Interview: What Did We Learn? Survival Lessons From An Independent Concert Venue — The Belly Up
In this segment, Talent Buyer Pete McDevitt talks about how he learned through experience the importance of banding together for survival through building a community of support and advocacy.
What Did We Learn? is a series of interviews featuring Southern California musicians and industry professionals, discussing their journey of transformation over the past year as a result of the music industry shut down due to Covid-19.
A few weeks before the Belly Up in Solana Beach, CA reopened on July 7, 2021, I connected with Talent Buyer Pete McDevitt over Zoom to talk about lessons learned during the pandemic. Independent concert venues like the Belly Up were hit hard during the pandemic, and are still recovering (some closed for good).
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about your background — how long have you been at the Belly Up as a Talent Buyer?
PM: I started with the Belly Up in February of 2014. Before that, I was a Talent Buyer at a venue called The Blue Note in Columbia, Missouri. I started there when I was in college — sweeping the floors and cleaning toilets so I could go to shows for free — and eventually ended up a Talent Buyer. After several years, I was in a place where I was ready to get out of the Midwest, and somebody connected me with the Belly Up which turned to be a great fit.
Q: How did you get your start at working in venues?
PM: I kind of fell into it. I played in punk bands when I was in high school and was always obsessed with music. When I was a freshman in college I ended up joining the Student Activities Board on the music committee, and somehow became a chair of that committee as a freshman — which I don’t think had ever happened before. At the same time, I was working at The Blue Note sweeping the floors, working security, that kind of stuff.
Into my sophomore year, the owner asked me if I wanted to start trying to do some stuff at the venue itself because he knew that I was working on stuff on campus. I started out booking indie rock, punk bands, and hip hop stuff — bands and music I liked and that I thought would be cool to see — stuff my friends wanted to see. It just sort of snowballed from there. If you told me 20 years ago that Jimmy Buffett would be calling me, I’d be like, Whatever! Yeah right!
Q: How is your experience over the last six years been at the Belly Up compared to where you were at The Blue Note?
PM: It’s been really great. I’m proud of everything I did at The Blue Note, but promoting shows in the Midwest is a completely different ballgame. Not being in a major market, we’d really have to fight really hard every show that we wanted. With booking San Diego, the proximity to LA certainly helps, and it has the allure of wanting to play in San Diego. In Missouri, I was probably booking 400 shows a year between two venues. In San Diego, it’s probably closer to 600 shows a year between all the venues we work with in addition to the Belly Up — [venues] Music Box, Casbah, and Soda Bar. We even do stuff with Live Nation and AEG.
Q: So let’s go back to March 2020. What was it like at the beginning of the pandemic?
PM: At the beginning it was crazy. The day before everything shut down we were gathered as a team in our conference room. That day the conference room became the “war room” with myself, the owners, and President of Entertainment, Chris Goldsmith. I would get a phone call, step out of the room to take the call, come back in and announce the show’s canceled. I don’t know how many times that happened that day.
Wow.
PM: Yeah, I mean we have hundreds of shows. It wasn’t like 100 shows canceled that day, but at least 30 or 40 canceled. Then over the course of the next couple of weeks, it was a lot of shuffling things around. Some would cancel, some would try to reschedule into new timeframes, but we didn’t know if we would be open, because none of us really knew. It was a really intense period.
And how long did that phase last of going through all the cancellations?
PM: It lasted a year.
So it has been continuous cancellations?
PM: Yeah because in the beginning, what we were hearing from everyone from the top on down and from [Washington] DC, was maybe this is three months, maybe this is six months. We had shows that were scheduled in May, for example, so they would try to hang on [and not cancel]. Some of them would be more proactive. But the ones that were being proactive were moving into Fall 2020. So eventually, that just wasn’t gonna happen. Some people thought they were playing it smart by moving into January or February of 2021, and look where we are now — it’s June 2021 and we’re still not open. The only ones that were smart moved into 2022, as it turns out. There are shows that were rescheduled into August of this year [2021] that we didn’t know were going to happen until a month ago.
So what was going through your mind during this time?
PM: There were just a lot of challenges. Some days were better and some were worse. There was never any doubt in my mind of the Belly Up reopening, it’s just that nobody really knew when that would happen. That was a bummer.
There were other things I think everybody experienced that contributed to that stress, whether that be the shutdown orders or people getting cabin fever from being home too much. Eventually, there would be days where things started to get better — we started making progress, there’s a vaccine now, and I can get the vaccine. Then we had a date for announcing the reopening. So right now, everything feels a lot better, but it was heavy for a lot of people.
Q: How did you manage the uncertainty of not knowing when we were going to come out of all this? How did you and your team manage some of that stress?
PM: I’ve always been a roll with the punches kind of person, but one thing that worked for me personally, especially towards the beginning of our Save Our Stages effort, was talking with all my peers across the nation. Being able to talk to people in other cities that were going through the same exact thing was almost like therapy sessions.
We worked together on the Save Our Stages effort, which turned into the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant. I worked on the Artists Outreach Team in the very beginning where we were asking artists to sign letters to Congress. As a Talent Buyer, usually, you get a win when you book a show you think is really cool. During that time a win was like, alright Jimmy Buffett signed their letter, John Mayer signed their letter, Billie Eilish signed their letter. Those were the things that helped with morale over the course of the whole thing. Then when the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant was included in the omnibus bill back in December, we were all celebrating. Little did we know that it would be six months later and we still haven’t seen any money…
On no! Unbelievable!
PM: Yeah, fortunately, approvals are starting to happen now. A couple of friends’ venues have been approved, and a few have gotten their money. So that tide is turning, but it caused a lot of frustration over the past six months. Especially when we thought we would be taken care of in February or March. Low and behold it’s June.
Q: How were you able to connect with your peers during this time? Did you do you have a network of people that you reached out to in the industry?
PM: Yeah, there are a lot of different promoters, talent buyers, and venues around the country that I knew prior. We hang out at conferences, compare notes on some things, but a lot of that credit is due to the folks that founded the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). I think they saw the writing on the wall pretty clearly early on — that this was going to be a long struggle and that the only way we’re going to be able to come out alive was to band together and join our efforts in order for someone to pay attention to us. They were people that were running the show and putting out the news to people that this is a thing and you should be a part of it.
“I learned that if we can all band together, we can do shit”
Q: What are a few things that you learned over the past 15 months?
PM: Normally we have a very independent-venue do-it-yourself mentality, so I learned that if we can all band together, we can do shit. If I was by myself trying to get Sacramento to pay attention to the specific needs that California venues have, it wouldn’t go anywhere. But if we and 300 other venues in the State are sharing a collective voice, we can make things happen. And it’s not to say that this was something that had to be learned, but it was something that had never happened before. Especially when you consider that some of the members actually even compete with each other. Just bringing everybody together, having that solid one voice can be very powerful.
How about on a personal level — anything you wish to share about what you personally learned?
PM: Cocktail hours on Zoom are a waste of time.
You got to do what you got to do, man. (laughs)
PM: Well, there were times when the days were dark. I think we can all relate to that. I think there were definitely times where I was dealing with stress in unhealthy ways. And there were times where I dealt with it in healthy ways too. It wasn’t like doom and gloom depression the whole time, but there was some of that.
It is being said that we’ve all experienced a collective PTSD, and are now starting to realize it. Maybe it’s why we’re seeing things like people losing their shit on airplanes.
PM: Yeah, we had the stress of the pandemic, we had the stress of the election, we had the stress of what happened right after the election, and then we went right into the Coronavirus. There were a lot of shady things that happened — it was a tough year for everybody.
I don’t need to get political about it, but just seeing all the bullshit from people on Facebook about what they’re posting. I’m not the type of person that is going to get into some argument in the comment section on someone’s Facebook post about anything. It’s just hard to see all the division in the country, and everything with Black Lives Matter and everything else, it was a really strange year. I just hope that we actually see important change come out of 2020. Like if we didn’t learn any lessons over the past 15 months, then we’ve got a lot of issues as a country. There’s still a lot of divisiveness and everything, and I just hope that with things reopening and things getting back to a pre-pandemic sort of way of life — although it’s certainly a new normal — I hope that helps some of the healing to kind of happen. It’s just hard to watch sometimes.
Q: What was the most difficult aspect of the past 15 months for you?
PM: Probably the uncertainty was the hardest. Just not knowing anything about when things would come back, and it just felt like the wheels were spinning in place.
Q: You mentioned hoping we can heal from the lessons. What are some of those lessons?
PM: I think for me personally it’s that you can never be too prepared for what might come. I don’t know if I was prepared, really. So I think that’s the biggest thing. I’ve compared this a lot to my grandparents. They were children during the Great Depression. That generation had a very different approach to life, unlike any other generation that’s come since then. I think coming out of this for us it’s sort of the same. I think for me personally, I’ll probably have a bit more of that mindset on decisions I make, financially or otherwise. Really bad shit can happen, and we never know when it could happen.
Q: How are things now that venues are opening up?
PM: It’s really busy. We reopen July 7th and we’re putting on new shows every week. Once we get closer to Labor Day things get pretty much back to normal, with even a higher volume of shows. It’s a different kind of rollercoaster we’re on now — from canceling hundreds of shows to confirming hundreds of shows.
Q: Looking back, is there anything you would have had done differently?
PM: We handled things the best we could. We learned a whole lot about live streaming. We had experience with video production from our KPBS show Live at the Belly Up. That helps us pivot into the live streaming world. But again, live streaming is not the same.
Will you continue with the live stream aspect moving forward?
PM: Yeah, we plan to do that. It’s something that has to be worked out with the cooperation of the artist and all of that, but we have the skill and the knowledge. So if somebody wants to do a live stream we’re certainly down.
Q: What has been your biggest takeaway?
PM: I’ve learned that there are a lot of people that I truly love in this business. There’s been a lot of times where if I was having a bad day there was somebody from another venue or a booking agency that called to check in and that sort of thing. It means a lot to everybody.
Also, all my folks at the Belly Up — I’ve always known them to be like a family, and it certainly felt that way going through all this together.
#music #theriff #bellyup #bellyuptavern #bellyupsolanabeach #saveourstages #niva #thebluenote #lightwavelive #jimmybuffett #johnmayer #billieeilish #concerts #livemusic #zoom #sandiego #sandiegomusic #californiavenues #independentconcertvenues #kpbs #liveatthebellyup #ziggymarley
