Take me back to the moment when the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020. What were you feeling as the owner of a music venue and a concert promoter?
Everything came apart like a house of cards. We had spent the past three or four months booking into the spring. I was already done with the Holler on the Hill lineup, and that was going to be our best group of bands at that festival ever. On March 12, I drove to The Vogue, where the Drive-By Truckers were on stage sound-checking. By that time in the afternoon, we knew we had to pull that show. I came back to the HI-FI and had to cancel the J. Roddy show here. Once we got all that stuff cleared for that day and the next, then it hit me: Oh, shit. We have 200 other dates booked. I called Michael Huber [president of Indy Chamber] and said, “This is going to be way worse than anybody thinks it’s going to be. We need to move right now.” To Michael’s credit, the next morning, he had an emergency Chamber meeting at the HI-FI with local leaders, and they were on it out of the gate. Having that support 24 hours in really helped us start building our alliances and coalitions. We knew we were going to need that to survive.
As things started to look worse and worse with the initial round of pandemic restrictions, what were some things you were doing behind the scenes to get by until you were allowed to start having shows again?
We were just focused on keeping all the plates spinning so we could be ready to go when we were told we could go. But as tours started canceling further and further out, that’s when we started thinking, OK, we’re in March now. July is canceling. August is canceling. We might have six months of no business. We might have a year with no business. We had a lot of support from fan donations. None of us really wanted to do that, but people encouraged us to. So we did, and many nice people helped us out. We did streaming for a little bit. I’m not anti-streaming, but I put on concerts because I want to put people in a room for an experience. Streaming doesn’t do that for me. I feel like people are getting ripped off a little bit in paying the same price for a ticket but they’re missing out on half the reason they bought the ticket. So we did some of that stuff, and it was fine. But it wasn’t something that we focused all of our attention on.
How were the struggles of your industry different from those of the food and drink industry?
Restaurants had it hard, but people still have to eat. And those places have the ability of selling food to go. You can’t sell a concert to go. And on the chain of priorities, food appears before music. The changes smart restaurants made to adapt probably strengthened their businesses a lot.
There are actually very few true concert venues in the state. There are a lot of restaurants where music is a secondary part of their business, but there are very few businesses where music is the primary part. We don’t serve any food. So if I don’t have a band, then I can’t sell a ticket. I can’t sell a drink. We’re not a bar. People don’t just come into our venue to have a beer. They come to see a show, and if there’s no show, they’re not coming.
You started the Indiana Independent Venue Alliance (IIVA) during the pandemic to help keep your fellow concert venues in business. Where did that idea originate?
We were a couple of days in, and my instinct was to just start calling other venues. I called David Allee at the Jazz Kitchen and Dave Kubiak at The Bluebird [in Bloomington] and said, “Hey, what are you thinking?” We all agreed that this was going to be very bad. So I was like, “Well, what if we all join forces?” So we did, and then we started finding as many people as we could that wanted to be part of our group. Once we had a critical mass, I could go to the city and say, “I represent 50 music venues in Indianapolis. Here’s what our problems…
Read More: HI-FI Owner Josh Baker Stages A Comeback – Indianapolis Monthly