A few years ago, Hannah Maier drove to Buffalo for a concert. The Atlanta-based psychedelic garage-rock band The Black Lips played Town Ballroom, a 1,000-capacity venue in the city’s downtown Theatre District. She recognized plenty of faces.
“Almost everyone in the crowd was from Rochester,” Maier said. “I wish they would have just played in Rochester because the venue was basically empty.”
Maier knows about the calculus at play when it comes to setting up live shows. She runs the agency Mom’s Home Booking and has worked with local acts like Dangerbyrd, Beef Gordon and Overhand Sam & Bad Weapon. (She’s also the new music director of The Route, which WXXI broadcasts in partnership with two local colleges.)
“If they would have played in Rochester, way more people would have come out, even if it was a smaller venue,” Maier said. “I almost feel like those types of bands, they do better if they’re playing at the Bug Jar.”
Her take on The Black Lips show points to a broader question about the state of concerts in Rochester, namely those for a certain tier of nationally touring artists: Is Rochester getting left behind? And why do bands like The Black Lips opt for Buffalo instead?
The group fits into an archetype: a festival-friendly act based in a much larger city that regularly plays markets like New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Black Lips recently performed at a roller-skating rink in Brooklyn with a capacity of 1,000.
The Bug Jar, by comparison, only holds about 200 people. This speaks to the first reason why Rochester might not be able to compete.
Doug Kelley has booked shows at the Bug Jar since 2012. He said he sees the touring routes of national musicians following a few well-trod paths. “A band will play Cleveland and then they’ll go to Toronto and go through Canada that way, and then come back out and hit the New England states,” he said.
Or, the artist might stop in Buffalo and continue straight ahead to Albany on its way to New York City and other bigger markets in the Northeast. Both routes leave Rochester woefully passed over.
At its most basic level, touring is an economic enterprise with notoriously slim margins, made even more perilous due to the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic. “The working class can’t afford it,” read an April 2024 headline of an article spotlighting struggling touring musicians in “The Guardian.”
What can help offset large upfront costs is playing in bigger rooms. Here in Rochester, Maier said, we might not have enough options: “Rochester doesn’t really seem to be able to keep one of those venues open.”
Water Street Music Hall, a 1,000-capacity room with an additional smaller club that maxes out at 350, is an exception. But as of this writing, it might be the only one.
Another was Anthology, the former East End venue that once showcased headliners like Father John Misty and Japanese Breakfast in shows presented by the concert promotion company After Dark Presents. Chris Ring has been the president and owner since After Dark opened for business in 2001. Headquartered in Buffalo, it also presents shows in Rochester, Syracuse, Albany and Waterloo.
Among the different concert markets in upstate New York cities, it’s difficult for Rochester, a C-level market, to compete with Buffalo’s more robust, B-level market. Ring cited Town Ballroom, Buffalo Iron Works, The Rec Room, The Showplace Theater, Mohawk Place, Electric City, Nietszche’s and Sportsmens Tavern all as viable Buffalo venues consistently booking shows for between 400 and 1,000 concertgoers.
By comparison, Ring said he could count Rochester venues that fit the bill on one hand. After Dark still books shows at The Montage Music Hall, Water Street Music Hall, Photo City Music Hall and Bug Jar. “I still think Rochester is one venue, two venues away from really having a foothold in the market to be considered when these artists are going out,” Ring said.
Dan Smalls started DSP Shows in 2008, and now presents concerts predominantly in Ithaca, Albany and Kingston as well as Northampton, Massachusetts and at Beak & Skiff Apple Orchards in Lafayette. His company occasionally books shows at Kodak Center.
Smalls said Rochester suffers from a lack of larger music clubs. “When you get beyond that level of those small rooms, I don’t know what there is anymore,” he said.
Smalls said that creating a scene where artists want to play is partly about venues establishing themselves as places where bands can regularly play. Ultimately however, selling tickets is key. “People have to come to those shows and support them in a way that the person who takes the chance on opening that club makes a living,” he said. “Because it’s really hard to make a living in a 500 to 700-cap club. It just is. The economics are not easy.”
