For two weeks, Chris Cobb checked the weather forecast obsessively. Exit/In, the historic Nashville music venue he owns, was set to host its first live event since Covid-19 shut it down.
He had been plotting a return for months, rehiring staff, negotiating with artists and transforming an old shipping container into an outdoor stage with a new 40-foot mural. Money flowed out of the club’s checking account. Revenue from ticket sales trickled in.
On June 1, a day before the first two bands were scheduled to perform, forecasters called for a greater than 90% chance of rain, as well as thunder. “It’s 444 days that we’ve been closed. We are going to get rained,” said Mr. Cobb. “It’s a cancel-the-show forecast.”
Covid-19 devastated the live-events business as venues went dark due to lockdowns and a lack of demand. In metropolitan Nashville, home to a vibrant live-music scene, revenue and employment fell nearly 75% at independent music venues in 2020, according to the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce.
As state governments lift restrictions on large gatherings, small businesses across the country are trying to figure out how to make up for a lost year. Rising vaccinations and an American public eager to get back out are providing reason for hope. At the same time, workers aren’t rushing back. Capacity restrictions and other safety measures can dent profits. Rent relief from landlords has ended or will soon, and government loans are running out.
Anna Watts paints a sign to commemorate Exit/In’s 50th anniversary
The reopening of Exit/In last month reflects a reality facing many businesses: Even with the U.S. economy booming and American consumers eager to spend, the road back won’t be smooth.
For Exit/In, reopening requires a level of manpower and other operating costs that come close to what is needed when business is booming. But business isn’t set to boom. The club, which pulled in just over $1 million in annual revenue before the pandemic, is doing fewer shows than normal and initially operating at reduced capacity. Mr. Cobb estimates he will lose $50,000 between now and September.
The club is vying with better-funded competitors for musical acts and customers and learning how to market in a world reshaped by the pandemic. Staffing problems keep popping up. The local musician who previously changed the lettering on Exit/In’s marquee each week now teaches full time. The venue’s only returning cook left after less than two weeks for a job in another state, giving one day’s notice.
With changes in state, local and federal policies, the club was left to set its own Covid guidelines.
Meanwhile, other business pressures loom. The property that houses Exit/In and its sister bar, Hurry Back, is expected to change hands this summer. It isn’t clear what the new landlord, luxury hotel developer Adventurous Journeys Capital Partners, will do when the lease expires next year.
The venues got a break on their rent that helped them stay afloat, though they have been making full rent payments since June. Even when the club returns to profitability, which Mr. Cobb expects to happen in the fall, it doesn’t have a clear runway to recoup the $160,000 it lost during the pandemic.
Chris Cobb, the owner of Exit/In, started promoting shows for the club in 2001 and later moved into a full-time position handling booking and marketing.
Mr. Cobb tried unsuccessfully to buy the building. A GoFundMe campaign, launched in April to keep Exit/In independent, has raised $270,000. A Memorial Day weekend fundraiser to benefit the club brought in an additional $18,000.
“I don’t think we are going to be stabilized like we were accustomed to for a long time, if ever,” said Mr. Cobb. “We are one day ahead of where we were yesterday and will be that way tomorrow.”
Lost Year
Since it opened 50 years ago, Exit/In has become a fixture of Nashville’s music scene. The venue, so named because the original entrance was in the back of the building, has hosted artists from Jimmy Buffett to Etta James to the Allman Brothers to Cage the Elephant.
Mr. Cobb, 41 years old, grew up in Dallas and central Illinois and moved to Nashville in 1998 to attend college. “I didn’t want to go to school. I wanted to play music,” he said. He started promoting shows for Exit/In in 2001, then moved into a full-time position handling booking and marketing.
He tried to buy Exit/In in 2006 when the club came up for sale, but couldn’t raise the cash, and left soon after the sale to work as a freelance concert promoter and producer. He spent about three months on the road, using the money he saved to buy a home.
In 2011, he launched Marathon Music Works, a midsize music venue and event space, with Exit/In’s then-owner. The partnership dissolved in 2019 and the venues divided up. Mr. Cobb and his wife, Telisha, kept Exit/In and Hurry Back.
Exit/In and its sister bar, Hurry Back, got a break on rent that helped them stay afloat during the pandemic. They have been making full payments since June.
He also produces outdoor festivals. “Exit/In doesn’t support us financially” he said. “It wasn’t capable of it.”
Exit/In stopped selling tickets last March. Mr. Cobb laid off his roughly 40 part-time workers and, a month later, four of seven salaried employees.
The club tried curbside food and beverage delivery for three months, declaring the experiment a failure after Mr. Cobb discovered he had lost $1,000 more than he would have if the club stayed closed. Online sales of T-shirts, sweatpants, coffee mugs, hats and other merchandise provided more reliable income, bringing in $92,000 during the time the venue was closed.
Two forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans totaling roughly $240,000 helped cover salaries for Mr. Cobb, his general manager and his programming director, along with rent and other expenses.
“If we didn’t have the PPP funds, we would be 100% out of capital,” said Mr. Cobb who has also applied for a Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, a federal relief program for live venues. Like many of its peers, Exit/In hasn’t yet received those funds.
Covid-19 widened the gap between independent venues and their well-heeled corporate competitors, said programming director Spencer Hooks, who remained on payroll throughout the pandemic, canceling and rescheduling shows and managing live streams.
