Portland, rock city | Running a rock club is notoriously risky, but a wave of new owners think they can buck the trend

Portland real estate broker Bill Umbel likes to take chances. "I'm a different breed of cat," he says. "I always have been. Someone says go this way, I go that way." Umbel is currently preparing to go where most businessmen don't dare ˆ— he's opening a rock club in Portland, which is by all accounts a risky proposition.

The city is a tiny market when it comes to attracting the top bands. Neighbors and city and state officials have been known to lean on clubs for noise. Portland tends to be an early-to-bed sort of place, without the kind of wee-hours revelry that urban metropolises see on weeknights. Most bars with live music in the Forest City operate in the red. And Portland's history is littered with great clubs that ultimately failed.

Umbel isn't daunted. In fact, he's invested more than a half-million dollars in the club already. He's had to dig a little to come up with those funds, spending his initial investment on the purchase of an old bank at 575 Congress St. and on the beginning phases of construction, then going to the bank for more. "Finding a banker willing to go out on a limb was difficult," he says. "But I've got enough financing to keep me going for a while."

Bankers might not share Umbel's enthusiasm for the business potential of the rock club scene, but many others do. The Portland music community has been abuzz with activity in recent months. The old Free Street Taverna is under new ownership, having been bought by Ted Arcand, the owner of Dogfish Café, a popular restaurant at the corner of Congress and St. John streets. A new eatery/nightspot called the White Heart is under construction just down the street from Umbel's building, and the granddaddy of all Portland rock clubs, Geno's, moved from its location on Brown Street to a nicer space in the former home of the Skinny. And word has trickled out that the Skinny, the hippest club in town a few years back, might resurface under new ownership.

That new owner would be Bill Umbel. He's talked to former Skinny owner Johnny Lomba about running the night club half of his new enterprise. The plan is to have a restaurant on the first floor run by the team behind the Blue Mango Café, a popular eatery that used to be on Spring Street. Upstairs will be a state-of-the-art musical space "with a great sound system and great sight lines," says Umbel. He's not sure what he's going to call his club, whether it will be the Skinny or something else, but he most definitely has a vision for it.

"What this town needs is a room," the bluegrass guitarist says, exaggerating that last word.
"Portland is lacking a first-class music venue with good tone, good sound, good vibe. There is no room in this town. Either you have the State Theater or Merrill Auditorium or you have a barroom that does music. Yeah, there's the Center for Cultural Exchange and the St.
Lawrence Center for the Arts, which are both nice places that do their own things, but there is no room with a capacity of 250-300 people that a lot of touring artists would like to play at." To prove his point, Umbel says he was talking Ken Irwin, the owner of Cambridge, Mass.-based Rounder Records, who said to him, "there's no place in Portland to send my bands" ˆ— acts like Kathleen Edwards, Bruce Cockburn and Jimmie Dale Gilmore.

Renovations of Umbel's space are currently underway. "I'll have my end of the construction done by the end of December," he says. "And then the restaurant people can start doing their build-out." When all's said and done, Umbel figures the club will cost him about $600,000, not including the $150,000 he estimates it will cost the restaurant to get up and running.

While he's excited about helping create a vibrant music scene in the Forest City, Umbel doesn't have any illusions about getting rich doing so. "I'm not looking to make a gazillion dollars," he says. "I have simple lifestyle. I don't have big cars. I have a small house."

Which is probably a good thing. Russ Riseman's small club on Market Street, the Alehouse, is one of the longest-lived rock clubs in Portland history ˆ— it's been around for six years. Take a cursory look at the finances, Riseman says, and running a rock club looks like it has a good profit margin. "You have a beer that you buy for 85 cents and you sell it for $4.

That sounds great. Unfortunately, you have to sell 100 of those just to pay the electric bill," he says. "In our case, the landlord takes all of my sales from a Saturday night ˆ— that leaves every other night to pay overhead, staff, etc. People think club owners leave the place after a good night, lighting Cohiba cigars with burning bills, but the reality is we have six hours ˆ— three each on Friday and Saturday nights ˆ— to pay our bills."

