with headliner-sized demand.
“People are outside trying to rip the doors off. We’ve got bicycle barricades pushing people so that they can’t get in,” Severin recalls. “I am standing on the bicycle barricades screaming at everybody to get the f–k away from the building, like, ‘Back off! Nobody’s getting in.’”
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At the time, Severin was only a few years into co-owning Neumos alongside Mike Meckling, current managing owner Jason Lajeunesse and Jerry Everard, who also owns the property and founded the club, originally known as Moe’s Mo’Roc’N Café, in 1992. Seattle entrepreneur Marcus Charles was brought in early on but sold his share of the business to Severin, Meckling and Lajeunesse in 2003, when the venue took on the name Neumos (pronounced New Mo’s).
Despite weighing in at “a buck 65,” as Severin puts it, he was trying to dissuade the thousands of festivalgoers from damaging the then-15-year-old club, only to find the venue’s wall of security guards laughing at him. “They’re laughing because they know if one of these people comes over and pushes me, I’m gonna fall over,” he jokes.
The show went on without issue, but it was not the first or the last time a sold-out performance threatened the venue. Later that same year, Neumos hosted a now-legendary show — the kind everyone in the city recalls attending despite the venue’s minimal capacity — that boasted a stacked lineup of Justice, Diplo and Simian Mobile Disco. The rectangular room was filled to the brim with sweating fans (“It was like an earthquake went off in that place,” according to Severin), and one of the only places from which the owners could get a view was the crow’s nest opposite the balcony, accessible only by ladder. While they were up there, Severin says he noticed the crow’s nest pulling away from the wall and threatening to collapse due to the energy of the jumping, dancing crowd below.
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“We’re like, this is going to fall down. It’s going to kill people. We’re going to get sued, and we are going to lose everything. We are done,” says Severin. “So, we tell [the crowd] to stop jumping. We didn’t get down out of the crow’s nest, because there’s nowhere to go.”
He adds, “The next day we came in and reinforced it so that a metric ton can be up there and it won’t fall down, and we built a spiral staircase [to get to it]. You ask people their favorite Neumos show, and a lot of times people will say that one.”
Despite Neumos’ momentary brush with catastrophe, it’s nonetheless that punk, home-of-grunge ethos that makes the storied venue a perfect fit for Seattle. Over more than 30 years, the venue — housed in the same building that once hosted an auto dealership called Hugh Baird, among other businesses — has hosted countless popular acts, including The Shins, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Iron & Wine, Ben Gibbard, Vampire Weekend, Feist, Cat Power, The Raconteurs, Rilo Kiley, Metric, Damian Marley, El P and Dizzee Rascal.
Neumos
Grace Lindsey
Sitting at the corner of 10th Avenue and East Pike Street, Neumos is an iconic sight in Seattle, with its black brick and painted murals of the famous faces who have graced the stage. The venue helped forge the Capitol Hill neighborhood into the cultural epicenter it is today by building community — not only at its concerts but also through an attached bar called Moe Bar, later renamed The Runaway.
“We did a whole remodel [of the bar] when we stepped in because it had been called the Bad Juju Lounge before and there really was some bad juju in there,” Severin says. The New Orleans-themed bar was transformed into a cocktail lounge with elevated style, complete with fun wallpaper and comfy booths. “[We] made it so it became a destination,” he adds.
Open seven nights a week, the 100-capacity Moe Bar packed its schedule with DJ sets, trivia nights and more. Consistent attendance there also helped Neumos, which benefitted from spillover from Moe patrons who decided to catch one of the venue’s shows on a whim, lured by the low ticket prices: $5 a ticket for a local act and $10 for a national one.
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“That made it so that we were able to get people to come and see some things that they might not have,” says Severin, adding that it also allowed the venue to host acts in “more styles of music, because people would just come and check it out.”
The venue thrived on its eclectic bookings, from hip-hop and punk to country and metal. Among other shows, it hosted Oasis’ first U.S. headlining gig and in 2009 welcomed a 19-era Adele. “She was so nervous and not wanting to go on stage,” Severin says. “Then she comes out and starts singing and everyone is like, ‘What the f–k?’ It was incredible.”
With genres and trends fluctuating in popularity over the three decades of Neumos’ existence, adaptability has been a key to its survival. The attached bar has changed names. In 2012, the owners renovated a below-ground storage space into the 200-capacity Barboza venue. And in 2017, Neumos’ owners updated the main venue with new state-of-the-art lighting and sound systems, and knocked out a wall to create more space at the balcony bar — which resulted in a telling discovery.
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“We did find $5,000 when we ripped [the wall] out. We rip it out and there’s all this f–king cash in small bundles,” Severin says, adding that the money was found behind a beer fridge where he assumes an employee was stashing stolen funds. “Everybody stole from us,” he continues. “I had to fire the same bartender twice.”
Three years after the nearly $1 million in renovations, Seattle was one of the first major cities to enact mass gathering bans as COVID-19 hit the U.S. Like everyone else, Severin believed the shutdown would be over a matter in a weeks. At the time, he got a call from Jim Brunberg, the owner of Portland venue Mississippi Studios, who was reaching out to entertainment and nightlife establishments — including those he regularly competed with for shows — in an effort to determine what everyone was going to do.
Steven Severin
Leigh Sims
After the call with Brunberg, Severin and his wife, Leigh Sims, worked with local businesses to create the Washington Nightlife Music Association (WANMA), which formed Keep Music Live Washington, a coalition that raised more than $1 million in relief funds to support struggling venues statewide with support from artists including Sir-Mix-A-Lot, Brandi Carlile, Macklemore, Kathleen Hanna, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan and Foo Fighters. But with rent, utilities and other expenses remaining due during the shutdown, Neumos and other independent venues still found themselves on the brink of permanent closure.
With so many venues in dire straits, Severin joined calls that eventually launched the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), marking the first time venue owners across the nation came together to collectively fight for federal assistance. Severin took on a government advocacy role — something he had become accustomed to from working with King County officials on behalf of WANMA — and began to fight for what would later become the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant.
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“I spent the pandemic just working. While everybody was learning how to bake bread, I worked every day figuring out how we’re gonna get money to keep our doors open,” Severin says — though he admits there was a point when he believed Neumos would never open again. Then, on one of the NIVA calls, he says that Tom DeGeorge, the owner of Tampa venue Crowbar, “ talked about running through a brick wall for me. He doesn’t know me. We’ve been on a call like five times. He doesn’t know me. And I was like, ’I’m gonna do the same for you.’ Then I was like, ‘I’m gonna save Neumos because this guy wants to save Neumos.’”
By December 2020, NIVA had successfully lobbied the federal government to provide more than $16 billion in relief to independent venues, as well as promoters, theatrical producers, live performing arts organizations, museum operators, motion picture theater operators and talent representatives. According to NIVA data, the funding saved 90% of independent venues from shuttering for good.
Earlier this year, Severin and Sims were able to attend their first NIVA conference in Milwaukee while proudly wearing badges with the Neumos name. “People would walk up to my wife and be like, ‘Thank you for saving my business,’ and my wife would be looking around, like, ‘Who are you talking to?’” says Severin. “Festivals, promoters, music venues, theaters, museums, aquariums, agencies — all those people got money because of the work [NIVA] did. We saved the f–king live music industry.”
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Joe Morrison may spend his days working as a personal injury lawyer at law firm Mullen & Mullen, but by night, he’s an avid music fan hoping to protect the live music scene he has supported and nourished for decades.
Together, Morrison, his partner Shane Mullen and Dallas-based production manager Corey Pond have launched the JAMBALOO Music Prize, offering one artist or group a $20,000 check along with professional recording time, promotional support and industry connections in North Texas. The prize represents the latest expansion of the firm’s JAMBALOO Festival, which debuted last year with 25 free shows across different venues in and around Dallas and Fort Worth.
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The competition is open to any artist or band with more than 50% of permanent members residing in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area; artists can participate by submitting an album with seven or more songs via Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music or Tidal. Fifteen anonymous judges will evaluate the submissions and select 10 semifinalists who will compete to become one of three finalists. The winner will be chosen through a weighted vote by a panel of experts, as well as a vote by music fans.
“We didn’t want it to be a popularity contest, which is what sometimes these things can turn into, but we did want there to be an element of public voting, because success and popularity do matter,” Pond explains.
Three finalists will perform on June 6 alongside a to-be-determined national headliner, with all tickets free to the public. The June showcase will take place at Longhorn Ballroom, a historic Dallas venue once managed by Jack Ruby, infamous for gunning down Lee Harvey Oswald after Oswald shot and killed U.S. President John F. Kennedy near Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. The Longhorn was reopened by Texas promoter Edwin Cabaniss and Kessler Presents in spring 2023 after a multimillion-dollar renovation that included a new 6,500-capacity outdoor amphitheater.
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Besides the $20,000 cash prize, the winner will also win a recording session at Dallas’ Luminous Sound studio with four-time Grammy winner Tre Nagella, as well as featured placement at Josey Records, one of the nation’s largest record stores; a live session recorded at NPR affiliate KXT radio; and an email promotion to 650,000 music fans.
“For a local artist, that [money] could fund an entire new album, that could fund the start of a tour,” says Nagella. “This isn’t like a record deal where they’re beholden to someone — they’re free to use it however they want to use it.”
Mullen & Mullen is also hosting a separate $20,000 venue prize, which was launched after the Fort Worth Music Office reached out about The Cicada, a venue facing closure. The venue prize will become an annual summer competition for independently owned, locally operated music spaces.
“We were looking for a way to kind of give back to the community, but to do it in a fun and unique way,” said Morrison, noting that the firm has invested more than $500,000 in the music initiative so far. “As a personal injury lawyer, who the hell wants to interact with me on social media? It felt better if we could give back in an authentic way where people just see us in a different light.”
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The JAMBALOO Music Prize is part of a broader vision for the Mullen & Mullen Music Project, which aims to support the North Texas music scene year-round rather than through a single annual event. Plans include pop-up shows, educational panels and industry mixers modeled after South by Southwest’s programming.
Last year’s inaugural JAMBALOO Festival featured notable performances, including a set by rising indie artist MJ Lenderman. The festival is strategically scheduled in February, traditionally a slow period for venues and artists.
“Let’s try to take a time of the year that’s traditionally bad for the industry and for artists, and turn it on its head a little bit,” Morrison says.
Dallas-based artists can submit their work at JAMBALOO.live.
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Independent music venue Antone’s has been guaranteed another 50 years in downtown Austin.
On Monday (Nov. 10), the club’s owners announced they had signed a 50-year lease for the venue’s current location on East 5th Street, which will see the iconic space through to its 100th anniversary in 2075.
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The Antone’s brand has been in several locations throughout its history, with its most recent ownership group landing on a former glass depot on the busy East 5th Street. The venue’s current edition, which opened on New Year’s Eve 2015, includes the 400-capacity concert hall, a record shop called Big Henry’s and an event space on its upper floor. The long-term lease includes all three spaces, while the event space and bar will be transformed into an Antone’s museum.
This summer, the venue, which originally opened in 1975, celebrated its 50th anniversary with a commemorative merch collection, a touring show and an anniversary box set that included live recordings from the blues club’s history.
“We’ve got to use this milestone and the achievement of the 50th to switch from surviving to thriving,” Antone’s co-owner Will Bridges tells Billboard. “It’s crazy to think that Antone’s would have a 100th anniversary and by having that long of a term, to just be able to think and plan long term.”
When Antone’s took over its current space, the owners signed a 10-year lease with two five-year options, with Bridges noting the landlord has been nothing but supportive of the venue. However, the ownership group saw an opportunity to receive a grant from the local Iconic Venue Fund if Antone’s had a secure position in the city, such as land ownership or a long-term lease agreement. Other Austin venues that have benefited from the fund include Hole in the Wall and Empire Control Room & Garage.
