Building a Rock Club

by Matt Parish
photo by Matt Scott

This month, Performer takes a look at a few different approaches to setting up a club for longevity, utility and great reputation among both bands and audiences. Some clubs pop up when unlikely booking agents take a fresh look at an overlooked room, some are built from the ground up; some were passed by for years before they came to power and some pop up in corners of cities no one’s ever seen before.

Our examples include The Silverlake Lounge in Los Angeles, Calif. We spoke with booking agent Scott Sterling, who also coordinates The Fold, a Silverlake-based promotions company that runs shows at several different venue in the area. The Silverlake is a 176-capacity room at the corner of Sunset and Silverlake Boulevard room with a cozy dive atmosphere.

From Great Scott in Boston, Mass., we spoke with Carl Lavin, who undertook a slow and steady transformation of the 260-capacity room from a sporty hangout for the Boston College and Boston University frat set to a nationally respected touring stop and revered home for local bands.

Finally, from The Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis, Minn., we spoke to Kermit Carter, club manager and head booking agent. Carter took over management operations shortly after it opened in 1999 as a local rock bar given a massive facelift by owners Gretchen and Erik Funk (of Dillinger Four) when they added a 400-capacity space to the back of the bar.

The Silverlake Lounge

Scott Sterling began booking shows at the Silverlake simply because it was right behind his apartment. “I just thought it would be fun to put on a few shows while in-between real jobs as a filmmaker,” he says. “In 1997 there were only a few places for live music in the immediate area, like Dreams (at Spaceland) and Glaxa, an art space also on Sunset.”

When Sterling starting working with the Lounge, the club had a paneled drop ceiling grown beige from years of smoke and water stains and no sound system (he would carry in a rented PA system into the club himself on show nights). The ceiling came out, three feet were added to the stage, the exterior was painted red and the bar was squared off to create more standing room. “The sound setup has been installed from scratch and updated piece by piece over the years,” Sterling says. The club‘s trademark neon sign above the stage was a Sterling touch. “The biggest change was hanging the ‘Salvation’ sign over the stage, that beautiful sign I had fished out of Lake Michigan.”

Sterling says that the initial plan had no long-term aspirations. “ I thought it would be about three or four shows and that would be the end of it. I named the club ‘The Fold’ in part because it had failure built right into the name.” But it didn’t turn out that way. The Silverlake, now part of a conglomeration of area clubs under The Fold umbrella (including El Cid, Bordello and Tangier), enjoys a wide variety of local indie pop bands and touring acts. “I still look to book the music I like, to work with people that interest me, and to take chances on new acts,” Sterling says. “That criteria has been constant.”

But with the club’s success, Sterling remains humble and pragmatic. “If you want an example of someone who has methodically and meticulously built a perfect rock club from scratch, you got the wrong guy,” he says. “But if anyone is a living example that you can put on innumerable quality shows within imperfect circumstances, I’d like to think it’s me.”

Great Scott

Already involved in thriving indie dance nights at various locations in Boston, Carl Lavin was initially just looking for a new venue to host a weekly event. “Some friends and I had been doing a night in Cambridge for a couple months on every other Saturday called ‘­­The Plan’ which I offered as something that could fit the Thursday slot,” says Lavin. “Great Scott agreed to give it a shot and we were able to incorporate the live music aspect because of the equipment that was already here.“

It didn’t happen overnight, but the public perception of Great Scott began to change. It already had some structural things going for it, like a spot right on the biggest corner in Boston’s most infested college neighborhood and a large enough capacity to make it worthwhile for better-known touring bands. In the meantime, little changes took place around the interior. Video games were moved around, some flags and sports memorabilia were removed and an iron railing that lined the stage was finally taken down.

Eventually given seven nights a week at the club, Lavin pushed things along by giving nights to different promoters around town, which helped ease his workload and bring in bands of all stripes. “Having other promoters committed to making their weekly residency work was invaluable,” he said. “It allowed me to narrow my focus and it allowed me to witness other ways of doing things that I wouldn’t have discovered on my own nearly as quickly, if at all.”

Nearly five years after setting up shop there, Lavin now enjoys a reputation as the booking agent at one of the most consistently great clubs in the Northeast and the first thriving rock club for both well-publicized touring bands and local bands that Allston has seen in years. “The location is the key reason I thought the transformation would be possible,” Lavin says. “The neighborhood is so densely populated with musicians, artists and other musically aware people and is relatively easy to get to from everywhere else in the city. Touring bands get to see a different part of town and I think Allston treats them well. It definitely treats us well.”

The Triple Rock Social Club

Unlike the other two clubs, The Triple Rock Social was built with the expressed purpose of putting on loud club shows. Formerly Blondie’s (and The Pilot Club before that), the bar began life as “The Trock” when Erik and Gretchen Funk bought the small corner bar right off the Interstate on Cedar Ave. in 1998. Says Carter, “They wanted to specifically cater to their friends - drunk punk rock people. Erik played in a popular punk band called Dillinger Four, so they already had a bit of a built in clientele.” Outside of the odd birthday karaoke band, the Triple Rock never hosted live music.

One day, though, the inspiration hit Erik Funk to knock down his patio and build a brand new space for rock shows in its place. “Yes, I think it was a bit crazy also,” says Carter. “After major construction, they built the room, and on June 6, 2003, had their first concert, literally still building the stage and putting in PA equipment the night of. Lifter Puller and Moutain Goats played.”

The room has a high ceiling and multi-tiered floor, an immaculate sound system and logistical touches that make bands swoon, like a load-in door that opens directly onto the stage. “We did not have to retro fit anything,” Carter says. “It was a clean slate. So there were certain things that Erik specifically wanted and one was an easy load in. 20 feet from the door to the stage — no stairs, no hoops, no bullshit — it is truly a breeze.”

“The room was designed for 400 person shows,” he says. “It makes it hard to feel like there is anyone there at smaller shows. So we have tried to ‘soften’ that room up a bit by getting more black on the walls instead of all the chrome silver stuff we started with.”

These days, the club is on top of its game and booking shows for everyone from Ecstatic Sunshine to The Unseen. “The production aspect of these shows - the water, the food, drink tickets, settling the shows - are all huge to us,” says Carter. “We try to see that bands are treated not as assholes who blow through one day and are gone the next but as friends who will keep coming back and supporting us.”

“That aspect has been very important to us as far as trying to secure national acts that come through town. We can’t give them the most money, but hopefully we can make it the one stop on tour where they are treated with respect and can eat some tater tots.”