The Philly music-venue scene: Growing or going?
The big news on the Philadelphia live music scene this season has been the advent of the Fillmore, the new 2,500-capacity venue operated by concert promotion giant Live Nation.
The big news on the Philadelphia live music scene this season has been the advent of the Fillmore, the new 2,500-capacity venue operated by concert promotion giant Live Nation.
There's been much ballyhoo about the Fishtown venue, which premiered last month with pop-soul heroes Hall & Oates and which has demonstrated its diversity with shows by Brit electro-duo Disclosure and Texas bluesman Gary Clark Jr.
Besides its spacious, balconied room with twinkly chandeliers, the postindustrial space also houses a scaled-down venue called the Foundry. On Sunday night, the Foundry hosts a DJ set by Roots drummer Questlove, who is on record (on Instagram) as calling the Fillmore "a place so friggin incredible . . . I REFUSE to believe #Philly has this."
There is good reason to believe this is a good time for music venues in town. According to secondary market ticket reseller Vivid Seats, a StubHub competitor, the Philadelphia music scene ranked No. 1 among the top 20 cities in the country, according to a formula based on number and variety of shows and affordability of concert tickets.
Last year, a Pew Charitable Trusts report found that since 2006, the growth of the percentage of 20-to-34-year-olds - a prime concertgoing demographic - in Philadelphia was larger than in any major American city. And local acts such as the War on Drugs, Hop Along, and Waxahatchee are gaining national attention.
But along with the alleluias comes angst. Well before the entertainment complex in the former Ajax Metal Factory on East Allen Street opened, music insiders were fretting: Is the Philadelphia music scene now dangerously "overclubbed"?
That word was used by Jesse Lundy, who books shows at the Ardmore Music Hall and other venues, in a story written by my colleague Jonathan Takiff in the spring.
Perhaps not coincidentally timed to the Fillmore's opening, its identical-capacity competitor, the Electric Factory, owned by former Live Nation exec Larry Magid, announced it had upgraded its sound system, launched a 20th-anniversary promotion, and landed choice bookings such as the Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz show, coming Dec. 5.
And as though to say, "I told you so," two small clubs, each with a rich history, the North Star Bar in Brewerytown and the Legendary Dobbs on South Street, closed in the last month. Those shutterings ratcheted up worry - is the Philadelphia music scene dying? - and filled social-media feeds with many a memory-kindling list of great shows.
Historically speaking, both those rooms were significant, and if you can't get misty-eyed about fondly remembered rock shows that are gone like your youth, what can you get sentimental over?
So here are my lists.
At the North Star, I saw the White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, John Legend, the Waco Brothers, Elliott Smith, Joan Osborne, the Libertines, Chocolate Genius, Jason & the Scorchers, Wussy, Pere Ubu, and, most recently, one of my favorite local bands, Shark Tape.
And at Dobbs, after it first closed in 1996 and later reopened as the Pontiac Grille, I caught Dwight Yoakam, Beck, Oasis, Jeff Buckley, Bo Diddley, Whiskeytown, Evan Johns & the H-Bombs, the Chills, and Alex Chilton.
As I was reminded the other day, I once saw a great show at the Pontiac Grille by indie-country singer Mike Ireland in which I, my pal Luke, and Brit novelist Nick Hornby were three of maybe six people in the room. And way back in 1991, I saw a band at Dobbs that you probably wish you had, too, called Nirvana.
But as Don Henley, who plays the Academy of Music on Thursday, might say: "Those days are gone forever, we should just let 'em go." Both the North Star and especially Dobbs, which had gone through many changes since its heyday under owner Kathy James in the 1990s, were integral parts of pre-hipster Philadelphia.
And, more specifically, of a pre-Johnny Brenda's Philadelphia. That Fishtown club, right up the street from the new Fillmore, was the transformative venue in the Philly music scene when it opened in 2003.
It's not just that it made it OK to go to Fishtown. ("I used to be scared to come up here," Daryl Hall said during the Fillmore's opening night.) Now, as Chris Ward, chief booker at Johnny Brenda's, puts it, the area is so busy - "We've got a casino across the street, and a hotel being built around the corner" - that "the question is, are we a neighborhood or a destination?"
More important for music fans, Johnny Brenda's - which is bringing in Sudanese groovemaster Sinkane on Tuesday and low-fi wunderkind Car Seat Headrest on Dec. 6 - also raised the standards for music clubs that target young audiences. Larry Goldfarb, who has booked the Old City acoustic room the Tin Angel for decades, once quipped to me that if fans want to see an act bad enough, they would go even if the concert were held "in a Dumpster."
Johnny Brenda's took the opposite approach. "It was a wake-up call for everyone," says Sean Agnew, who co-owns the 1,000-capacity Union Transfer, where rapper Jeezy is due on Nov. 18. His R5 Productions books all-ages shows at the First Unitarian Church - where Shamir Bailey plays Friday - as well as the art clubhouse PhilaMOCA. "The club and venue experience has gotten so much better in Philadelphia. There's a nice place to play at every level."
That's true at places such as Boot & Saddle in South Philly (also co-owned by Agnew), as well as World Cafe Live, which targets a more adult audience.
And the concept has made its way to the Fillmore, which - whatever you think of its corporate-branded hippie nostalgia name - is a very nice place, with excellent sightlines and sound by Lititz, Pa., industry leader Clair Bros.
"It's super-nice," says Agnew, sharing in the consensus about the room, with which he only occasionally is in competition, as Union Transfer is less than half the size. "I was amazed and surprised at the size of it."
Indeed, the bigness of the Fillmore complex makes it an extremely comfortable place to see a show, and makes a venue such as the Electric Factory - where I saw a terrific Kraftwerk show the night after Hall & Oates - seem cramped and poorly laid out in comparison.
The competition between the Fillmore and the Factory is likely to be intense - all the more as, if you're keeping score, the latter is now being booked in conjunction with the local outpost of AEG Live, which, behind Live Nation, is the second-biggest concert-promotion company in the country.
AEG has recently put on such high-profile shows as D'Angelo at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside and Kacey Musgraves and Kendrick Lamar at the Trocadero in Chinatown.
And though the Fillmore is well-positioned, the Factory is holding its own for marquee acts. "The Electric Factory calendar looks solid to me," Ward says. Rapper Azealia Banks is at Electric Factory on Nov. 18, and Bucks County rockers Circa Survive on Nov. 27. The Fillmore, meanwhile, has Dan Auerbach's the Arcs on Dec. 16.
Will this band battle be the ruination of the Philly music scene - or at least of the Tower Theater, another Live Nation room that's roughly the same size? (Probably not: My Morning Jacket are playing the beloved room in Upper Darby on Nov. 19.)
Agnew says it's possible ticket prices will rise as promoters try to outbid one another for bands. But another competitive tactic, he says, is to win an act's loyalty by guaranteeing them a lower ticket price for their fans.
"With the Fillmore here, there's going to be more competition," Ward says. "But the Electric Factory has its history, too. They're going to go at it. But I think they're all going to be left standing."
"The free-market argument is that the more competition there is, it's better for the customer," Agnew says. "The Fillmore opens, and the Electric Factory makes improvements. This is our most successful year at Union Transfer, and it's also the year that there are the most venues. It shows the strength of the music scene when there are more venues, and it gets more people to go out to different places. It's good for the city's music scene to have another option, another alternative."
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