Pioneer Inn - Dave Lyons - Venue Owner - Booker Interview
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 Pioneer Inn Nederland, CO |
Venue Stats:
Type of Venue:
Venue established: Music Style: Local Attraction: Owner: Music 'Booker': Official Website: |
Pioneer Inn Bar, restaurant, live music 1971 Most types, 7 nights/wk Rocky Mountain town, ski resorts Dave Lyons & Cindy Shaw Dave Lyons PioneerInnNederland.net |
Dave Lyons shares his viewpoint as a live music venue owner...with a twist!
Dave is a little different when it comes to most venue owners. He used to be a full-time musician! That gives him a unique advantage to hiring musicians for his venue. It also gives him deeper insight to share with you what a venue owner desires when they hire a band. After listening to this entire 40 minute interview, just ask yourself..."Do I act professional enough to play music full-time?" (audio interview on video below)
Dave is a little different when it comes to most venue owners. He used to be a full-time musician! That gives him a unique advantage to hiring musicians for his venue. It also gives him deeper insight to share with you what a venue owner desires when they hire a band. After listening to this entire 40 minute interview, just ask yourself..."Do I act professional enough to play music full-time?" (audio interview on video below)
 |
|
| Status: | Musician Notes: |
| Amateur | Great place to start developing your skills with the open jams and open mics. |
| Part-timer |
Pay
is about 30% of market rate, bar-tab, & tips. Bands on Fri &
Sat nights only. Good place to refine the act you are developing before going full-time. |
| Full-timer | You
will lose too much money on a Friday or Saturday night to play here.
You will also find the performing policies constricting but do-able and fair. |
Interview Transcript:
Jill Today we’re going to interview Dave Lyons who owns the Pioneer Inn just up the hill in the mountains here in Colorado and he is primarily a music venue owner. Dave is interesting. He used to be a professional musician many years ago, and he has sent out an essay to people who want to play there. The essay was pretty strong, but it was interesting. He told me it offended only full-time musicians, it didn’t really offend the amateurs. This is the kind of venue that you would play when you’re trying to put your act together, get responses, make sure you really do have what it takes to become a full-time musician. If you are already a full-time musician, this is not the venue you’re going to play because Dave just really doesn’t have the budget for it. Now Dave and I don’t agree on everything, but what I like about Dave is that, even if he doesn’t agree with you, he’ll talk to you. And I think he makes a great case about professionalism. You have to keep in mind, when you’re out there selling gigs, these venue owners, this is where there mind-set is, this is what they’re thinking. So the more insight you have into your client, or potential client, the better off you’re going to be. I’ll bet you’re going to get some good insight out of this interview. So, enjoy.
DAVE Well, my girlfriend works in restaurants. We’ve been together 17 years, so you could call us married. Technically, we’re not. But anyway, she works for restaurants, always has, and she was looking for a better job, not just waiting tables in restaurants, and the place had been for sale for a while. I played music at the Pioneer Inn for 25 years ever since I moved to Colorado. The price got low enough, so the real estate agent sent me the listing again and said, ”Take a look at it, it might be worth it.” So at the price she was asking, we were willing to start negotiating about it. I had a little money put aside from a little inheritance gift I had so I was able to swing the deal, and we just did that this spring because the old owner really wanted out, and I took it over. So I run it as a music venue at night and my girlfriend Cindy Shaw runs it as a restaurant during the day.
Jill All right. Do you have good food?
DAVE What’s that?
Jill Do you have good food there?
DAVE Some of it’s good, yeah, you know, it’s ordinary bar food. None of it is dangerous or bad… It’s not what I’d prefer to eat, but some of it is real good.
Jill (laughter) So, the Pioneer Inn, is it actually an inn, is there a hotel or something like that there?
DAVE No. The name is a bit misleading, I’m not sure why that is, but no, it’s a restaurant and we have a bar. Primarily a bar.
Jill So what do people primarily come there for?
DAVE Well, primarily people come in to eat during the day, but at night it is a music venue, has been for 40 years. By the time I was 14 I was playing at bars, with a note from my mom. I was along-haired freak electric guitar player back in those days. I started playing guitar at 6, I was doing recitals and stuff at 10, and I was playing in bars at 14. I kind of worked my way through college playing in bands. I switched to bass when I was about 16, and I’ve been mostly a bassist since then.