Barstool blues
While there's a lot of excitement about what's going on in the club scene, especially on Congress Street, Portland has seen this all before. Much like the restaurant industry, the rock club business in the Forest City has a cyclical nature. Every four or five years a few new ones open, a few established ones close. The mantle of coolest club in town has been passed from Raoul's to the Tree Café to Zootz to Granny Killam's to the Skinny. Each thrives for a while, then shuts down for one reason or another. And now arguably the coolest club ˆ— if you're talking innovative original music from exciting national bands ˆ— isn't even a club, but Space Gallery. (See "Space oddity," p. 18.)

"Portland has this amazing, organic cycle," says Jessica Tomlinson, director of public relations at the Maine College of Art, whose location on Congress Street puts it right in the heart of the action. "Clubs come and go in waves, but the scene never dries out. When the Skinny went down, Space popped up." Things seem particularly hot and heavy at the moment ˆ— there don't appear to be any clubs going down, and plenty are popping up. All of these new nightspots raise the question whether a city of 65,000 north of Boston ˆ— and one that's often considered out of the loop by touring acts ˆ— can sustain them all. The Portland Phoenix Band Guide lists as many as 70 clubs in southern Maine and Portsmouth, N.H. Is there enough product ˆ— bands, both local and national ˆ— to fill all those stages?

Traditionally, it's been something of a challenge to get groups on the touring circuit to play in Portland. "It's very hard to book live original music and make a go of it," says Kris Clark, former owner of Zootz, a Forest Avenue rock and dance club that was popular in the early 90s. "The people that run clubs and bring in really good live music do it for the love of music. I started a club to see the bands that I wanted to see."

Every show is a gamble, whether the band is national or local, up and coming or hugely popular. "When you're booking local acts, it's just a guess that you'll be able to fill the club," Clark says. "Each show takes a lot of effort. You have to get the posters out, try to get articles in the paper, drum up interest." But even with all that effort, 25 people might show up ˆ— and you still have to pay the band.

National acts are even more difficult. You first have to get them interested in coming to Portland and establish a relationship with booking agencies. The Skinny's Johnny Lomba says that takes some doing. "At the time when we opened, Zootz hadn't been doing music on a regular basis for a couple of years; Granny Killam's had closed," he says. "There weren't many places doing touring bands at the time, and Portland just sort of fell off the map."

As a result, Lomba says he had to do some selling of the city to bands and booking agents. "Number one, you had to make people aware how close we are to Boston. Number two, you had to make people realize we're nothing like Boston, that the market is really small," he says. "It took booking agents a while to trust that I couldn't pay bands the kind of guarantee they were used to getting in a place like Boston, but I could guarantee them a good turn out."

Lauren Wayne, who promotes shows in the Portland area for Tea Party Concerts, which has an exclusive arrangement with the State Theater but also works with such nightspots as the Big Easy and Space, says Portland is considered truly small potatoes when compared to the cities to its south. "Boston is a primary market; Portland is really a tertiary market," she says. "Bands are getting paid a lot more to play in Boston. We can't, for example, charge $15-$20 for tickets to club shows. People here won't pay that."

Couple lower ticket prices with smaller audiences, and many bands turn their buses around at Boston. "When I get ticket counts of shows in Boston," says Wayne, "90% of the shows are four times larger. It can be tricky. If bands aren't coming from Boston and going to Canada, it can be hard to get them to come here."

One way to attract touring bands is with a guarantee that they'll make a certain amount of money no matter the turnout. This can put a lot of pressure on a club, though. "The trick is to get as low a guarantee as possible," says Kris Clark of Zootz. "If I guaranteed them $1,500, say, they could have all of the door, but I would get bar sales. If they want $3,000, then I'm only able to take whatever's left over. And if there's a snowstorm, and I just booked a $2,500 band, it hurt." Even with bands getting radio play on local stations, and with articles in the paper, there's still no way of knowing whether they'd fill the house. Portland tends to get national acts on weeknights ˆ— weekends are for Boston and New York ˆ— and often people aren't interested in staying out late on a weeknight.

