From ‘Marry You’ to ‘Wedding Bell Blues’
Singers, bands scramble as nuptials put on hold.
LOS ANGELES— Until a few weeks ago, if you got married in L.A. and hired a mariachi band, there was a good chance Susie Garcia’s family played you down the aisle.
The singer and bandleader has fronted her own group, the renowned all-female Mariachi Las Colibri, for a decade and has seen generations of Mexican-American Angelenos through birthdays, baptisms, weddings and funerals. Her husband, Pepe Martinez Jr., leads his own band, Mariachi Angeles, inspired by his father, the founder of legendary group Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan.
Almost every weekend this spring, the two were booked to perform traditional music at cultural events and regale young couples at weddings across southern California. That is, until early March, when COVID-19 turned everyone’s future around.
“We crossed out about 15 gigs in a week,” Garcia said. “Wedding after wedding, planners were calling me devastated, like, ‘What do we do?’ ”
The answer, as every musician and event planner soon learned, was nothing. Life would be on hold for months until the disease abated.
While the virus has upended touring, shuttered venues and left artists scrambling to livestream living-room concerts, there’s much more to the live music industry than that spotlight. Gigging bands and DJs, the kind who perform at thousands of weddings, bat mitzvahs and private parties across L.A., don’t play globally broadcast all-star fundraisers, but have been decimated just the same. Their livelihoods may come back eventually, but the loss of reliable gigs at the peak of wedding season has been sudden and staggering.
The wedding industry isn’t the first place most look to see the fallout of COVID-19 on the music business. But it’s a huge sector that’s a clandestine livelihood for many studio and touring acts.
Compared to the financial gamble and myriad uncertainties of touring original material, playing Motown classics in a hotel ballroom is usually a steady gig. COVID-19, unfortunately, arrived just in time to vaporize those jobs.
“We’ve survived fires and mudslides at our locations, but to have every event for maybe six months all off the table, that really pulled the rug out from under us,” said Jesse Kivel, a musician and cofounder of Dart Collective, an L.A. event-music firm that’s grown into a hub for indie musicians and DJs to make money between tours. Kivel’s firm hires dozens of artists and instrumentalists, and had booked around 200 weddings and events for the spring high season.
Many of those couples will reschedule eventually when COVID-19 lets up. Jen Nordine, 28, was set to marry Keith Kniland, 37, in March in the Coachella Valley, where Nordine’s parents had a home growing up.
“It’s our happy place. Over Easter weekend last year, Keith and I hit the links, and on the second to last hole he got down on one knee and told me he couldn’t live this life without me,” she said.
The San Francisco tech-industry couple booked Dart’s string ensemble for the ceremony and a Dart DJ for the after-party, after discovering the firm on wedding sites and Instagram. Although they had to kick their wedding back nearly a year due to COVID-19, they’re staying optimistic.
“It felt selfish and trivial to be sad about it,” Nordine said. “Letting go of something you’ve dreamed of is always a tough pill to swallow, but there is nothing quite like this global pandemic to put things into perspective. If we can survive isolation together, we can survive anything.”
Other couples made it work with a little improvisation.
“With a wedding, there’s a ‘The show must go on’ feeling, but we weren’t going to risk people’s lives,” said Terry Case, 41, an engineer in Silicon Valley who had booked his wedding for late March in the Santa Cruz area. After California issued its stay-at-home orders, he and his fiancée instead threw a socially distanced ceremony with six friends in a nearby park. The band they had originally booked, Coffee Zombie Collective, still played their closing dance as new spouses.
“I’m from West Virginia and the last song of every wedding there is John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads,’ ” Case said. “The band recorded a version and sent us a link so we could play it. It was so sweet and we were glad to still do it our own way.”
Right now, everyone in the industry is similarly scrambling. Kivel, who cut his teeth in the L.A. rock group Kisses, knows it’s tumultuous when gigs fall through.
“A lot of our touring musicians make a stable income from our gig work so they can do a tour that maybe breaks even. Ultimately, we pay the bills,” he said.
When that work ends too, it’s an enormous challenge to stay above water.
“Even if you get a good day rate (playing weddings), when you break it all down it becomes a very normal bluecollar income,” he said. “How do you get from here to 12 or 18 months from now as a performer if you don’t have other revenue streams?” Who knows how long the COVID-19 lockdown will last or what kind of gigs await on the other side. Maybe couples will pare wedding expenses if the expected recession proves severe. But even in the midst of a pandemic, people fall in love, children are born and loved ones pass away. People will need to gather to commemorate it all. When that day comes, they’ll need a band.
“The last gig we played in March, I was like, ‘Should we be here? Healthwise, should we have come?’ ” Garcia said. “I felt very torn. But music is a staple of our culture. And that couple deserved their moment.”