Jill Let me ask you this. Wjem I read your essay, I’m trying to look for it now, in the very beginning ,-- apparently your essay really angered a lot of musicians.
DAVE Some. Two that I know of.
Jill Why do you think that is?
DAVE I think they were being picked out, pointed out. It was a little bit of, “If the shoe fits, wear it!” attitude I took with that. Funny, one of the guys, both of the guys that got mad are professional working musicians that have played in some pretty important bands, and I guess they thought I was accusing them of not being professional by simply sending them that essay. Which isn’t the case at all.
Jill It’s kind of like when the boss chews out the entire staff for something that one employee did.
DAVE Right, but it’s something you don’t want anyone ever to do again, so it’s totally justified.
Jill (laughter) I got you. That makes sense. Well, hopefully there won’t be much fall-out, because, like I say, everything you talk about on professionalism is what we talk about, too.
DAVE It’s like any other job. That’s the part that’s just common sense stuff.
Jill Yes, because even the professionals who got mad, they have to admit that you’re right. I mean, you were right about everything you were saying.
DAVE I don’t think that was it. I think they were just upset that I would say that to them, since they weren’t the ones that were guilty.
Jill Maybe that. I can understand, because when I read it, I kind of felt the same way. Even though I’m not a musician, T and I are sort of like one person, we’ve been married a long time, and when he got the e-mail, it was too many words for him, I think, so he said, “Read this and tell me what you think.” So I read it, and I kind of felt a little stunned, too, because I’m thinking, “But we do that. And we do that.”
DAVE And give yourself a pat on the back. I’m not saying you don’t do these things, I’m saying I want everybody to do these things that comes in here.
Jill Yeah, this is what I’m looking for. You’re just trying to make your expectations clear.
DAVE I had some people complain there was too much anger in the language. But I read it again, and I thought it was just right. I don’t want them … I want them to take it seriously.
Jill I’ll be honest. I thought it was a little angry, too. You know what I said, though? I said, something has happened to Dave to make him angry about this for some reason. He’s had some kind of bad experience, because it is so personal the way you write it, and you can tell you’ve experienced it and you’re very frustrated with it. And I think that’s what they’re talking about the anger,
DAVE There’s also a thing sometimes the boss has to do, and that is to pretend to be angrier than you really so that people will take it seriously. You’re putting on a little bit of a show so that they don’t ever want to see you like that again. So when I get a band and I don’t what to do with a band at the end of a night, I go stomp around and go “Aarrrgh” and…
Jill I like the part where you say “In case you’re skimming this, this is important.” You know, if you edited it, it would be so good. It would a good little guideline…
DAVE I think that’s what I’m going to do. Take those little bits out that are angry, tone it down, make it a little smoother and calm, but leave all the context, then I think it’ll be a real good essay.
Jill I think so, too. Again, there is so much good stuff in there that they really do need to know and, quite frankly, I think most of them just don’t know. They just don’t, and they need to. What do people need to do to play at the Pioneer Inn?
DAVE They need to be able to contact me by e-mail, send me some kind of internet link for their product, probably a video so I can look at them. Good quality recordings are also nice to get, and then we’ll have a little conversation with them about what my terms are and what they need to be able to play, and we can work out a date or we’ll decide that it’s not a match.
Jill How often do you offer live music there?
DAVE Seven nights a week, but we only book bands on Friday and Saturday nights. We have vocal jam sessions the other five nights.
Jill Oh, well, that’s pretty nice. How many people usually come out to that?
DAVE We get good crowds on the week nights, in fact that’s one thing we’ve been struggling with for our business model is that sometime week nights are just as good as the weekends.
Jill I think that’s all of Colorado, to be honest, from what I’ve seen around this place. Y’all have a huge weekly business here.
DAVE Yeah, and a lot of people don’t work a standard Monday to Friday kind of job. They have a different day off, or maybe they work late nights. One of our crowds are the service people, they want to get crazy in the couple of hours they have before the bars shut down. It’s a pretty late crowd, people come in after 10 o’clock, so our music starts at ten, except the blue grass pick on Sunday.
