Slim’s and Music Hall will partner with Goldenvoice
Goldenvoice is strengthening its hold on the Bay Area concert scene, announcing on Wednesday, Jan. 24, that it would partner with Slim’s and the Great American Music Hall to book and promote shows at the iconic San Francisco venues.
The festival operator is a subsidiary of Los Angeles’ AEG Presents, the corporate concert company owned by Philip Anschutz — the conservative businessman behind a number of Christian fundamentalist organizations, including some that actively work to overturn gay rights. Goldenvoice has long run the Fonda Theatre, El Rey Theater and the Novo in Los Angeles. It also owns the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival.
The promotion company started its San Francisco expansion in 2004, when it bought the Market Street building that houses the Warfield, and four years later took on the lease for the Regency Ballroom and Social Hall, both located inside the former Masonic Temple at 1300 Van Ness Ave.
Slim’s, a 430-capacity South of Market nightclub, and the Great American Music Hall, a historic 600-capacity venue in the Tenderloin, will remain independently owned by rocker Boz Scaggs and his partners in Big Billy Inc., according to a news release.
“We at Slim’s and the Music Hall are excited about working with the folks at Goldenvoice,” Scaggs said in a statement. “They bring a new level of outreach and imagination, along with a genuine love of music to our clubs and to the Bay Area.”
Last February, general manager Dawn Holliday stepped down after 28 years at the helm of both venues to focus on her work as the producer of the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival at Golden Gate Park.
The move bolsters Goldenvoice’s standing in the Bay Area against competitors Live-Nation, which operates the Fillmore and Masonic as well as Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, the Concord Pavilion and the Bottle-Rock Napa Valley festival; and Another Planet Entertainment, which books the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium and the Independent in San Francisco, Fox Theater in Oakland and Greek Theatre in Berkeley, as well as the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival.