‘The end of an era’
Lost Leaf ’s final show Saturday
The Lost Leaf moved into a 1920s bungalow just south of Roosevelt Row in downtown Phoenix in 2006 with the goal of treating the musicians who played and the artists whose work was displayed there with respect. That meant not taking a commission on the art and making sure that every band got paid.
Since then, it has become one of the Valley’s most beloved music venues, holding its own against gentrification as one of the longest-running independent music spaces in downtown Phoenix.
When owner Eric Dahl announced in February that the Lost Leaf would host its final show on Saturday, March 26, he noted with pride that the bar — with its modest capacity of 50 — had paid more than $500,000 to artists and musicians since settling into that house 16 years ago.
Tato Caraveo, a visual artist who’s done the art and music booking for the venue from the time it opened, says, “If the Lost Leaf is gone, that’s the end of an era for that whole area.”
‘There was nothing like the Lost Leaf at the time in Phoenix’
The name the Lost Leaf is a reference to a missing page in an art book. Dahl first used the name for a website he launched in 2004 to buy and sell the antique prints he’d been collecting.
Having been a drummer on the local scene since 1987, Dahl befriended Caraveo, a fellow musician, while playing shows together.
They were hanging at the Emerald Lounge, a club their bands frequently played on the corner of Seventh Avenue and McDowell Road in Phoenix, when they asked the owner what the deal was with the space upstairs.
He told them it was once a photo studio but had been empty since the ‘70s.
Dahl and Caraveo climbed the narrow stairs to check it out.
“There were pigeons flying out of the ceiling,” Dahl recalls.
The landlord said they could have it for $300 a month. They had it cleaned up in a day or so.
The Lost Leaf opened as a gallery with occasional live music on Feb. 4, 2005.
“Just seeing the galleries taking so much from the artists, it was a labor of love where the art sales were going directly to the artists,” Caraveo says.
That September, the Emerald Lounge closed to make way for a Starbucks.
“At that point, our rent went from $300 to $3,000,” Dahl recalls. “And we weren’t allowed to sell any types of liquids from their deal with Starbucks. So we moved out.”
They reopened the Lost Leaf the following year in its current home, a house on Fifth Street that had been a Max’s Sausage House.
They’d discovered the building while playing a First Friday gig with Sunorus, their improvisational acid-jazz project, on the sidewalk right across the street.
The owner was having an open house, so Dahl and Caraveo walked over to check it out.
“We fell in love with the place,” Caraveo recalls.
The Lost Leaf hosted a gallery opening in the new location on St. Patrick’s Day 2006 with DJentrification and Sunorus.
It took another 14 months to get a liquor license.
Caraveo credits word of mouth with the full house they drew on their opening night as a bar.
“Being natives of Phoenix and being involved in the music and art scene, Eric and I had a pretty good draw from the get-go,” Caraveo says.
“And we’d been doing parties there, so that sort of helped get the word out that there was a bar moving into the little house on Fifth Street.”
The cool aesthetic didn’t hurt. “There was nothing like the Lost Leaf at the time in Phoenix,” Caraveo says.
Eventually, they started hosting live acts seven nights a week, never charging a cover, which Dahl says was “more a survival technique” at first.
“There just wasn’t anything going on around there,” he says. “It was more or less, ‘Hey, let’s get people in the door by any means possible.’”
Having come up through the Phoenix punk scene of the ‘80s, touring in a converted school bus with the Generiks, Dahl cut his teeth on shows that were $3 to $5.
“So it wasn’t too much of a stretch to say, ‘OK, we have a liquor license to sell beer and wine. We can survive off of that.’”
The Lost Leaf was never limited to any certain style of music, but it did avoid bands on the heavier side of the musical spectrum just because of volume.
“It wasn’t anything personal,” Dahl says. “It was just you’re playing in the living room of a house.”