Jill Oh, that would be fun, blue grass.
DAVE Yeah, that’s a lot of fun. Yeah, they start at seven and they just play ‘till it’s over. Sometimes they go until last call even though they started at seven.
Jill That’s good and laid back. And good for you because it’s cheap and it gives them a chance to play somewhere. That’s kind of nice.
DAVE Yeah, it’s a real homey place. You should come up and see it some day if you’re in the mountains.. There’s a big old fireplace that they sit around in a circle and pick and we’re stoking fires for that.
Jill Sort of like you’re camping indoors.
DAVE Just pickin’ and livin’.
Jill I’ll buy that. Tell me a little about the most important things in your mind as a venue owner that the musicians can do to be a lot more professional maybe than what you’ve seen?
DAVE Well, I’ve seen all ages of professionals from doing everything right to doing everything wrong, I guess. The main thing to remember is that it’s a job just like any other, and the things that are expected of you are the exact same things that would be expected of you if you had a job doing anything else, working in the kitchen, working at the bar, being a professional lawyer or a doctor, or any job at all. You would be expected to show up on time for your appointments. I would expect musicians to follow that same rule, and if you’re late or late often enough, you get fired for that. It happens in any darn job in the world. I’m not laying out in special guidelines. I’m just telling musicians that, even if this may not feel like a job it is a job, so treat it like a job with the same expectations.
Jill To us our venues are our customers, that’s our clients, and it’s up to us to do the best we possibly can do for our clients or they’re not going to hire us again.
DAVE Yes, and that makes two separate things. One is playing music well and the other is professional standards of conduct, arrive on time, don’t be drunk, don’t over drink on your tab, be nice, tip the waitress. Before you’re on, you work with the venue itself, make sure your gear is together and functions so that it doesn’t cause a problem all night,
Jill Remember to bring your 9-Volt batteries right?
DAVE (Laughter) Right. People forget any thing. You know if it’s one tiny little thing or another, we work with people and we get it done, but some of them come without half their stuff.
Jill You know, I think that’s because they’re just not used to gigging. You know yourself that when you were gigging regular, you had your stuff organized, and together, and you could go in and set up and tear down so much faster. Because you did it all the time. But I think some of these guys only play once a month, and they leave half their stuff at home.
DAVE The more you work, the more streamlined you get your rig. The more you know exactly what you have and what you need. I played gigs with half a different bands all at once and they all required different rigs so I got constantly to know what I’d need for each single gig. Some have electric, some have PAs, some don’t have PAs, some have to interface PAs, so I had to bring a small amp for stage reasons, for others a big amp. Sometimes they would be upright…
Jill How do you feel when you hire a band and they come in there and they bring all these Marshall house stacks like they’re playing some concert. What goes through your mind…
DAVE Well, that’s not necessary A. because you can get your sound nowadays out of a tiny little, light little box, which is what suggest for most musicians that they use unless they have a road crew hauling their stuff around. In which case they won’t be playing my venue. And also if you’re taking up way too much space. Have some respect for the other members of the band and for the audience themselves. You have to leave some room for them.
Jill Exactly. That’s a good point.
DAVE The amps that sound best in my room are the Protector Deluxe Reverbs. It’s a 22 Watt 112 amps. It’s really nice. It’s a really nice little amp and I have a 300 watt bass amp that’s like that. It’s small. You know everything can be pretty small nowadays.
Jill Those new Bose Towers are awesome, too. They even do well outside, believe it or not.
DAVE Yeah, they’re kind of three dimensional.
Jill For an acoustic solo I’m talking about because that’s what I’m used to, but not for a band.
DAVE You’re not going to generate any real high sound pressure with those.
Jill No, but for an acoustic solo they work great.
DAVE And for stage monitoring, if you’re going to use them that way. That’s another thing I’d say about professionalism, what you pointed out about wallpaper gigs These corporate parties or restaurant happy hours, wallpaper gigs, they may not seem very good one at a time, but if you can piece together a calendar full of them, if you can get 360 annual corporate parties, you got a great calendar.
Jill Ooo, that would be hard to get 360 corporate gigs, wouldn’t it.
DAVE You’d be raking in the cash.
Jill Yes, you would be.
