The man who runs the room, on momentum and ads.
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Four and a half minutes inside the Stone Church, a music venue in Brattleboro, Vermont, with the man who runs it. Two visitors are seeing the room for the first time, and both of them ask questions.
It opens on the advice he got before taking the building on, most of it against it. “I mean, like, well, yeah, that’s not a good idea. And I’d recommend against it mostly, but with this face, it’s kind of like, it’s gorgeous. It’s hard, it’s hard not to do. Now we’re stuck.” That leads to the line the rest of the tape rests on: “So I think it’s a very momentum-based business. You can’t really stop.”
He plays music himself, or did. “Uh, last time I played in front of people was at your place, which is almost exactly about when we opened this place.” Asked if he is in hiding, he says totally. Asked whether the venue changes what a musician would play in it, he says no, then makes the case for the room anyway: “I know, but I think the venue does bring out the best in musicians.” His evidence is a guitarist from Living Colour who played a Band of Gypsies Revisited set here, “It was really one of the better shows we’ve had here”, and what the man said afterwards, “in a room like this, if you don’t sound good, right, that’s on you”.
The problem is not the room. “Our one problem is there’s not a lot of people that are very close to here.” Audiences are spread across genres and a wide area, “there’s a lot of competing interests”, and the job is always “to like get enough people in, but when they do, they usually like it.”
How he fills it is the least romantic part. “like burning money on like Facebook and Instagram, just giving them a credit card and like begging for them to like show our shows to people.” People still miss shows anyway: “this just popped up and it happened 2 days ago.” By the numbers it worked, “we’ve got, we got a good following now. We got like 11,000 Instagram followers, more than that on Facebook”, and he resents that it works. “It’s frustrating, but it does work better than anything else that’s going on.” On the platforms themselves: “they kind of like into the, you know, move fast and break things. Yeah, they like... they broke it.” What he trusts more is older. “Email, big email lists are good, and text is helping.”
Asked whether the room will get him writing again, he leaves it open, then gives the name of the place and his own.
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