- By Jennifer Mulson and Amanda Hancock The Gazette
- Dec 30, 2020 Updated Jan 14, 2021
(excerpt)
Loss of live music
2020 wasn’t just bad for music venues. Geoff Brent, the owner of The Black Sheep, described it as a “total worst-case scenario.”
Early in the year, it wasn’t clear how bad things would get. As the pandemic started, The Black Sheep took a position that many local venues shared: They canceled shows, planned virtual shows and hoped — and even planned — to be back soon.
“Soon” never came in 2020 for the standing-room-only venue on Platte Avenue. It hasn’t hosted an in-person concert since March 14. The lack of live music there, and everywhere, has weighed heavily on Brent.
“Besides the obvious financial hardship on the business and our staff, we really love what we do and I think going months without seeing each other, seeing bands, seeing our favorite regulars was an even worse impact on all of us,” Brent said. “We live for live music and this year that just wasn’t possible.”
The pandemic waged on, crushing calendars all around town and making for a scheduling nightmare between venues and artists.
In total, Sunshine Studios Live canceled 300 concerts and events in 2020, according to owner Christina Corbitt. Many shows were postponed not once or twice, but three times, a testament to how much the timeline for reopening changed. She says “hundreds of thousands of funds” were lost due to mandates and new regulations “contending against us.”
For Corbitt, though, the “quietness and stillness of this past year has been by far the hardest part.”
Being “essentially” shut down by the government without a solid plan or clue if financial aid was coming proved especially frustrating for Brent. “The timelines seem to always be a moving target,” he said. “It felt like just one setback after another, and in a lot of ways we were powerless to decide our own fate.”
Lulu’s Downstairs, a newcomer to the live music scene, was picking up steam before the pandemic shut the Manitou Springs bar and venue down. After scaling back to just a bar, Lulu’s has been fully closed since late October.
Throughout the year, other midsize venues such as Stargazers Theatre and Boot Barn Hall found creative ways to host shows while following guidelines. But that was the minority.
Concerts have been off the table for Pikes Peak Center and Broadmoor World Arena mostly because of restrictions on large gatherings. That meant canceling huge and sold-out concerts and laying off employees.
“It wears on you,” says general manager Dot Lischick. “I used to be a whole lot taller before this year.”
Against a lot of odds, venues have treated survival like a superpower.
The World Arena held drive-in movie nights. The Black Sheep hosted movie nights, too. “In an industry where thinking on your feet is kind of always the mantra, 2020 was an extreme version of that,” Brent says.
Corbitt agrees, saying, “We have really had to think outside the box and become super creative. Luckily that’s our specialty and what we do. We are always changing, growing and evolving. Challenges spark our ingenuity.”
She leaned on Sunshine Studios’ recording studio to bring in business. She and Brent say the community has shown a lot of love by purchasing merchandise and gift cards to use later.
Lulu’s and The Black Sheep used the time off to renovate their spaces. But each day, there was a sense of heartbreak.
Brent got through that, he said, thanks to something as simple as a positive comment on the venue’s Facebook.
“The mental strain from being kept from what we love was huge,” he said. “Positive feedback from the community kept us going.”
Full article here…