DAVE Unfortunately, the steadiest gigs, I offer 7 gigs a week and no corporation can compete with me. My pay scale is low but during the week I’m paying musicians a lot of money. I’m a job creator. (laughter)
Jill Yeah, and a good example of that, T Moody, he will go play Little Bear every time they call, and I think you might know where Little Bear is, at Evergreen.
DAVE Yeah, I played there a while.
Jill He loves that venue, and they don’t pay him as much as he’s supposed to get, but he will go there because the tips are so damn good that it just makes up for what they can’t pay him in the fee. Plus he really enjoys that venue, and they take great care of him. They feed him, they’ve got great food there and everything.
DAVE Yeah, Pioneer is a lot like Big Bear, traditional mountain venue that’s had live music for a long time. Is known for it.
Jill And they get him in there on a Sunday afternoon when the motorcycle crowd is going through, and he makes fantastic tips so for him it’s worth it. So there are times a professional is going to take less money because he knows he can make up for it.
DAVE Yeah, it figures. The reasons people will play for less are vague? A is for exposure, and related to that is to be able to build a scene at this place, which is part of the attraction here and at Little Bear. And third because it’s fun and easy to do. At a discount. (laughter)
Jill Now there was something you were talking about in your essay about breaks, and even though I agree with you that breaks should be short, but when you were talking about a 10 minute guideline for breaks, that just seems unrealistic for me simply because basically that’s when you’re kind of getting to know the audience, you’re building your relationship with the audience, you’re selling your CDs and you’re hitting the bathroom and grabbing a beer and then you get back, tune up, do whatever you need to do to get ready, so I just felt that 10 minutes was a lot of pressure. So talk to me about that.
DAVE Well, that’s not your time to talk to the audience,. The time to talk to the audience might be when the gig is completely over, but on set breaks you need to get your bodily functions taken care of and get right back up there. If someone’s going to be selling your “merch”, you need to have somebody who does that. You can’t be doing that on the set breaks. You can easily conned into a conversation that takes, 15, 20, 30 minutes, people start talking to you. From a professional point of view, musicians should shun the audience on set breaks, they should disappear. They need to take care of business and get right back on stage. Ten minutes is really how long we used to do it back in the bad old days, back in the 70’s and the 80’s. Bands have gotten more recently into playing longer sets and taking longer breaks, and from the point of view of a club owner, that is not a good, I’d rather see shorter sets and shorter breaks. It’s better for the audience, works better for the club. You’re less likely to drive people out if you play a shorter set, and they’re less likely to get bored and leave if you take a shorter break. So the old school way forty on, ten off, I’d like to see bands going back towards that. On set breaks, I’m in league with the audience.
Jill The thing about the break, T has a very specific thing he does for three hours, He goes and he plays for about an hour and a half, takes a 20-minute break, then finishes the set, and then hangs out. That’s kind of his routine, so when a guideline is narrowed down that much --
DAVE A 20-minute break is acceptable. To me 20 minutes is the upper end of an acceptable break.
Jill But he takes only one break. And there’s a pro musician in New Jersey who plays three hours, he doesn’t even take a break. So he gets $500 a gig, too.
DAVE Well, I don’t know what he sounds like but with some bands, you don’t want them to play an hour and a half, like if it’s real upbeat or fast music or it’s loud. But if it’s mellow, an acoustic thing, then ……
Jill He’s not mellow. It’s real high energy which is exactly why he has to take a break, whereas the other guy I was telling you about, he sits down when he plays and T, he stands up and jumps around, he’s a real high energy acoustic solo, and so if he doesn’t take a break, he’ll die young.
DAVE Well, yeah, I’d say if I would alter the play, if he was going to play there, say on for an hour, off for fifteen, on for an hour, off for twenty, something like that. I’m OK with 20 as long as it’s no longer. I’ve watched what happens when it’s 30. People start packing up.
Jill I’ll go in and the band’s playing and I’ll think, cool, I’m going to check this out and I’ll sit down and they’ll take their break about the same time. and I’m sitting there waiting and waiting for almost 30 minutes and I will walk out because I came out to see live music.
DAVE 30 minutes is too long.
