by Chris Gray Pick a club, any club. Look at it, study it, but don’t tell
me what it is. Maybe it’s a club you’re familiar with, maybe not – it doesn’t
matter. Get a good look at it. Now put it back in the deck. I’m going to
shuffle them around, like so. Don’t tell me what it is. First I’m going to tell
you a few things about the club you chose – things you may already know about
them, if you’ve been there since SXSW. Things like how it suddenly seems so
much easier to see the bands, how the lines for the bathroom seem so much
shorter, and how you don’t have to wait nearly as long to get a drink. You
hadn’t noticed? Well, then you’re part of the problem – if there is one. Attendance in Austin clubs is down. Thank God everybody can
agree on this, because getting club owners to agree on anything else is harder
than treating a gator with a toothache. The reason for the attendance drop
could be anything, from the position of the planets to the simple fact that
much of Austin’s clubgoing population goes to college, and just isn’t here
during the summer. Is it finals? Maybe. Taxes? Could be. Loss of interest?
Possibly. More clubs? Probably. Lack of talented bands? Probably not. Instead
of one big reason, there are many, often two or three at the same club. And
yet, since all the different clubs make up one big scene, and since attendance
is down all over town, it’s possible the reasons lie deeper than any one of
these. Over the past few months, changes have happened in Austin that suggest
one of the scene’s periodic transformations is underway. And, although many
local clubs have ridden out any number of these metamorphoses over the years,
right now is what concerns clubowners most.
At the heart of most attendance downturns is the cyclical
nature of the club business. Clubgoing is usually heaviest when school is in
session, and often the revenues generated during this time – from September to
March (also the prime time for club tours) – carry clubs through the leaner
summer months. The scene cycles from year to year too, and every once in a
while an off year comes up. Is 1995 one of those years? Hard to say. Not so
hard to say is that the recent proliferation of brewpubs, coffeehouses, and the
lounge renaissance all offer Austinites something else to do with their money
other than see live music. Plus, rumblings from a different cycle, one that
affected Dallas and Houston years ago, are now being felt in Austin as the city
is finding itself a stop on more and more major artists’ tours. While many of
these cycles are familiar to local club owners and managers, some aren’t, and
these unfamiliar cycles are what has thrown the scene into an unusually
agitated state of flux.
“Agitated State of Flux” is a nice phrase for what some
scenesters see going on at Emo’s. Since SXSW there’s been a death watch on the
club thanks to a dearth of mohawks, piercings, and tattoos – punks that is – at
the usually brimming club. Perhaps more than any other local live music venue,
Emo’s has been buffeted hard by the changing tides of the scene, and can be
used as a microcosm of the club picture as a whole.
When the club opened in May 1992, it was a textbook case of
being in the right place at the right time. As alternative music exploded both
locally and nationwide, Emo’s similarly became one of the preeminent
alternative clubs in Austin and America. “We had the pie to ourselves,” says
Emo’s owner Eric “Emo” Hartman. Emo’s had the pie to itself for almost two
years, as a matter of fact. Two years of packed houses catapulted Emo’s to
national recognition, but closer to home, two years of the same club every
night took its inevitable toll on Emo’s audience.
“Anywhere you go for a year or two every night in a row,
you’re going to get tired of,” says Justin McCoy, Emo’s stage manager, booking
agent, promoter, and frequent performer with his band Buzzcrusher. And soon,
that’s exactly what happened. The opening of Lovejoy’s in early 1994, and
Casino el Camino later that year meant that, instead of having just one place
to go, the crowd congregating at Emo’s now had three. While each club has a
definite area of specialization – Emo’s, live music; Lovejoy’s, inexpensive
premium beers; Casino, a full bar and grill – each appeals to basically the
same crowd.
“A lot of people refer to us as `the Devil’s triangle,'”
says
Casino Eighmy, owner of Casino el Camino. “There’s Lovejoy’s, Emo’s, and us, so
people bounce around a lot. They’ll go over to Lovejoy’s and they’ll have a few
pints, and then it’s like, `Well, I want a shot of something.’ So they’ll come
over to me. Likewise, people go to Emo’s because it’ll be a triple bill and
they want to see the opening band and they want to see the headliner, but they
don’t want to see the middle band. They’re like, `Oh, this band sucks. Let’s
get out of here for a while. We’ll just walk half a block over to Casino’s,
hang out there, and then come back.’ We get that all the time. If you go around
to these three clubs on any given night, chances are that probably 20 percent
of the crowd has been at all three.”
