After the basic questions of health and material welfare have been considered and satisfied, the next great uncertainty seems to surround what is going to be left of the culture in the wake of the COVID-19 shutdown. What survives and what falls? What futures take their beginnings here?
It is a question every bit as much about group psychology as about the interdependencies of economics, art, and epidemiology. How do businesses based on congregation and community survive and rebuild. When a “new normal” emerges, what will it look like, and will people be quick to embrace it? The questions spin out of control quickly if you let them.
Music venues, of course, are a ground zero of COVID-19 devastation. It is a waiting game now for those who have the resources to wait. Those that haven’t already been shuttered.
I spoke with Mike Campbell, head of booking at Colony in Woodstock, for an insider’s perspective on this unprecedented interregnum in which all rooms are dark and all stages empty.
In his work at Colony, Mike has engineered an elegant balance between of local and national, between the kinds of music that have always played well in Woodstock and the kinds of music that we could perhaps use a little more of. Drawing on his own connections as a lifelong touring musician with eclectic tastes, Mike has brought a lot of fresh air into that historic, beautifully renovated room on Rock City Road.
He has been venue manager and booker at the Colony since the venue reopened in the spring of 2017. He was a guitarist for the Long Island melodic punk band Latterman throughout the early and mid 2000s. He is the bass player and longtime collaborator of songwriter Laura Stevenson, whom he first met in 2007, playing on all five of her studio albums and touring with her band for over a decade. Stevenson and Campbell were married in 2016. Campbell has also performed as a touring band member with songwriters Kevin Morby, and Craig Finn (of the Hold Steady).
He enjoys a unique 360-degree view on live music. It is an enterprise to which he has given essentially all his adult life. I joke that the recent birth of his and Laura’s first child is just about the first serious thing he has done that doesn’t involve the stage. I wanted to know how it went down for him, what he is doing now, and, most of all where he thinks we are headed.
I wrack my brain to think of a single thing venues can actively do to stay afloat. I come up pretty empty. How about you?
Our business is: I book shows that people want to go to. Those people go to the shows, where they buy food and alcohol. That’s the revenue stream. If there are no people to go to a building to buy products at that building, there is no business.
You can do things like that to keep the brand alive, more than the business per se.
Right, we have been doing things like Jim Friskel’s weekly virtual open mic. which is great. It is content-generating, which is an important part of a venue’s and a promoter’s business. The end game of generating content is driving revenue. So we’re creating content, but it is basically just saying, “Hello, everyone, we’re still here. Don’t forget that we exist when we open our doors again.”
Until we can open doors again, short of good-spirited community support through gift certificates and, when we were still doing it, curbside food pickup, there’s not much we can do. You really need a couple of hundred people in the room buying drinks. Ten to 20 takeout orders day is a fraction of what our daily business needs to be.
You were early in on the National Independent Venue Association’s (NIVA’s) initiative to agitate for aid on behalf of performance venues.
Yes, all we can do is things to hasten the state, local, and federal aid that we’re told we’re getting. But in the same way that people are struggling to get their individual unemployment benefits, going on six or eight weeks, the feeling is that you just wait to get the thing that is coming to you and that’s there’s nothing you can actively do.
So we’re trying to challenge that and call the promise-makers to task with this 1400-plus union, I guess, of independently owned venues across the country, calling on the good will of people, and leveraging the strength of numbers, people massed together.
If the people of Woodstock and the surrounding area all write Delgado, that’s all well and good, but if the people who support 1400 venues are all writing their representatives, that’s how change can happen. It’s really the most effective thing we can do at this point.
How did you get involved?
From interacting with people I know from having toured half my adult life, people that run First Avenue in Minneapolis, that run Le Poisson Rouge in New York City, other promoter friends in Phoenix and elsewhere. These are the people who spearheaded this, and I am in couple of group chats with other independent promoters, so I was clued in early and was able to get Colony in on that initial launch. It has grown really quickly.
I’ve pulled together with Mike Amari (formerly of BSP, currently Bearsville Theater). He created an ad mat with the logos of all the Hudson Valley venues for a region-specific NIVA landing page that automatically calls up the county, state and federal representatives you should be reaching out to. It takes less than a minute.