Jill They’re sitting at the bar getting drunk and it’s pissing me off, and--
DAVE That’s why I say they should just disappear for 10 minutes. And when they re-appear, get back to work and not hang out with the crowd until they really are done.
Jill I think they’re just there sucking up that tab like you were talking about and trying to get their money’s worth and meanwhile the set I’m going to see is going to suck because they got all those Jager Bombs going.
DAVE Right, they’ve got too much of a buzz. Right, and all that is from the customer’s point of view, and that’s why I say the breaks should be short, 10 or 15 is good. 20 is acceptable. But longer than 20, no good,
Jill Do you, like with the amateur bands, do you have a problem with them overdrinking while they’re playing like it’s just a big party instead of them being there for the audience? Do you run across that?
DAVE Absolutely. I’d say that’s one of the main differences between a professional and an amateur band, although even the most professional bands can fall into that trap because the beer, the liquor, is part of their pay, so some of them feel they have to consume in order to get their money’s worth, so to speak, and others think it’s a big party and that’s part of the fun of it is that they’re getting drunk with the audience. Neither of those are correct points of view. The band is there so that you can take care of your basic needs, you know, get some food get some drink in you so that you’re feeling good and you can play and perform well. You’re not supposed to get caught up up with the clientele, you’re supposed to be putting on a professional performance which involves, you know, a pretty high level of sobriety really.
Jill Yeah. It’s funny, the people who think they play so much better when they’re drunk. I’m like, hell no, you don’t.
DAVE (Mutual laughter, two voices…) Some people still play pretty well even when they’re drunk. I’ve known some amazing players who were still pretty good even then, but they’re the exception, not the rule. Nobody’s better.. You know, if you start to catch a buzz by the very end of your show, that’s OK by me. I’ve been guilty of that enough times myself, but the more I play and the more high level shows that I do, the more I want to be pretty darn sober and not start drinking until the show is well underway.
Jill What I found interesting, when you sent the essay out to the musicians who desire to play there at your venue, I thought all your points on professionalism were fantastic. It’s obvious you know a lot about professionalism. But do you find that because—and to be quite frank, I’m saying this because we get, T gets a lot more and musicians we know get paid a lot more – so I have to ask this question. Do you feel that by paying more amateur rates to musicians you’re getting amateurs and that’s why you have the professionalism issues?
DAVE Well, now, I wouldn’t say I was having an issue. I just wanted to put everybody on the same page with that thing. There are a few people who don’t go by those guidelines. They were based on a couple of bad experiences I had over the summer. But for the most part everybody is professional, and I hire full-time professional musician even though the pay scale is low. And that’s because I make it easy for them, with a fully installed PA and a fairly generous tab. It’s a comfortable and easy gig to do. And with a per cent pay out, if the band is professional enough to pull in a crowd, they can make a lot more money. But it’s in our interest to encourage them to promote. To me, too many bands drop the ball on promotion. I’ve been in bands and I’ve seen them do it. And that doesn’t serve the band or the venue. The venue can’t be required to do all of it and neither can the band. They both need to. Now in terms of what musicians ought to get paid, I think the pay scale should be a whole lot higher. What I’m seeing in my business is that we’re being robbed by things like taxes and insurance of profits that would go into our pockets or perhaps to pay employees and musicians better.
Jill Right. I just know, I’ve had a lot of businesses and have had to do a lot of events and promote a venue and things like that and I always looked at it, if I contract a musician, it’s not really up to my contractor to make it successful. I contract a musician more because that’s the environment that I want to create, and if I failed in picking the wrong musician or something, I just kind of kick myself for it and don’t hire them again but ultimately I never expect my contractors when I hire for an event to make it successful. I look at myself to do that. How do you feel about that?
DAVE You should do that?
Jill Myself. It’s up to me to make it work.
DAVE I just went through that. I think I’d have to require both parties, particularly in a night club. If it’s a special event that’s happening someplace that doesn’t always have music, that’s a little different, it’s a little harder for a band to promote that, but they should still do that, if they’re going to play there they should tell the people who would like to see them that they’re going to be at this place. And if you don’t make them do it, they won’t do it. Some of them will, but for the most part, they don’t see any value in it. They’re like everybody else. They’ll just get lazy and not do it. So that’s the reason why I’m saying the pay scale is where it’s at. And also I get the law laid down to me by my financial partner who runs the restaurant and does the books that we’re losing money on music three nights out of four, and in order to preserve the gig at all, I have to bring it in financial line.
