Pioneer Square went joint cover one weekend a month. What that meant is that you
could pay
$5 at one club and move around the Square, getting into all the other clubs with
just the one cover charge. A lot of bands
hated it, as it meant that someone might pay cover at a different club and then
show up and hear your band without paying.
So if a band was playing for the door like at the Central you could have an audience
that paid cover somewhere else.
What we realized
is that it just boiled down to starting earlier, whatever club had music blasting out
of
it grabbed the first customers of the night. What we would do is shoot for an 8:30 start
with some kind of assemblage of musicians
getting up and jamming blues. Some musicians were too cool for it, they thought it
too blatant
a hustle. But for us it was survival, do whatever we had to do to hang onto the weekends
that paid our recording bills.
Mark and Ryco on bass and drums, maybe I'd sing a few songs. Maybe someone from another
club would play harp or sing a few. Eric from Life In General -- a great guitar player with
a dry sense of humor -- he was always game when we co-billed with them.
It was funny, but there was always people out in the Square waiting for the first sounds of music, and
once we would start, the first few customers would come in and
within 20 minutes
the place would start to fill up. The beer taps would start to flow and the room would
start chattering and everyone was happy.
It didn't even matter if the first people in the door even stuck around; that was not the
point. The point was to get them to pay at the Central, get some customers for the
bartenders,
and get the club hopping before the later 10 and
11:00 p.m. crowd started showing up.
We would exploit anything going on. Did we think that many of the people getting out of a
baseball game would actually be into Variant Cause? No, probably not. But when that
crowd was walking through the Square looking for a place to have a beer, you can bet
that R.B. Chop Chop was up on stage banging out some white-boy-blues. Our own audience
would show up later. Our sole intention was to do whatever it took to hang onto weekend
status.
And the harsh reality is that weekend status is established solely by numbers through
the door and how much business the bar did.
That was a great strategy which worked for us and works in any kind of central location
where there are a lot of clubs, in those old downtown club areas that some many cities have.
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