Thanks to the 50-year lease, Antone’s has been selected to receive a $1.3 million investment from Rally Austin (home to the Austin Cultural Trust that controls the Iconic Venue Fund) to create a museum called Antone’s “World Famous” Museum of the Blues. The museum, which will be housed permanently on Antone’s upper level beginning in 2027, will celebrate Austin’s blues heritage and foster educational and community programming. It will donate a portion of its proceeds to the city’s Rally for Live Music Fund.
On Monday (Nov. 10), Antone’s will also launch the Antone’s Forever Fund as part of the Clifford Antone Foundation, to ensure the museum’s educational, cultural and community initiatives are continually advancing.
The museum will be open both during the day and in the evenings, providing additional revenue to support the venue and the Clifford Antone Foundation. The Iconic Venue Fund grant also includes a five-year operating stipend to help grow museum operations.
Given the response to the Antone’s 50th All Stars shows in Los Angeles, New York and Nashville, Antone’s creative and musical director Zach Ernst believes these new developments will help cement the venue’s legacy.
“All this extra activity we did this year under the banner of the 50th really reminded us how important Antone’s is outside of Austin,” Ernst tells Billboard. “We really do deserve this kind of [support] as an institution. It’s hard for worker bees like me and Will to think that way. But it is all thanks to Clifford Antone and his vision back in ‘75.”
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The staff at the Atlanta’s Masquerade can’t say for certain if the music venue is haunted, but there are stories – lots of stories.
The sprawling four-room venue first established itself in Atlanta in 1989 – two years after the first venue of its name was opened by the same owners in Tampa – and took over the former DuPre Excelsior Mill at 695 North Avenue that had come to life a century earlier. The mill produced a packing material to fill mattresses and other items (before foam eventually made it obsolete) and, like many 19th century factories, several workers were injured in the production process, and the belt of the mill took the life of at least one man.
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While no one has managed to exchange names with those haunting the various Masquerade venues, no one claims to be specifically visited by mill workers. There’s a woman who was seen by several staff members hanging around the freight elevators at the 695 location. One of Masquerade’s owners Berta Ochs says he was supervising the construction before the venue first opened one night and a leftover coin operated basketball machine started up. He could see a man shooting hoops and after yelling at the figure to leave, Ochs said, suddenly he was gone.
Employees have often felt like they were being watched when no one else was around and one employee who was working the venue’s haunted house Chamber of Horrors says she felt a tap on her shoulder, turned to find no one except a medical instrument from the prop table flung at her feet. There have even been online rumors that Masquerade has vampires.
Greg Green, Elena de Soto, and Brian McNamara.
Josh Martin
“Not to dispel the rumors,” says Masquerade marketing manager Camilla Grayson, “But I think that was because there was a plaster vampire up in the rafters that was left over from an event.”
“There’s also a popular roleplaying game called Vampire of the Masquerade that people go around doing live enactments of,” chimes in Masquerade GM and talent booker Greg Green. “That might have played into that whole vampire rumor too.”
Masquerade has not helped itself in the matter with rooms that denote the afterlife. Since its first Atlanta location, it has featured multiple rooms named Heaven, Hell and Purgatory and referred to them as a trinity of nightclubs. The rooms were stacked with Heaven obviously at the top, Hell on the bottom floor and Purgatory somewhere in-between.
“The upstairs Heaven room was known for the bounciness and sway of the floors,” recalls Green, who has been with the venue for nearly 35 years. “When people would get to jumping in unison and you were downstairs, you could see the ceiling looking like a trampoline. When you hear about people reminiscing, it is like, ‘We were jumping on the trampoline floor in Heaven and we just knew we were about to fall through, but never did.’”
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The venue’s 695 North Avenue location was a behemoth on the streets of Atlanta’s Fourth Ward – with an entirely black stone exterior save for a purple cursive neon sign that read Masquerade. It was an intimidating figure brought to life by founders Ochs, Brian McNamara and Dean Riopelle that attracted all forms of rockers and punks in the early 1990s including Fugazi, The Ramones, Foo Fighters, Radiohead and, of course, grunge legends Nirvana who were paid $200 to play for a room of maybe 50 people, according to Green.
Pay receipt for Nirvana’s 1990 performance at Masquerade.
Elena de Soto
With three rooms to fill, Masquerade was able to take a chance on many bands in their early years including Bjork, N.W.A and Coldplay. Green recalls a young Dave Matthews coming through at the start of his career with manager Coran Capshaw (a now-renowned artist manager who runs Red Light Management) selling the musician’s t-shirts out of his trunk.
In 2016, Masquerade had to leave behind the 695 North Avenue location when ownership sold the building as gentrification (and undoubtedly the historic music venue) made the Fourth Ward a desirable neighborhood to build a mixed-use development. Ownership was looking for another space to house the multi-room venue, when the city of Atlanta stepped in.
“The city wanted to keep us given the cultural institution that we were and [the city] had all these vacant spaces that they said, ‘Hey, is there any of this that you can use, even on a temporary basis,’” Green explains. The space is part of Underground Atlanta, a formerly neglected shopping and entertainment district that first opened in 1969, but the buildings date back to the mid-to-late 1800s when they served as the Georgia Railroad Depot and were a major hub early on for the city. “We didn’t really have a choice at the time. And wound up moving equipment, gear and all the stuff, building out on a small scale what it would take to operate temporarily and it just worked. That was nine years ago and we’ve stayed and we’ve expanded.”
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The Masquerade at Underground Atlanta now features four rooms Heaven (1,450 capacity), Hell (625), Purgatory (300) and Altar (250) connected by a shared courtyard. A fifth venue is expected to open in 2026.
Despite moving to a new location – surrounded by pedestrian-only spaces with shops and art galleries – Masquerade has not lost its spooky factor. Underground Atlanta’s custodial staff refuses to enter certain areas of the entertainment district at night and has heard people talking at night when no one was around. On one of the interior buildings there’s a plaque that says this wall was part of the first Civil War era hospital in Atlanta, “The dead and wounded were brought here,” explains Grayson.
A back hallway that connects all the venues is littered with creepy dolls with burnt-out eyes brought in by operations manager Howie Stepp – though no one knows where he sources the dolls from. Online, fans say they’ve seen a headless confederate soldier that walks around at night, and the courtyard is along Kenny’s Alley, which is named after a man who died in a jousting accident at the Georgia State Fair in the 1800s. That same courtyard is where fans from every room gather between sets to smoke, order some food, grab drinks and interact with music lovers of all genres.
New Found Glory play the Heaven room of Masquerade in 2022.
Elena de Soto
“The courtyard is the great equalizer,” Grayson says. “It’s awesome watching a K-pop fan interact with a ska fan because they’re both coming out of shows at the same time. It’s an awesome mix of people from all walks of life.”
With the ten-year anniversary of the new location looming, Masquerade is reaching new milestones. By the end of 2025, Green says the venue and their company Masquerade Presents, that promotes larger concerts in the city, will have presented a record 800 shows. Despite steep competition from various local venues including the more than 70,000-capacity Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Live Nation-owned Coca-Cola Roxy and Tabernacle, and the home of NBA’s Atlanta Hawks State Farm Arena, Masquerade has continued to thrive by taking a chance on up-and-coming artists and seeing that goodwill returned.
“We really don’t look at the individual shows as a series of battles to be won or lost,” Green says. “We look at it as one long campaign. If we can come out just a little bit better off at the end of the year than we were at the beginning, then it’s a win.”
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In recent years, they have hosted shows with Japanese Breakfast, Mitski and Doja Cat. Alex G played 10 years ago at the 250-capacity Purgatory, worked his way up from Hell to Heaven and, earlier this month, he returned to Atlanta to play the 22,000-cap Eastern with Masquerade Presents as a co-promoter. Arena act Travis Scott played the Heaven room earlier this year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his debut Rodeo.
“Part of our ability to maintain over all that time is an attitude of treating people just as well when they’re young and getting their start as we do when they’re superstars,” Green says. “Providing them with amenities they might not get at other small rooms like private green rooms and showers and laundry and all the things.”
“We’re able to take that risk on [rising acts] a second time, because we really believe in the music that people are creating, and not just focused on the numbers and the data. We were actually there. We’re talking to our staff that we’re working it that said this was really cool,” Grayson adds. “We’re like, ‘They are worth having back because they absolutely kicked ass to 30 people.”
Last Month’s Indie Venue Profile: Antone’s in Austin
After six years of working at famed Minneapolis venue First Avenue, Sonia Grover, Nate Kranz and the rest of the staff got phone calls one November morning in 2004 telling them to come get their stuff — the nightclub was closing. The legendary venue, best known as Prince’s stomping grounds and the site of his 1984 Purple Rain film, would be shuttering its doors for good.
“We were just kind of told the doors are going to lock, so if you have anything in the building, get your s— and get it out of here,” says Kranz, who serves as First Avenue’s GM.
Just five months earlier, the venue’s original founder, Alan Fingerhut, had fired the club’s longtime management team of Steve McClellan and Jack Meyers, as well as financial advisor Byron Frank, and decided to run First Avenue himself, which ultimately led the club into bankruptcy.
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Kranz and Grover, who is First Avenue’s current talent buyer, got a friend to pick them up in a station wagon and immediately went down to the iconic venue, which was built inside an old Greyhound bus depot, to get their band folders and, most importantly, their “huge OfficeMax style paper calendars,” says Kranz. “We’re like, ‘Look, we have no idea what the hell is going on if we lose that calendar.’”
As Kranz and Grover were scrambling to move the many shows they’d booked to other Twin City venues, other staff were grabbing bits of memorabilia that have not made their way back to First Avenue since. At the same time, the local population went into fight mode.
“It can’t be overstated how much love there is for First Avenue from the local community,” says Kranz, “and that includes our government officials.”
The staff quickly started communicating with Byron Frank, who had made the wise financial decision to purchase the building only four years earlier and stepped up to prevent the venue’s imminent closure. To help in this effort, then-mayor R.T. Rybak (a frequent First Avenue visitor) moved the bureaucracy along at lightning speed — making calls to federal judges, getting the bankruptcy proceedings to move at a record pace, securing a new liquor license and anything else the club needed.
“The mayor was invaluable in being able to tell the city staff, ‘This is not the normal course of business. This is important to the city. This is the heartbeat of our city. You need to move this to the top of the docket,’” says Kranz.
Within two weeks, First Avenue and its attached 250-capacity venue 7th Street Entry were hosting shows again, and the city has remained protective of the cultural institution that Grover calls “a truly special, magical place” and which has hosted such legendary artists as Frank Zappa, Tina Turner, The Kinks, B.B. King, U2 and Run-DMC.
To commemorate First Avenue’s 40th anniversary in 2010, the staff decided to add the now-iconic white stars to the formerly all-black building. The stars — introduced in honor of one of the venue’s former names, Uncle Sam’s — feature the names of bands and artists who have played First Avenue, with some stars left blank for those to come. Grover explains that the staff knew the paint job would be relatively quick and decided not to make a public announcement about the process.
“For a day or so, the building was white or cream colored and, oh, boy, did we learn the hard way that we should have made an announcement beforehand,” says Grover. The paint job was in the local news and all over social media, with community members calling the venue in a panic. “The community feels like…Byron owned First Avenue at the time, but this belongs to all of us, so everyone should have known what was going on.”
The stars are now a tourist attraction for a building whose reputation precedes itself. The distinctly curved building was originally the Northland-Greyhound Bus Depot. The space was designed at the height of luxury travel in 1937, with public phones, shower rooms, air conditioning and checkered terrazzo floors (which remain to this day) in stunning art deco style. Just over 30 years later, the bus depot relocated, and Minneapolis native Fingerhut had the vision to turn the space into a rock club called The Depot in 1970. Later in the decade, it took on the name Uncle Sam’s, but by 1981, it became First Avenue and 7th Street Entry and was led by the partnership of McClellan and Meyers.