And tastes change. A club owner may have a good run with a certain booking agency or a certain style of music, but then find that the same bands bring dwindling crowds. Russ Riseman of the Alehouse says that when he launched the place, he quickly lucked into an audience. "The live music thing was huge then, especially the jam bands, and that's where we found our niche after the Basement closed," he says, referring to a now-defunct club around the corner. "Right now the college kids ˆ— and our demographic, 21-35 ˆ— are heavily into DJs and recorded music." Every time the trends change, the club has to change.

Working on a building
Even if clubs are successful gauging tastes and bringing in bands ˆ— and crowds ˆ— the business can still be uncertain. The Skinny was the most happening place in town for years, staging shows by exciting national bands and enjoying a regular clientele; for the most part, Johnny Lomba says he was happy running it. In January of 2002, Men's Journal magazine called it one of the best bars in the country. But in February 2003, it was out of business. "We were close to getting into the black at our three-year hump, then somebody bought the building and we were gone," says Lomba.

Geno D'Alessandro Jr., who runs hard rock club Geno's with his father, had the plug pulled on his club by a landlord, too. Geno's is a grizzled veteran of the scene, and its Brown Street basement became legendary over its 23 years. But when the owners of the building decided they wanted to put condos in, the club was out. D'Alessandro found a new place, but soon ran into problems with the state, which has laws on the books about bars serving alcohol in proximity to schools ˆ— Maine College of Art dorms are next door ˆ— and churches. There's one of those nearby, too. "We had no problems with the city, but then the state came in," says D'Alessandro.

Kris Clark of Zootz, likewise, says city officials were great to deal with, and were very accommodating when the residents of an elderly housing complex across the street filed complaint after complaint about the club. According to Lomba, the city was good to him, too, helping him raise the $30,000 he needed to get the doors open. "We got a loan from the Downtown Portland Corporation," Lomba says, "and Lee Urban [Portland's director of planning and economic development], was key. He was one of our biggest supporters."

Maine College of Art's Jessica Tomlinson has been studying the city's creative economy with the Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance. She has a "parlor game" she likes to play to demonstrate the importance of the local music scene. She'll ask members of the city council how many bands they think are listed in the Phoenix Band Guide. "One person said 40, another 50 ˆ— the reality is that there are 350 bands listed in there," she says. "What is the impact of that? How does that create a sector that has to be taken seriously?"

With help from the Maine Arts Commission and the city of Portland, PACA is preparing to do an economic assessment of the creative economy, inventorying arts and cultural institutions, from musicians to clubs to galleries. "I think the economic impact is going to be fascinating," says Tomlinson. "It's not often that arts and culture establishments are viewed as businesses. They're viewed as ancillary, quality-of-life things. But if you look at what's happening on Congress Street, how many of those businesses are related to the creative economy? You've got clubs, record stores, places to eat. It's really responsible for the revitalization of Portland."

With more clubs going in, the rejuvenation should be even greater ˆ— if the area can sustain them all. Lomba thinks Portland's at a place where it can. "There's enough to go around," he says. "We're all going to be doing something different. Space really mixes things up with art and film, White Heart has plans to do music, but with small acts and maybe different styles of music than we would. We'll be doing things that wouldn't work at Geno's, wouldn't work at the Free Street. We all know each other and have made a verbal commitment to work together. It's exciting because the Arts District is really becoming a destination."

"It would be really nice to get upper Congress Street going," agrees Ted Arcand of 128 Free Street, the old Free Street Taverna. "People think of the Old Port as a place with a lot of bars. It would be nice if people thought about the Arts District as a place to get a good meal and listen to live music."

That's about all you can ask, according to Bill Umbel, who is a font of enthusiasm for the possibilities. "Portland is poised to have a hot music scene," he says. "If nothing else, I want to be a part of that and leave a legacy. I want to leave behind a music place that people will have fond memories of and that might help a few deserving bands. Is that too much to ask?"

"I didn't know I'd have to pay $600,000 for it," he jokes. "That's a large bar tab."