It’s never fun to watch your patrons spend their time and
money somewhere else, but all three owners think the triangle may help them in
the long run, because exposure for one club generally means exposure to all
three. “It’s good for us, because it brings in even more people,” Hartman says.
“Yeah, we lose out on some drink sales, but we still see the same people. They
just have other options – that’s all it is.” And cutthroat competition in the
nightclub business usually means that nobody wins anyway. “You don’t want to
get into lowering and lowering of prices, because it’s not going to help the
bottom line,” Hartman says.
However, loss of drink sales is one of the reasons Emo’s
chose to begin, for the first time ever, charging those over 21 a cover at the
door last December (minors have had to pay $5 up front since the club’s
inception). Although $2 for roadshows and $1 for local shows doesn’t seem
exorbitant, the crowd that went to Emo’s for the drinks and not the bands had
other ideas. Hartman insists it’s too early to tell whether or not the cover
will have any lasting effect, and says it was instituted as a survival
measure.
“Before we had a cover charge, we might be really crowded in
here, watching the show, but if no one paid for a drink, we’d die,” he says. “A
perfect example of that is four years ago at a Didjits show in Houston. We had
a really busy house, but everyone had been drinking at the arts festival for so
long that no one had a drink there. I think our bar sales that night were $400
and the whole show cost $800, so we totally lost on that. We were just digging
ourselves a hole here because that was happening.”
Arts festivals aside, there is now more competition in
Austin
for the alternative dollar than ever. But too much competition can be just as
deadly for a marketplace as not enough. On any given weekend, your average
over-21 K-NACK or KVRX listener can choose a night out at Emo’s, Lovejoy’s,
Casino, the Electric Lounge, the Blue Flamingo, or the Flamingo Cantina. If
there’s a touring show rolling through Liberty Lunch or the Austin Music Hall,
then it could cost anywhere from $5 to $30 for a ticket. Throw in T-shirts,
drinks, trips to Sound Exchange and Tower, maybe cigarettes, cheap pot, or the
odd movie here and there, and suddenly a demographic famous for its disposable
income finds it’s all been disposed. Then, there’s nothing to do except sit at
home – a problem that affects all the clubs.
“Right now’s the time of year where most people just don’t
have money,” says Mike Henry, booking agent for the Electric Lounge. “School’s
ending; it’s not quite summer, it’s not quite not; it’s kinda hot for the first
time. `Maybe we’ll go to the lake,’ `Maybe I just don’t wanna go out,’ or `I
don’t have any money and my roommate’s moving, and I gotta pay the phone bill.’
It’s just kinda the dog days.”
It is kinda the dog days, and where many clubowners
are feeling the most heat is in crowds for local bands, which just aren’t
there. Liberty Lunch’s Mark Pratz, who relies on local shows to get him through
summers lean on roadshows, says his recent local crowds have been “terrible.”
Hartman, being nice, says his are “kinda off.” Henry says a recent bill of
Gal’s Panic and Gomez, two bands with among the best draws in the local
alternative scene, drew only about 60 percent of what he expected. The
abundance of local talent and choice of venue have made Austin a buyer’s market
– but what’s playing isn’t always what’s selling.
“There are some bands that have a crowd that goes with them
everywhere,” Henry says. “As long as they’re not just totally overplayed,
they’ll go out pretty much every time. But there are some bands that, after
they start playing too much, it definitely affects their draw.” Only in Austin,
right? That a band’s drawing power could go down as the number of gigs
they get goes up. Well, not really. Theoretically, it’s possible for the same
band to play a different Austin club every night, say Hole in the Wall on
Sunday, Emo’s on Monday, the Flamingo Cantina on Tuesday, Antone’s on
Wednesday, the Blue Flamingo on Thursday, the Electric Lounge on Friday, and
Liberty Lunch on Saturday. And if that happens, how many people, besides the
obligatory (and guest-listed) friends, lovers, and hangers-on will show up
every night? People can’t afford to, and only the most die-hard fan would go
see a band every night. That situation may seem a little fantastic, but if a
band is booked three or four places in the same month, it spreads its crowd out
over three or four nights and sometimes three or four clubs.
“You run into the fact that people can choose,” Emo’s McCoy
says. “They’re like, `Well, I’ll go to see this one the third week because I’ll
have money then,’ or `I don’t have to study then.’ What I’m running into is
having to time it, and gauge it, and keep everybody happy.”