Mike, Drew Frankel (Levon Helm Studios) and I have been working on this together. Any attempt to get authorities to pay attention feels like throwing stuff against the wall to see what will stick. Drew, Mike and I have been in touch a lot. If we are given some kind of timeline for the return to normal, or the new normal, we think it would be nice to have the three main venues in town present something together.
It’s all I can do, other than like, check my email and have an agent move a date for the third time. That’s what my work day is like now.
Tell me about the moment at which you knew this was bad
March 12 was when we announced, three days before it was mandated. It was the first day of a four-day weekend of killer shows that I was excited about: Mason Jennings, Archers of Loaf, which was on its way to sold-out, and the Welcome to Night Vale double header, which were both sold out.
I spoke to Woodstock town supervisor Bill McKenna, and I spoke to Ulster County executive Pat Ryan. Everything was changing by the moment. Bill said, “I’m not telling you you can’t do business, but it sounds like mandates are coming soon.”
I was faced with the decision. We have a banging weekend of business coming up, good for Colony, good for the town, and I have been told by the authorities that I don’t have to cancel this.
But it felt irresponsible. It felt like we should cancel. I called [Colony owners] Neil and Lex Howard. They trust me to make decisions based on my instincts and my experience in this industry, and they backed the decision to close.
I then had to get in touch with Archers of Loaf’s manager literally just before they all boarded a plane to Albany. An hour later, their Boston show the next night cancelled, and from then on it was this wave of cancellations. Everything was unprecedented. We thought we were closing for two weeks. We thought it was just going to go away.
My methodology since is push that bulldozer a little bit forward every day, plow through the calendar, rescheduling or cancelling and refunding. It has been like reverse engineering, undoing my normal job.
You deal with tons of artist management. Is booking just like a make-believe, as-if thing where you go through the motions while we wait to see what is possible, and when?
It was that for a while, but then I started getting bounce back emails some of the biggest agencies that exist. Agents were being fired and furloughed. The reality is setting in that this industry, from the top down, is coming unglued. It’s crazy. I am still getting tours routed to me in the fall. These legit, big-time agencies are still looking at October optimistically.
My most recent exchange concerned a date in October with an agent I work with all the time, a guy who works with artists at all levels. I said, I am taking your temperature here. Do you really think this date will happen, or are we just going through the motions and we’ll address it later if we have to? He said he’s optimistic for club shows in 2020 but as far as large-scale theater or festival events, he doesn’t think that will happen until 2021 at the earliest.
It’s a question of capacity now, whether 300-capacity clubs will have to reduce that by half or two-thirds. If it’s an airborne disease spread by coughing and sneezing, I am not sure how 100 versus 300 makes it better. But if that’s proven to be a solution, okay, but it is going to change everything, the kinds of offers we can make, everything.
Do you think audiences will be sluggish to return?
People are going to look at the experience of live music differently. They will be wary at first, and are they going to want to spend money on leisure activities? People will need to blow off steam. People will be starved for public spaces and communal events, and the arts and entertainment, but also they will feel shell-shocked. You feel a little scared of outside and things you can’t control. It’s unknowable at this point.
The new criteria for getting booked is proving that you draw under a certain amount, so this could be a boom time for some of my projects and, like, noise bands.
Good point, like the inverse of Pollstar.
Do you predict heavy venue losses?
Yes, it is already happening. Every independent venue is on the chopping block, and it’s not just the independents. The biggest concert producers in the world are laying off half if not more of their staff. It’s really hard for venues that don’t own the property, or are in debt, and almost all music businesses are, as there is really not that much money to be made.
Neil and Lex own the property. It’s been there 100 years. It’s an amazing room. I think it will be still be there. I think we’ll be back.
I come from a punk and DIY background, and think something that will happen organically is entrepreneurial, DIY, boutique venues blooming from the ashes, things that may be more interesting in the long run. With all the big concert promoters and venues shut down, people will be, like, “Well, if we want music, we have to make it ourselves.” That’s exciting to me.
For more information about NIVA and the #saveourstages initiative, visit https://www.nivassoc.org.
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