With a lack of traditional, mid-sized music clubs in Rochester, smaller-capacity venues like the bars Lux Lounge and The Daily Refresher, Three Heads Brewing and the restaurant-bowling alley Radio Social have taken on much of the concert-hosting burden. They can present live music while maintaining non-music revenue streams. With their food, beverage and gaming appeal, these spots have brought enough people in to make money, Maier said, and therefore, they tend to pay local artists well.
“Maybe the show itself doesn’t pull 1,000 people, but there’s a ton of people in there bowling and eating. They kind of have a cushion,” she said of Radio Social. “It’s nice to book places like that because you can make sure that the bands get paid.”
What these venues don’t often have, though, are nationally touring acts. Those bands tend to prefer bigger rooms to make the travel worth their while. But part of it is purely logistical.
Jeff Marsha is the general manager at ASM Global, the parent company of Kodak Center. Even for a venue with 10 times the capacity of the Bug Jar, Marsha said he’s often at the scattershot whim of travel logistics.
“Sometimes we don’t have a lot of choices,” he said. “We might rely on someone driving by our front door, and they need a date because they’re on the way from New York to Cleveland or from Toronto to Pittsburgh.”
Even the spacious Kodak Center, with its theater seating and balcony, can only book within its limitations. The venue doesn’t own its own sound or lighting equipment, meaning the show has to be financially worth the rentals. The venue ultimately lost out on a bid because its freight elevator couldn’t fit a massive video wall for a touring act.
Acts on a smaller scale belong in smaller rooms, obviously. Marsha said Rochester has plenty of great ones to help foster and cultivate up-and-comers. “But once an act’s been around for x amount of years and they’re growing, that’s where Rochester might miss out,” he said
Danny Deutsch, owner of Abilene Bar & Lounge, agreed that there is no shortage of clubs that accommodate between 50 and 300 concertgoers. He mentioned Flour City Station, Photo City Music Hall and his own club among those that provide frequent opportunities for artists to play and audiences to hear them. Mid-sized venues that can fit closer to 1,000 patrons are less prevalent, he said. Anthology never recovered from the pandemic and closed soon after, and the comparatively smaller and newly opened Essex is still finding its footing, yet to book shows on a consistent basis.
“Being infrequent makes it tough for people to respond or for people to be aware,” Deutsch said. “There’s still more people that don’t know about the place than do. Whereas Anthology, they were doing things with such volume and big acts — 1,000-seat room — that people knew of it or went there for some show, or you drove down East Avenue and saw a line.”
Andrew Nittoli and Riley Fressie are the co-owners of the Upstate Music Group agency and talent buyers for Essex, the 800-capacity room on University Avenue that opened in fall 2023. They said improving Rochester’s standing within the routing market is one place to start.
“How do you take a city like Rochester that is a C-market, when you think about it musically, and turn it into a B?” Fressie said. “It’s never going to be an A, because A-markets are New York and Chicago and Philly, but how do we get it to a B? And the answer is more venues.”
Nittoli said Rochester boasts a geographic advantage being midway between Buffalo and Syracuse on the New York State Thruway. Fans from both cities would come to Rochester for bigger shows, if Rochester is able to book them. “[Rochester] just kind of fell off because of the lack of venues,” he said.
There’s also the delicate art of contract negotiations, which the concert-going public rarely if ever considers. To overpay is to damn the venue and all but guarantee the bookers end up in the red. But, Fressie said, “If you give them too little, they’re gonna go to Buffalo. It’s this Goldilocks situation.”
Perhaps the most realistic approach is incremental change. Local bookers and talent buyers agree that additional 1,000-cap venues would theoretically bring in more national acts. It remains to be seen which venues, if any, are able to step up, and whether or not traditional music clubs can thrive again in a post-pandemic landscape.
Patrick Hosken is an arts writer for CITY, and Daniel J. Kushner is a former CITY arts writer, now contributor. Feedback on this story can be directed to patrick@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Oct 1-31, 2024.
