Live music hit hard by gathering restrictions
Venue owners nervous as show after show cancels
It was early March, and artist managers were starting to get nervous.
Aaron Ohlsson, the owner and talent buyer for the Miramar Theatre and nightclub Site 1A in Milwaukee, was gearing up for a busy spring at his venues when he started fielding calls. Some of the acts he booked were getting anxious about the spread of coronavirus, that they would fly to Milwaukee and get stuck in the city.
“I wanted to continue doing shows,” Ohlsson said. “I kept saying, ‘There’s only a couple of cases here, no one has died from it here.’ I didn’t understand the magnitude of it at the time.”
There were a few cancellations. Then there was a flood of them. With calls to reduce the size of social gatherings to minimize the spread of coronavirus, the vast majority of concerts for the latter half of March and into April — from stadium shows to intimate club gigs — have been canceled or rescheduled.
This unprecedented era for live music could continue for quite some time.
On Sunday, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised against gatherings of more than 50 people for at least two months; within days, officials were urging groups be limited to less than 10 people. President Donald Trump said Monday the United States might experience social distancing through July or August.
For Ohlsson, at least 16 shows — not including local bookings and outside rentals — were scrapped. The earliest his venues will open up, possibly, is mid-May.
“With overall operational expenses, it’s a six-figure loss for us, easily,” Ohlsson said. “I still have to pay rent. I still have to pay utilities. I still have to pay insurance. Insurance is not covering this. … And we don’t know when this is going to end. … Being a promoter, an event organizer, it’s extremely hard to plan for the future when the future is so undecided.”
Canceled: ‘The two really good months’
The enormous impact at the Miramar and Site 1A is the tip of the iceberg for the live-music industry in Milwaukee.
Fiserv Forum has postponed six spring concerts, so far, including Elton John and Blake Shelton, who won’t be back until 2021. Kenny Chesney and Florida Georgia Line have pushed back their Miller Park performance to a date to be determined; that event had been expected to draw 40,000 people to the Brewers ballpark April 25.
Most of the shows that had been scheduled through April at the Rave, the Miller High Life Theatre and Shank Hall have been either postponed or canceled. Potawatomi Hotel & Casino is closed indefinitely, and so is its concert venue, the Northern Lights Theater. That’s also the case for the Cactus Club, Anodyne Coffee Roasting Company, the Jazz Estate and X-Ray Arcade in Cudahy.
No venue in town is spared from this, and for most of them, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
For indoor music venues in Milwaukee, “March and April are usually the two really good months before summer hits,” said Shank Hall owner and concert promoter Peter Jest. “For now, it’s
going to be really hard.”
After the CDC issued its guidelines Sunday, the Pabst Theater Group on Monday announced that its four venues — the Riverside Theater, the Pabst Theater, Turner Hall Ballroom and the Back Room at Colectivo Coffee — would be closed through May 15. Between them, a whopping 128 shows have been either canceled or postponed.
“It’s just a tremendous shock, of course,” said Pabst Theater Group CEO Gary Witt. “The financial impact on a monthly basis is just huge. We have to take it 30 days at a time, strategize and plan how to continue to move forward, and be mindful of the fact that a high percentage of our employees are parttime and rely on these jobs.”
For the Pabst Theater Group alone, that’s more than 200 people.
Hundreds of jobs on the line
As staggering as it is to see nearly all the concert options in Milwaukee this spring disappear, the impact on employees who need the work, and on small venue operators without much to fall back on, is even more devastating.
“It is sure to put many places out of business,” said Jim Linneman, who has run his small bar and music venue Linneman’s Riverwest Inn for 27 years with his partner Marty Hacker. They’ve been canceling or postponing shows one week at a time. “With the live-music business model, there are tight margins.”
There needs to be government support on the national and state level, Milwaukee venue operators insist. Witt thinks a small-business bailout, similar to how the U.S. government responded to the auto industry crisis in 2008, is necessary, and called for Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers to put a stay on a 5.6% sales tax for small businesses that’s due Friday. Jest also suggested money from the Miller Park tax, which expires March 31, could be “turned into something that can help small bars and clubs being forced to close by government regulation.”
Media reports suggest a federal economic stimulus package could total more than $1 trillion, and Evers and state legislators are in the early stages of exploring emergency funding options, the Journal Sentinel reported.
Finding ways to help workers
But the need for many who work at local music venues is urgent, and venue operators aren’t waiting to see what pans out.
Some shows are still going on at Linneman’s Riverwest Inn — but they’re private performances streamed to the venue’s Facebook page, where viewers can make donations to the bands and the venue, Linneman said. The streaming series begins with the Bill Camplin Band, performing Saturday.
The Pabst Theater Group has launched a GoFundMe campaign, and is donating all proceeds to bartenders, ushers, stagehands and other part-time employees. Donations come with perks, from a free drink coupon for a $10 donation, to a private dinner backstage at the Riverside Theater or a Riverside box for a show, each for $1,000.
The Cactus Club, which was acquired by manager Kelsey Kaufmann just a few weeks before closing indefinitely Sunday, also has a GoFundMe page organized by an employee, with a fundraising goal of $8,000 to support staff and pay immediate expenses like the mortgage, Kaufmann said. The club is also launching a new merchandise line to be sold at cactusclubmilwaukee.com.
X-Ray Arcade is trying to raise $15,000 through GoFundMe to support three employees and cover expenses to keep the club afloat for the next two months, said owner Nick Woods, and is selling new merch at
Nevertheless, Woods is “not under any illusion we can sell $15,000 worth of T-shirts to be able to cover everything, but I’m not entirely sure what to do. … Within the space of 48 hours, an entire month of shows went out the window, just like at every other music venue in existence. … That has been stressful, to say the least.”
Ohlsson is also selling new Miramar Theatre merch and has set up a GoFundMe campaign with a $15,000 goal. But even with those efforts underway, he’s deeply worried.
“We’re dead in the water completely, with no source of income coming in for an undecided amount of time,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for 10 years, and I’ve never gone through anything like this. … I’ve been used to working harder and staying up later to make more money, but right now it doesn’t matter how hard I work because it can’t change what is happening.
“My family works for me. My best friends work for me. It’s really scary to not be able to provide for them. They’re looking at you wondering, ‘What are we going to do?’ and I don’t have any answers.”