Nathan Kranz, musician Bob Mould, Sonia Grover and Dayna Frank.
First Avenue
The 1980s also saw the emergence of one of Minneapolis’ greatest sons, Prince, and in a sense, First Avenue became his venue. Anyone who worked at or frequented the venue has a story of seeing Prince there, says Grover, but “I don’t think people ever took it for granted.”
“The vibe was always different if Prince was in the room,” says Kranz. “It gave [people] the feeling of, ‘Well, s—. I’m definitely in the right f—ing spot right now.’ ”
First Avenue’s current stage is one custom-designed by Prince for the filming of Purple Rain, and Frank added the only VIP space in the venue, the Owner’s Box, to give the superstar a space to watch any shows he attended, with or without notice.
“Every year we go down the list of, ‘What can we do to get better, to improve?’ We’re like, ‘What about a new stage?’ But how do you tear up the stage that Prince personally designed? You don’t,” says Dayna Frank, First Avenue’s current owner. She adds that what makes First Avenue “so special is that mix of authenticity and legacy while still having the highest-class modern amenities, best sound system and best traffic flow in one location.”
Dayna Frank became the steward of First Avenue in 2009 after her father, Byron Frank, had a stroke. More than a decade before her father got sick, Dayna — who had grown up at First Avenue and attended Sunday night dance parties with other Minneapolis and St. Paul teens — moved away. But once he fell ill, “I stepped in and realized how special and irreplaceable it was,” she says. “I wanted to help maintain it and do what I could to keep it active and keep it independent. My dad thankfully recovered, but I had fallen in love with working there and the people there and stayed on after he got better.”
With 16 years under her belt, Dayna still considers herself “a newbie” on the staff. Both Grover and Kranz have more than 25 years at First Avenue, and the venue’s website boasts an entire page dedicated to employees who have worked there for more than a decade.
“We love live music. It’s so fun to be part of it in a behind-the-scenes way,” says Grover when asked about her longevity at the club. When she started in 1998 as an assistant to the booker, the company only ran First Avenue and 7th St. Entry. Now, First Avenue Productions books more than 1,000 shows annually at the additional venues it owns: the 350-cap Turf Club, the 650-cap Fine Line, the 1,000-cap Fitzgerald Theater and the 2,500-cap Palace Theatre, which it co-operates with Jam Productions.
In 2020, as the live music business shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dayna doubled down on her commitment to remaining an independent venue when she became the catalyst for the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). Prior to the pandemic, many indie venues were siloed and viewed each other as competitors in an already thin-margin business. But she had visited indie venues in other cities and gotten to know owners in a non-competitive manner, which led to her reaching out once the pandemic started to create the trade organization.
“If 10 years ago, I had said, ‘Let’s start a trade association,’ there would have been a lot of ‘Why? What’s your angle? Why are you asking me for my economic data?’” says Dayna. “But it was this moment where either we were all gonna survive or none of us were gonna survive.”
Dayna subsequently became the founding president of NIVA, which successfully lobbied for the 2021 Shuttered Venue Operators Grant that provided more than $16 billion in funds to help independent live event venues survive through the pandemic.
“There is something unique about having the ability to control a room or make decisions based solely on what is right for the local community and the local artists and the folks on the ground,” says Dayna of keeping the legendary venue independent. “I’m the only owner. There’s not private equity. There’s no investors. Nate, Sonia and I can do what we feel is right with no outside influences and no ulterior motives. That’s a really wonderful and powerful position to be in.”
In the 1980s, it was considered a win when a small venue like the 9:30 Club only lost $100,000 in a year. Back in ‘86, when promoters Seth Hurwitz and Rich Heinecke (Hurwitz’s former high school substitute teacher) purchased the six-year-old, rat-infested 200-capacity space from married couple Jon Bowers and Dodi Disanto, they knew it was more of an investment than a money-maker.
“The 9:30 was a loss leader,” Hurwitz tells Billboard, “but I needed to do the small acts so I could get them on the big stage like R.E.M., Smashing Pumpkins.”
Those were the rules of regional concert promotion before the giant national corporations like Live Nation and AEG entered the picture. Every region would have a closed network of promoters — “famously designed and perpetrated by Frank Barsalona and Premier Talent,” Hurwitz explains — and to make your way in, you had to start from the bottom.
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Hurwitz can’t say for certain why he always wanted to put on concerts. He speculates that maybe it stems from his love of presenting music to others. In elementary school, he’d skip outside time during recess to play records he brought in, and, at home, he played disc jockey, setting up a little electronic kit where he could broadcast radio just far enough for his household to hear in other rooms.
More likely, he believes he got into the business to feel important and integral to the live music experience. “[I wanted to put on shows] probably so I could go anywhere in the show. In fact, I hate going to other people’s shows because I get told I can’t go here or there and I hate that,” he says.
9:30 Club
John Shore
In his teens, Hurwitz began booking shows at a local movie theater with a stage; he later moved up to larger shows with Heinecke’s financial backing.
“When it came time to put on a show, [Heinecke] had the money and I had been to New York to visit agents with the promoter Sam L’Hommedieu Jr.,” says Hurwitz of tagging along from D.C. with the co-founder (along with Jack Boyle) of the 162-seat club Cellar Door. “It was just one trip, but I learned a lot. Probably the most important thing I learned was how to pass [on booking an act], which is a lost art.”
In his early twenties, Hurwitz and Heinecke’s promotion company, I.M.P., was working in tandem with Ian Copeland, who was emulating Barsalona’s promoter network in the D.C. metro area. I.M.P. booked the smaller shows in the region at the Ontario and eventually the original 9:30 Club, where they became the exclusive bookers. By 1986, Disanto was done taking the financial hit of running a small club and sold it to I.M.P.
“She was like, ‘Here, you buy it. I’m sick of this.’ And we did,” says Hurwitz of his first venture into venue ownership. By booking shows at the 9:30 Club, Hurwitz and Heinecke had been able to grow with acts as they progressed to money-making shows at arenas, and though he says he didn’t have an interest in buying the club, Hurwitz knew they couldn’t allow the entry point for their talent pipeline to dry up.