Jill Just the market rate. I’m curious, because your venue is pretty far up in the mountains and the pro musicians that I know around here on the plains—Fort Collins, Loveland, all that, we just play here around the plains just about everywhere – but they tell me that when they go up into the mountains, they charge more to go up there and play, so that means they charge double or triple what your maximum pay is there,
DAVE Well, some bands are going to come up here. Bands have, some good ones, too, from down there, and even national touring acts. The reason why is they need to get their calendar full and it is a good place to play without the pay. You see, we do the same thing in reverse, we musicians who live up here, we charge more to play down there. Like (unintelligible) played up here for $250, the whole band. Or like $50 bucks a man. Whereas we like to get $300 to go down to the bottom of the hill. I imagine the bands down there want the same thing, they want to get their gas money. and their time moving around (2 voices, muddles)
Jill So it sounds as if you would get more amateurs from down here than you would from your own area.
DAVE Well, I know everybody up here. I know if they can play or not. But you know, I’m perfectly willing to get what you’re calling amateurs a chance here if they have an act that they’ve been working on that they think they can sell, if their quality has reached a level of professionalism that I can tolerate, then I’ll book them, give them a shot. That’s the only way they’re going to be a pro is to get a shot at being a pro.
Jill Right. Well, that’s good, because in the beginning you kind of have to do those open mikes and those amateur gigs to get your act actually together to get out there and actually get paid well.
DAVE From the point of view of what I can afford to pay, their expenses getting up here and everything are irrelevant. That’s not important to me. I’ve got my own bottom line. On the other hand, I do feel for them and what I would say to any band that wants to play here is that if you can develop a following, you can make a lot more than $200. We’d be thrilled to pay you $600 if we had a $3000 night at the bar.
Jill Exactly!
DAVE That’s a pay out of 20%. Which puts us high on our margin but allows us to sweeten the deal if a band does a good job. It’s good money.
Jill On a regular basis, do you show enough of an increase in business to justify the expense of live music now or is that real marginal currently under the budget?
DAVE Well, I would say that’s really difficult to determine because, if we didn’t have live music, the place might be completely empty. Most of the bean counters say that it’s not worth it. That you should just forget live music and run the bar and the restaurant and have a jukebox or a karaoke machine or something because your risk of loss with live music versus your benefit of gain is so minimum. To me that’s not looking at it correctly. They’re not looking at the long-term effect of having music in your venue all the time so that people come back three months later because of that. So that they come back a year later because of a band they saw there, I got a letter from somebody in Texas who are coming back up in December and want to see the (Unintelligible) again. These people on their trip from Texas to cine skiing are making a special trip to Nederland to see this band because they liked them.
Jill You say you have a partner in that business?
DAVE Yeah, my girlfriend’s my financial and acting business partner. Perhaps she doesn’t want to, but those are the finances.
Jill Right. What is good is that you do let people have a shot in your venue. That should keep music live and you’re doing the jam sessions, so I see you doing it as cheaply as possible, just from my experience.
DAVE Oh, absolutely as cheaply as possible. She’s leaned on me and leaned on me, and I’ve got to strike the balance between her saying we’re still not really making money and keeping quality musicians interested in the place. We’re right on the edge of that balance, you know, the low fees are discouraging to some people but the percent payout encourages everybody to do better, and if we could build our scene up over a period of years, that percent payout will start being big every night.
Jill Since we’ve been out here, we’ve been exploring all those mountains up there, and we were going through Poudre Canyon and I finally found Mishawaka. I’d always read about it but I’d never seen it or really knew what it was
DAVE A beautiful place.
Jill Isn’t it neat? We had to stop there, and it was really cool and it was right on the river and I said where does anybody park? There’s no parking, you just have to park on the side of the road, but --
DAVE (mixed voices) I can get pretty congested in there.
Jill But they get some pretty big bands in there. They’re a mountain venue that pays for professional live music pretty much. They have low level and even mid-level bands in there, so what do you think they’re paying for those guys? Not the label guys but the cult-following musicians?