More and more, what keeps people happy is not what
nightclubs
can deliver. Although the term “alternative” was more or less still valid when
Emo’s opened in 1992, the music outgrew its name faster than the Red Hot Chili
Peppers changed guitarists. According to its original definition, alternative
meant a style of music deemed too offensive, noisy, or just plain inscrutable
for the population at large. Today, it’s the standard. Alternative music
generates mainstream profits. Pearl Jam sets their ticket prices at whatever
they want, and don’t even worry about selling out (of course, some would say
they sold out a long time ago). The airwaves are saturated with Buzz Bands and
buzzing guitars, and somewhere in there is a point of critical mass. “If the
band isn’t on MTV or K-NACK, they’re not a huge draw,” Hartman says. “Even the
bands who played here before and packed the house aren’t drawing them in as
much.”
After losing a prerequisite number of acts to overnight
success, nightclubs stand to lose even more this summer to the growing
festival/arena/shed circuit. Austin audiences appear to be especially hungry
for such larger shows, if Southpark Meadows’ summer/fall calendar is any
indication. But, before they plunk down $25 for that Lollapalooza ticket or $20
for Pearl Jam (oops – too late), they might want to stop and consider what
they’re giving up. When several acts band together and hit the shed circuit,
they take away potential summer tours from the smaller clubowners. This summer
alone, Live, Wilco, Veruca Salt, Luscious Jackson, Hole, the Jesus Lizard,
Pavement, Beck, Ziggy Marley, Sheryl Crow, and Blues Traveler, all acts with a
Lunch or Music Hall/Backyard gig in their recent pasts, are hitting the sheds.
“At the shed level, there aren’t enough… acts touring this
year, so they’re creating tours,” says Tim O’Connor, owner of the Austin Music
Hall and the Backyard. The cost of a ticket for such a show also subtracts from
the audience’s concert budget, leaving them with that much less money to spend
at a local venue.
“The Austin live music audience got what they wanted,” Mark
Olivarez, general manager of the Back Room says. “For a long time, people were
wondering how come the shows were passing up Austin and playing Dallas,
Houston, and San Antonio, and that kind of a thing. They wanted more shows here
and they wanted more venues, and I think that problem has been addressed. Now,
there are so many things happening here in Austin at any given time and the
audience is really getting what they want. But what no one ever stopped to
think about is what would happen once that question got answered. It’s the
basic law of supply and demand – the supply is huge, and the demand is the same
as it ever was. With more stuff, now people have to make a choice as to what
event to go to.”
When they do choose, Austin audiences are now choosing the
direction their concert-going colleagues in Dallas and Houston chose long ago:
Eschewing local acts for road shows. As Austin becomes a major tour stop, the
clubs are left in the wake of the vans and equipment buses. When an act like
Hootie & the Blowfish, who could have probably played the Music Hall if
they wanted to, decides to move to Southpark Meadows and charge $15 a ticket,
“You’re gonna take $15 from a lot of people,” O’Connor says. “If you’re talking
about the Austin Music Hall, you’re talking about 2,500-3,000 people on a
sellout. If you’re talking about Southpark Meadows, and you talk about a Hootie
or someone like that, and they pull 10,000, 15,000 or even 20,000 people, it
affects that much more of Austin’s music-going populace.”
Such trends lead clubowners to believe that, in spite of
Austin’s reputation, its days as a Live Music Capital – of the World, of Texas,
of anything – may be numbered. “Unfortunately, I think what’s gonna happen now
is you’re gonna see less local bands here in Austin, and you’re gonna see them
moving out to the next college town somewhere along the way,” says Olivarez.
O’Connor concurs, saying “I think that to make the size of investment it takes
to get in this business now, and to maintain a visibility through promotions
and the like – I think you’re gonna look for more and more tours.”
But is it really that bad? Certainly, it’s hard to ignore
20,000 people singing “Hold My Hand” or 40,000 people in the prime of their
clubgoing lives moshing to “Even Flow.” But couldn’t the drop in attendance
just be the same thing that happens every summer? When the fall rolls around,
the clubs should see some pickup in attendance for the very same basic reasons
that there’s a drop now: People will be returning to school, wallets will be
full from summer jobs or parental generosity, and throats will be dry from the
long, hot summer this is already shaping up to be. Most clubs will be around a
year from now, but some won’t. This has always been a fact of the nightclub
business. And as far as the long-term changes go, as to whether Austin has more
R.E.M.s and Blowfish in its future, or if more Lollapaloozas ultimately mean
less acts at Emo’s, that water is much murkier. Perhaps the only person who
knows the answer to that is Father Time, and he’s got his poker face on and
isn’t tipping his hand. n
This article appears in June 2 • 1995 and June 2 • 1995 (Cover).