Until it did.
In 1993, Dante Ferrando and a group of investors that included then-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl opened the neighboring venue Black Cat, which could be scaled from 500 to 800 capacity.
“Now there was another [club] with a bigger stage, bigger dressing room, bigger capacity, and all our so-called friends walked,” says Hurwitz. “It was a hard lesson to learn.”
In order to compete, I.M.P. purchased another old venue in a neglected part of town and moved the 9:30 Club to its current location at 815 V Street in January 1996.
“We wanted to create the greatest club ever — never an argument again. No question where people would play,” says Hurwitz. “We invented the mega club. The challenge was at the 9:30 Club, we got all these acts, we got the history (which was honored at that time, not so much now) because we had the best small plays. We still needed the best small plays. We needed to have the best big club and the best small club.”
For the new V Street 9:30 Club, they created a moving stage that could shrink the room from 1,200 to 300 without anyone noticing. And they wanted to move away from the old rock’n’roll ethos of a smelly, dirty black box like the former space. The new 9:30 Club serves good food, has great sightlines, is never too hot (the venue invested in extra AC units to be sure) and the staff is always kind to fans.
9:30 Club
Richie Downs
Another point of pride for Hurwitz is the lack of sponsorship around the 9:30 Club. There is no signage with corporate sponsors. There is no VIP area, balcony seats don’t sell for more money and, most importantly, they do their best to keep ticket prices low.
“It’s an egalitarian sort of situation. It is not this velvet rope kind of thing. You go with your people, you’re treated nicely, you’re not uncomfortable and you have fun,” he says.
The current 9:30 Club opened in January 1996 with two sold-out shows by The Smashing Pumpkins and it’s continued to build its reputation from there. In its nearly 40-year history, the venue has hosted such legendary acts as Tony Bennett, Bob Dylan, Adele, Iggy Pop, Drake, Justin Timberlake, James Brown, Lou Reed, George Clinton, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Radiohead and countless more.
I.M.P. has grown with its artists and now also owns and/or operates the 1,200-capacity Lincoln Theater, the 2,500- to 6,000-capacity Anthem (both in D.C.) and the 19,000-capacity Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md. In 2023, I.M.P. spent $10 million to build another small club, the 450-capacity Atlantis, which is a replica of the original 9:30 Club minus the smell. While Hurwitz says small clubs are still “a losing proposition,” The Atlantis helps feed bands to the 9:30 Club and I.M.P.’s larger clubs from day one via the company’s promotion and marketing. “It’s not just a placeholder,” he explains. “We want to make you bigger so that we will make more money next time.”
That strategy has panned out for I.M.P. through the lost art of the pass. “We do pass on things that we don’t think are cool enough for the 9:30 Club. A lot of the acts that don’t play us, we actually passed on. So, I’m sorry, but people count on us to curate,” says Hurwitz. “We don’t have enough dates to do the acts we want to do. Why would I do something that I think sucks or has no potential?”
Several of Nashville‘s top independent venues, along with local artists, are teaming up for a new event, 615 Indie Live, designed to celebrate and support Music City’s indie live music scene.
Thirteen independent venues and over 40 local artists and bands spanning genres including rock, hip-hop and jazz will come together for 615 Indie Live on Feb. 1, 2025. Event passes are currently discounted to $15 using all-in pricing, with the passes granting entry to all participating venues. The event will run from noon until 2 a.m., allowing attendees to visit multiple shows at various venues across the city.
Participating venues include 3rd and Lindsley, Acme Feed & Seed, Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge, DRKMTTR Collective, Eastside Bowl, Music Makers Stage at Delgado Guitars, Night We Met, Rudy’s Jazz Room, The 5 Spot, The Basement, The Blue Room Bar at Third Man Records, The East Room, and The End. Participating artists will be revealed in the coming weeks.
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615 Indie Live is presented by Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp and Music Venue Alliance Nashville.
Proceeds from ticket sales will benefit Music Venue Alliance Nashville, including the organization’s Emergency Relief Fund that aids Nashville’s independent venues to help them stay open during periods of financial crisis. Those who buy passes during the presale period — which lasts until midnight on Oct. 31, 2024 — will have a chance to win a Project 615 gift bag and a VIP Nashville attraction pass, which offers complimentary admission for two people to over 25 area attractions, including the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the National Museum of African American Music and the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum.
“Independent music venues are the heart and soul of Music City, providing a stage for new artists across diverse genres to showcase their talent and be discovered,” Deana Ivey, president/CEO at Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp, said in a statement. “We hope 615 Indie Live will inspire Nashvillians and visitors to explore new music and discover venues they may not have visited before. Locals might even find a hidden gem right in their own neighborhoods. By holding the event during the winter, we hope to help boost business at the venues during a traditionally slow season.”
The Greater Nashville Music Census, released earlier this year, highlighted the impact of independent venues and the financial struggles those venues, as well as indie artists, face.
“All of the recent data clearly shows that independent venues are a foundation of Nashville’s live music ecosystem, yet they are quickly becoming an endangered species,” Music Venue Alliance Nashville president Chris Cobb said in a statement. “615 Indie Live marks the beginning of exciting new partnerships born from this data, reinforcing our mission to celebrate and support an essential part of what makes us Music City. My sincerest thanks to the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp for partnering with us to support independent venues and local artists.”
Nonprofit foundation Live Music Society has announced the recipients of its second annual Music in Action grant.
The Music In Action grant provides funding for venues to program events that build community and promote accessibility for marginalized groups, create opportunities for both local talent and touring acts to grow and find new audiences, and increase their revenue and customer base. The number of small music venues benefitting from the program is up from 17 in 2023, while the funds have grown from $500,000 last year to $710,000 this year.
This year, 24 small performance venues across the United States have been granted a total of $710,000 to program events that build community and boost revenue. The 24 venue grantees include Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans, Nocturne Jazz & Supper Club in Denver, Cole’s Bar in Chicago, Drkmtter Collective in Nashville, The Lost Church in San Francisco, The Royal Room in Seattle and Chris’ Jazz Cafe in Philadelphia.