How First Friday helped build momentum
When they opened, the area around the bar was “pretty desolate,” Caraveo recalls — a lot of vacant homes and dirt fields.
“There were no big buildings like there are now,” Dahl says.
The neighborhood has gone through many major changes since then.
“With Fifth Street kind of being at the center of First Friday at different times over the years, there was a fresh set of eyes coming through from all over the city, even the state, saying, ‘Oh, what’s this little place?’” Dahl says.
“We started seeing building getting torn down instead of being restored,” Caraveo recalls. “And we were like, ‘It’s gonna make its way towards us.”
In recent years, Dahl says, “We were actually getting shade from the nearby buildings due to their height.”
Gentrification took its toll, but Lost Leaf is still the ‘neighborhood bar’
The impact of gentrification on the Lost Leaf went beyond new buildings throwing shade. It also cost the Lost Leaf a bit of the following it had when it first opened.
“I think when people see large condos going up and bigger buildings,” Dahl explains, “some of the old-schoolers fall by the wayside a bit and look for the darker corners of town again.”
Outside investment led to rent hikes in the area. That left a lot of buildings vacant on the Lost Leaf ’s block, which meant less foot traffic. And nearly three years of construction on a project just across the street made it more difficult for cars to access Fifth Street.
The opening of Crescent Ballroom, Valley Bar and the Van Buren, or what Dahl calls “larger, more capable music venues,” also had an impact on the kind of crowds the Lost Leaf could expect to draw.
As Caraveo says, “A new place opens, people are excited and that becomes their new place for a while, which is how it was with us at first.”
But the sense of community the Lost Leaf nurtured remained.
“It’s a gathering place for some of the residents that have been in that area the longest,” Caraveo says.
“That’s their neighborhood bar, their special place. Not just them, but the downtown community in general.”
‘The pandemic really kind of put a fork in us’
Nothing hit the Lost Leaf quite as hard as being shut down for more than eight months in response to a global pandemic, with no source of income to offset the bills coming due every month.
“The pandemic really kind of put a fork in us financially,” Dahl says.
They raised $25,000 through GoFundMe,
which as Dahl says, was “amazing.” But it took another $80,000 of PPP loans and grants to stay afloat.
“And we’re still paying back PPP loans at $1,800 a month right now,” Dahl says.
By the time they managed to reopen sales were down 80 percent.
Dahl’s reasons for deciding to move on, though, are more than personal.
‘Trying to figure out a way to pass it on’
Dahl and his wife, Lauren, have been talking about selling Lost Leaf for years, he says, “trying to figure out a way to pass it on.”
The Dahls met at The Lost Leaf. Lauren had been tending bar for nearly five years when her future husband asked her out.
The couple now have two very young daughters at home. Avary is two-and-ahalf. Mila is 14 months old. They moved to Strawberry, a mountain town two hours north of Phoenix, in 2016, the same year Dahl quit drumming.
“I’ve been a drummer most of my life and I never wore any ear protection, so I suffer from pretty serious tinnitus,” Dahl says.
“And the last place we lived was in Willo, a beautiful neighborhood, but it’s really noisy. I needed to remove myself from that environment of sirens, helicopters and horns.”
As a software developer, Dahl can work from anywhere, and living in a forest is a dream come true, having spent much of his childhoods in forests, from Washington State to northern Arizona.
Dahl says he and Lauren have been “looking forward to a new chapter in life.”
But it won’t be easy letting go. “Growing up in Phoenix, I never fit in,” Dahl says. “I’ve never quite been in style. For me, this was a venue I could go to by myself and feel completely comfortable. To sit there and watch the bands and to see the new art was just something I’ll never forget.”
The Dahls tried to hand off the business to Caraveo.
“I just couldn’t,” Caraveo says. “I’d rather just be focusing on art.”
The Dahls are still hoping to find a new owner to carry on the mission of the Lost Leaf, but the last show under current management is Saturday, March 26, with Djentrification and Treasure MammaL.