“Postpone, cancel, rebook, postpone, cancel, rebook.”
This, says Motorco Music Hall co-owner Josh Wittman, has been his booking process ever since his venue went dark on March 16. Booking national tours normally requires several months’ notice. With all but two of Motorco’s 55 employees furloughed and an uncertain future ahead, trying to imagine the future of live music has become Wittman’s full-time job.
In North Carolina, under Governor Cooper’s reopening plan, venues will stay closed at least through May 22. After that, barring a spike in COVID-19 cases, they’ll be allowed to reopen at a “limited capacity.” Four to six weeks later, they can increase their “permissible capacities.”
What those capacities will look like isn’t clear. For that matter, it isn’t clear whether audiences will return no matter what the state allows. A recent poll suggests that only about 40 percent of Americans would be willing to attend a sports or live-music event before a vaccine is available. Many venues were already operating on a tight margin; sustaining themselves with smaller crowds would be a heavy lift.
Some are already folding. In Boston last week, the owners of the legendary rock club Great Scott announced that it had closed forever.
Collectivism is one step forward. Nationally, 1,200-plus business owners have mobilized to form a new advocacy group, The National Independent Venue Association. Numerous local venues in the Triangle, including Kings, Lincoln Theatre, The Pinhook, Motorco, and Cat’s Cradle, have joined the #SaveOurStages efforts. Those efforts largely entail lobbying for industry relief but, Pinhook owner Kym Register says, it’s also been refreshing to see owners putting their heads together.
“Competition in art, in general, is one of the big problems, period,” Register says. “NIVA’s cool. And if we can take this lesson of working together collectively and collaboratively, we can be better in the long run. It’s not just a crisis that we’re responding to; capitalism is the crisis.”
Register suggests that live-streaming is one technology that may stick around. Since it closed, The Pinhook—which is also fundraising for employees through a Patreon account—has filled its nights with virtual drag shows and karaoke. Register says the platform has allowed performers the space to experiment, make money, and keep queer culture alive online.
“It’s cool to create access for people who are more compromised in their health or are more anxious about getting sick,” Register says. “There’s a lot of [people] who can’t afford to pay a price to go to a thing that’s dependent upon that cover price range. It’s a cool door to open, and so I think we’re gonna lean into it a little more.”
It’s not a perfect solution for everyone, though. Nick Wallhausser, a member of the beat-music collective Raund Haus, says the group immediately felt that live-streaming was too unwieldy to invest in.
“It became so saturated from the get-go because it’s the only answer that we can think of,” Wallhausser says.
Instead, Wallhausser says that Raund Haus—known for throwing packed, pulsing electronic parties—is prioritizing its label and educational programming over live events.
“Rather than pushing to do another one of many live-streams, we’re going to choose to focus on releasing music that we believe in and artists we want to support,” Wallhausser says. “One of our mandates early on was, make dope shit happen. And that goes for live shows, that goes for collaborations with people. And it stays with the records we release.”
As for the actual mechanics of a live show—that part of the puzzle is especially uncertain. In Arkansas, a Travis McCready concert on May 15 is serving as a lonely prototype for what a live show could look like. The Southern rock concert, occurring in defiance of the governor’s orders, will feature an audience of 229 in a theater that seats 1,100. Sections will be grouped into “pods” of friends and relatives; bathrooms have a limited capacity and walkways are one-way.
With one eye squinted, Josh Wittman says that he can imagine a more sanitized, restricted concert-going experience of the future. That experience might begin at the door with a ticket stub and a temperature check and continue with six feet of distance and frequent trips to sanitation stations.
NIVA, Wittman says, is putting together a list of practices that venue owners might be able to introduce into live shows. Motorco only has a few comedy nights on the calendar for August, and Wittman suggests that music shows may not return in their normal form until March of 2021.
But a timeline and a set of practices are just ideas for now. Wittman and other venue owners repeatedly emphasize the painfully speculative nature of the moment.
“I really wish that it would just go back to normal,” Register says. “But I don’t think it’s gonna. I think there’s going to be a new normal for a long time. And I don’t think it’s going to go back to the way that it was.”
Correction: Motorco closed March 16, not March 17, as was stated in print.
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