The 2024 recipients will use their funds over the next year to launch concert series, put on family-friendly festivals, build out membership programs, develop spaces for LGBTQ+ musicians to gather, create educational programming and host monthly Latinx dance parties.
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“People are trying to open their stages to new voices: women, BIPOC, LGBTQ and even just different styles of music that they are not used to presenting,” says Live Music Society executive director Cat Henry. “It’s really exciting for people to take a philosophical risk to make sure that they’re not just staying in one lane the whole time and providing opportunities for more voices at the table.”
For Live Music Society founder Pete Muller, the Music In Action grant is about giving people who love and know their business the ability to take a swing at something new and help build a more sustainable business for the long term. “If you have a 200-seat venue, you are not going to make a lot of money. Even if you run it well. The best shot you have is to figure out how to raise a lot of philanthropic local dollars,” says Muller. “Most of the time, it’s going to be shoestring and we can help.”
While Live Music Society does not intend to fully fund any venues, Muller says the nonprofit created the grant for them to take risks on new musicians, pay their musicians and staff reasonable wages and remain an integral part of the live music ecosystem.
“200-seat venues or 100-seat venues are an amazing place to start your musical career,” says Muller, who is also a touring musician. “I actually prefer smaller venues. You can really connect with the crowd. The only problem is, it’s very hard to make a good living.”
Live Music Society, which began handing out grants in 2020, hopes to continue growing the number of venues that receive funding through the Music In Action grant, with the amount of funds reflecting the need. With the 2024 Music In Action grant and its annual Toolbox grant, the foundation has now disbursed $3.7 million in funding to small venues.
To further its mission to recognize and protect small venues and listening rooms across the United States, Live Music Society is also looking to help venues by developing and sharing best practices. In partnership with its venue grantees and involvement with organizations like the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) — Live Music Society will host a panel at this year’s NIVA conference in June — the foundation plans to collect expertise that it can share with small venues to help them succeed in a tough live music economy.
“One of the goals of gathering in New Orleans [for NIVA ‘24] is to help create an informal network of companies and club owners because they aren’t really competing with each other. They are in different markets,” Muller says. “If one of them finds a great musician, sharing it with a different club is helpful to both. The more you interact, the more you create community.”
Full list of 2024 Music In Action grantees:
118 North – Wayne, PAB Side Lounge – Cleveland Heights, OHBlue Jay Listening Room – Jacksonville Beach, FLBossa Bistro – Washington, D.C.Chris’ Jazz Cafe – Philadelphia, PACole’s Bar – Chicago, ILDevil’s Backbone Tavern – Fischer, TXDrkmttr Collective – Nashville, TNFogartyville Community Media and Arts Center – Sarasota, FLGrand Annex Music Hall – San Pedro, CAJilly’s Music Room – Akron, OHLa Peña Cultural Center – Berkeley, CAMaple Leaf Bar – New Orleans, LAMOTR Pub – Cincinnati, OHNocturne Jazz & Supper Club – Denver, COOne Longfellow Square – Portland, MERebel Rebel Studio & Lounge – Berea, KYRoots Music Project – Boulder, COThe Acorn Center for the Performing Arts – Three Oaks, MIThe Jalopy Theatre – Brooklyn, NYThe Lost Church – San Francisco, CAThe Parlor Room – Northampton, MAThe Royal Room – Seattle, WAThe Spot on Kirk – Roanoke, VA
Nine months before Live Nation made the headline-grabbing decision to cut merch fees at 77 of its clubs and theaters across the country, Ineffable Music Group did it first. Now, the company’s CEO, Thomas Cussins, has a piece of advice for other independent venue owners and operators concerned that the concert giant is using this tactic to curry favor with artists and agents and squeeze out their businesses: Everything will be OK.
“Merch money is not what is going to keep us in business,” says Cussins, whose company oversees 10 venues across California, including The Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz, the Ventura Music Hall in Ventura and the Golden State Theatre in Monterey. “What causes independent venues to go out of business is the one in 10 shows where venues pay way too much relative to the draw and end up losing everything they made on the previous nine shows.”
Cussins made the decision to stop charging acts performing at his venues a cut of their merch sales — a standard industry practice — while watching a Jan. 24 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about Ticketmaster. Cussins says it was members of the band Lawrence’s testimony about how much bands rely on merch money for touring that moved him to change the company’s policy: “It is money that most directly gets into the band’s pocket and the idea that we were taking away from that did not sit right with me.”
Since then, he says the decision has not hurt his business “at all.”
Still, independent venues remain concerned about what Live Nation’s new “On the Road Again” program will mean for them — how can they compete with the deals Live Nation is offering? The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) released a statement on Wednesday (Sept. 27) following the news, saying, “Temporary measures may appear to help artists in the short run but actually can squeeze out independent venues which provide the lifeblood of many artists on thin margins.”
Thomas Cussins
Daniel Swan
The statement continued, “The initiative announced yesterday may seem like a move to follow the lead of some independent venues. It is not that. Instead, it appears to be a calculated attempt to use a publicly-traded conglomerate’s immeasurable resources to divert artists from independent venues and further consolidate control over the live entertainment sector. Such tactics threaten the vitality of small and medium-sized venues under 3,000 capacity, many of which still struggle to keep their doors open.”
A NIVA member since 2020, Cussins says he understands why some NIVA members may be upset that Live Nation’s policy might put pressure on their businesses. But, he adds, eliminating merch fees is a net positive for the entire live music ecosystem — one where everyone is benefiting.
“It’s difficult to operate a single venue in a market against Live Nation,” says Cussins. “Venues are low-margin businesses. I’m not here to say that no one should charge merch fees. What I am here to say is that it is my opinion that if you waive those fees, it is an overall healthier ecosystem and you will actually do better in business because you are doing something that makes the process easier.”
What was your reaction when you heard the news that Live Nation was going to waive merch fees for artists?