DAVE Well, the way they run it is interesting. It’s a whole lot different from our model. Our cover charge is called a bar. It is a better way to run the music if your product really is music than at our club. Our product technically is alcohol. Music is a sales pitch. That’s our business model because people walk in, there’s no cover charge. Down there to walk in there’s a cover charge That’s largely the competition in (unintelligible). The cover charge is what really makes it so difficult for us
Jill That’s a great point that you bring up about the different business models for different venues. You’re saying that at Mishawaka their focus is live music so they have a different business model for collecting that revenue.
DAVE I think they charge a cover fee of at least $10.
Jill Your draw is basically alcohol, music the sales pitch. In other venues where food is the draw, or alcohol is the draw, or whatever, they hire live music. They tend to pay more. You remember those wall paper gigs.
DAVE They usually paid pretty well
Jill Yes, always! Those are the best paying gigs in the world, but that’s because the people are drawn there for a whole other reason. It’s something they pay for to add to the atmosphere, basically.
DAVE That’s an atmosphere loss leader for that business model. And actually it’s an atmosphere loss leader for my business model, too. We can’t lose a lot of money on music, but we don’t have any illusions about making a lot of money on music. We’re going to break even and have a scene. We’ll be happy with that. It would be nice to make a little money. But I’m OK with giving the musicians the bulk of what we’re profiting and really skimming the margins tight. That’s why I went to 20%. At that level, we won’t make any money until sales exceed $2000.
Jill Yeah, that’s tough, especially for where you’re at, but at least you’re doing what you can to save it, and I think that’s great.
DAVE I’m hoping it will build a scene, so that, like I say, within a couple of years’ time we’ll have the kind of repeat customers and maybe even become a destination so that we have nights that good every night.
Jill Right, right. Like the people from Texas coming back.
DAVE Right. If we had 365 people like that coming once a year, that’s somebody in the club every night.
Jill Yes. And for an amateur who’s just working a job and playing a few gigs here and there --
DAVE It takes persistence.
Jill It does take persistence. We paid quite a price, because when T started I was always in real estate finance because I was an investor and my background before that was sales so that’s all I knew, so when T and I got married about seven years ago, and he was getting in the music business, and I-- I‘d had a construction business, a property management business, but I had no idea about a music business. I knew nothing. I knew what the general pop public knows when they walk up and talk to you at a gig. And I got on line, because my big thing was how do we book gigs? So I get on line, and there’s no real good information out there. It’s all bullshit.
DAVE Everything is different. And they change so often, you know, and the guy you talked to last week might not be there any more and it’s a mess. I quit enjoying that 20 years ago.
Jill And another thing I noticed, basically all that was out there was about sell your music on line and get rich. And that’s all BS.
DAVE The whole get rich part is a bit of a pipe dream. I mean that happens very rarely. But if you could just make a living doing something you love so much, then you’re a success.
Jill Exactly. That’s what we’re trying to teach people to do. We went all over the country and developed a whole booking system, and I had to sell it as an e-book first so I could get the money to build the website, and once I had the website I could give it for free because I got my advertisers on there that people click and I get paid, basically. So I was able to do all this. Plus T makes a pretty good living, so I get to stay home, which is fine.
DAVE It sounds like you make a great team
Jill We do, we do.
DAVE A musician needs a booking agent first and foremost.
Jill Well now, I don’t book his gigs, actually. He does all that.
DAVE Oh, that’s hard.
Jill Here’s the thing. You know yourself, if you’re building a business, you have to build a system that’s duplicatable by anybody which is why McDonald’s is great because that system is duplicatable by teen-agers, basically. So I knew that if I did his booking for him, it wasn’t really going to be able to do him any good, it wasn’t going to teach anybody anything, so I worked with him with old-fashioned sales techniques, basically, to help him develop a system, so now we’ve got a system that anybody can do in almost any populated place in the country.
DAVE Well, that’s excellent.
Jill So this is really good what you’re saying, because it can’t just all come from me, even though I talk to people like you and other full-time musicians every day. I want people to hear it from everybody because you may say something differently than the way I say it and somebody’s going to get it.
DAVE That’s just good teaching. Say it a different way, and maybe it will click this way.
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