I was ecstatic. It’s something I’m very passionate about because it fosters a healthier concert ecosystem.
Were you worried about the financial hit Ineffable would take when you decided to eliminate merch fees at Ineffable venues?
No, because merch money is not what is going to keep us in business. What causes independent venues to go out of business is the one in 10 shows where venues pay way too much relative to the draw and end up losing everything they made on the previous nine shows. I think it’s more productive spending one’s time fostering a healthier ecosystem where everybody has a chance to make money. To me, that means not taking artists’ merch money and artists taking more door deals, where the artist has an opportunity to make the most money.
But is that realistic? For many artists, taking a door deal with no guarantee is too risky.
Correct. Some can’t take that risk. But many other artists understand they can make more money on a door deal and lower the risk the venue faces. For independent venues to be healthy, we need volume, which means we need bands to be healthy and touring and making enough money to support themselves. And the money made from merch most directly affects their ability to be out on the road and do well.
What is your reaction to the statement NIVA issued, saying the On the Road Again program is just an attempt to squeeze out indie venues?
They’re doing what they think is in the best interests of their members. We’re members of NIVA and they have done an incredible job for our business. I’m a huge fan. But my take is that merch money is not what’s going to keep these independent venues in business. What’s going to keep them in business is a healthy concert ecosystem, where we’re keeping the bands healthy and keeping them on the road with deals that are fair so that everyone can make a few bucks and eat at the table together and nobody is gouging the other person.
What is the biggest challenge facing artists on the road right now?
It is the travel costs — the price of gas, vehicle rentals, the price to pay crews. If you are going out there and you are doing the same business and your costs have increased 30%, how can you possibly make that up? You might just not tour. I know a lot of bands that have told me they were doing 80 dates a year and now they just want to do 40. They just want to pick the 40 best markets. That hurts independent small businesses. I’m seeing that firsthand. Artists that are in the prime of their career saying, “I want to work less, but each one has more meaning.” And I can’t blame them. But if they can do a longer tour and amortize those costs and play those small secondary markets, then I can be their partner on the ground in markets where I operate venues and keep my hands out of their merch money.
What advice do you have to other venues considering dropping their merch fees?
It’s not one-size-fits-all and it might not be the right solution for everyone. But I am so happy that we made that move — not only from an ethos standpoint, financially as well. It has not hurt me at all.
Non-profit foundation Live Music Society has announced the first recipients of the Music in Action grant program, which provides anywhere from $10,000-$50,000 to small venues. For 2023, 17 venues with a maximum capacity of 300 were provided with a total of $500,000 to develop and implement creative ideas to engage their communities, expand audiences, and generate new revenue sources. This year’s recipients include The Rebel Lounge in Arizona, Sunset Tavern in Washington, Happy Dog in Ohio, Café Coda in Wisconsin and more.
Since the start of the global pandemic in 2020, Live Music Society has provided $3 million in grants to small music venues. The first three rounds of funding were aimed at providing pandemic relief, but the new grant program, Music in Action, is pivoting to help venues succeed and not just survive.
Live Music Society founder Pete Muller — who is also a touring musician — tells Billboard that the foundation understands that the economics for these small venues are difficult and the profit margins can be razor thin, even in non-pandemic years. Small venue owners, he believes, know their community and know the best ways to engage locals and bring people back to their rooms. This year’s ideas included The Stone Church in Vermont continuing their GRRLS 2 The Front program which dedicates the month of March to women and nonbinary-led groups and offers a stage management/sound engineering course. The Elastic Arts Foundation in Illinois will revive their Dark Matter performance series and enhance the AfroFuturist Weekend festival showcasing emerging and established Black artists across different neighborhoods of Chicago’s South and West Sides. Cafe CODA in Wisconsin will expand their COOL SCHOOL program, providing free music education activities and introducing a mobile stage for increased accessibility.
“We’re saying, ‘give us your idea and we will mitigate that risk by giving you money to do it,’ That’s what the grant is,” says Muller. “Hopefully that allows them to do something that’s inspiring and helps the club, but also inspires other places…. It’s seed money. Our return is not cash, it’s creating energy in this ecosystem.”
Funds for the grants come from Muller and other supporters. Live Music Society’s board selected the 17 venues and their programs out of more than 100 applications this year, focusing on ideas that champion historically marginalized groups such as BIPOC, Latinx, LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities.
Music in Action is about trusting that music venue owners know what they need to flourish, says Live Music Society executive director Cat Henry, adding “asking [venue owners] was important, not telling them.”
“One of the biggest things we’ve heard from venue owners is that this is unique. There’s not really a lot of funding opportunities, especially for for-profit [businesses],” says Henry. “It changes the way they think about things knowing that somebody cares about this, that there’s an advocate out there that is looking out for the sector as a whole.”
Live Music Society has also teamed up with trade association National Independent Venue Association for the second annual National Independent Venue Association conference set to take place in July in Washington, D.C. Live Music Society will do an introduction to their grantees at the NIVA ‘23 Independent Awards Gala, a panel discussion with key stakeholders from the small venue community and sponsorship of a Salute to Small Venues concert at Pie Shop. Additionally, they will provide a networking space called the Live Music Society Cantina, located across from The Anthem, the main venue hosting conference programming.
Check out a full list of 2023 Music in Action grantees below.
The 2023 Music In Action Grant Recipients:
Big Room Bar, Columbus, OH
Cafe Coda, Madison, WI
Caffé Lena, Saratoga Springs, NY
Chocolate Church Arts Center, Bath, ME
Club Passim, Cambridge, MA
Dazzle, Denver, CO
Drom, New York, NY
Elastic Arts Foundation, Chicago, IL
Happy Dog, Cleveland, OH
Hey Nonny, Arlington Heights, IL
Ivy Room, Albany, CA
Stone Church, Brattleboro, VT
Sunset Tavern, Seattle, WA
TAC Temescal Art Center, Oakland, CA
The Muse Performance Space, Lafayette, CO
The Parlour, Providence, RI
The Rebel Lounge, Phoenix, AZ