“A billion-dollar corporation like Live Nation can easily weather the storm,” said Mr. Hooks. “[For] venues like us, smaller, independent promoters, it’s life or death.”
A New Playbook
Before the pandemic, Exit/In produced an average of 19 shows a month with a maximum capacity of 500. It looked to reopen with two shows a week at 40% capacity. By late April, Mr. Hooks had scheduled about 20 shows, both outdoors and indoors, for June and July.
With many national acts reluctant to tour, the club booked more local and regional musicians than it had in recent years. It stepped up efforts to showcase more diverse performers following last summer’s police killing of George Floyd.
Parking-lot concerts seemed like a good way to restart when it wasn’t clear when the club would be able to host indoor performances. But they cost roughly $5,500 to produce, versus about $1,000 for an indoor performance, not including payments to artists. The biggest costs are the stage and outdoor sound and lighting systems on top of port-a-potty rentals, handwashing stations, fencing and extra security.
“Our costs aren’t going to decrease. It’s just our revenues,” said Mr. Cobb, who looked to sell sponsorships and more merchandise. He decided to build his own stage out of a shipping container instead of renting one to better position the club if Covid restrictions re-emerge.
Exit/In and other small businesses set their own Covid policies after local social-distancing requirements were suspended. Tony Dipiazza sets up sound equipment ahead of the June 2 show.
Mr. Cobb also weighed how many employees to bring back, which positions to fill and how much to pay returning workers.
“What the math says is that people need to do more and make less. That doesn’t work for me,” said Mr. Cobb in late April. “It just seems like a total morale killer to try to ask people to come back and do more for less than they are accustomed to after a year with no income.”
Mr. Cobb rewrote his organizational chart and job descriptions in early May, trimming full-time staff by one. He wrote a mission statement, a vision statement and a list of company values. Hourly pay for part-timers increased by roughly 25% to $15.
“It’s the wrong direction from a payroll perspective, but ultimately the right direction,” Mr. Cobb said.
Familiar Faces
Three weeks before the first show, the rehired full-time staff gathered for the first time in more than a year for a pep talk. Mr. Cobb told the group how fortunate he felt that they had returned.
Tori Bishop, newly promoted to marketing director, noticed that the club still had its comforting old-building smell. “It almost felt like the pandemic was this fever dream,” said Ms. Bishop.
Lindsay Ogden sets up the bar at Hurry Back.
David Smith, recently promoted to food and beverage manager, was eager to return after spending most of the pandemic without work. “It felt like coming back to school after summer vacation,” he said.
Many hourly workers also returned, though some at reduced hours because they now had other jobs. Cooks proved harder to find because many had moved on. “Now that everything is reopening, everyone is fighting for the cooks that stayed,” Mr. Smith said.
Changing Health Guidelines
Exit/In planned at the end of April to unveil its outdoor summer lineup—six weeks of socially distant parking-lot concerts. On April 27, days before the scheduled announcement, Nashville said it would soon lift all capacity limitations. A statement made by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee that same day suggested that an end to mask mandates might soon follow.
It now fell to Exit/In and other small businesses to set their own Covid policies. “We don’t feel comfortable at full capacity,” said Mr. Cobb, who spent hours trying to figure out what the club’s policies should be. He decided to keep the outdoor shows, but bump up capacity by about 50 people to 300 and add a few indoor shows each week.
“It feels very lonely,” said operations manager Jenna Mitchell, who helped draft separate guidelines for staff, artists and patrons. “It feels like we are digging a new tunnel.”
The club’s approach made it more attractive to some performers and patrons and less attractive to others. Exit/In turned down a request by one nationally touring artist to play a show that was guaranteed to sell out at $50 a ticket because the musician wanted a full-capacity audience.
“That show will go across town,” said Mr. Cobb. “We desperately need the revenue.” In an industry where relationships count, he worried about losing the performer, “potentially forever.”
Tony Dipiazza and Andrew Erickson set up sound equipment ahead of Midnight North’s performance.
Five years before, Exit/In had commissioned an artist to decorate one brick wall with portraits of a dozen of its biggest acts, including Jimmy Buffett, Chuck Berry, Jessi Colter and Cheech & Chong for its 45th anniversary. In May, it posted the image—with masks added—on Facebook and Twitter to encourage safe practices.
That same afternoon, on May 13, the CDC announced that vaccinated individuals could gather unmasked indoors. Health officials didn’t offer any guidance for live venues that pack hundreds of people together for hours, shoulder to shoulder.
The entire team held yet another meeting to discuss Covid policies. The safest option, requiring proof of vaccination, wasn’t enforceable, they concluded. Hanging plexiglass from the ceiling to the bar would protect bartenders but make communication difficult. A mask mandate made sense, but the group stumbled on how long to let patrons keep masks off after pulling them down to sip beer.
“The part that bums me out the most is that it’s a lose-lose for us,” said Mr. Cobb. “If we take a hard-line stance with our policies, then we alienate an entire segment of our customer base. We don’t take a hard-line stance and we alienate the other half.”
The Soft Opening
With one week to go, Exit/In informed concertgoers via social media that it would require masks indoors for its first 10 shows, regardless of government policy, and outdoors, when in proximity to others. It asked artists slated to perform later if they would agree to a mask-optional policy and full-capacity shows beginning Aug. 1, a month earlier than planned.
A server brings out an order of pretzels at Hurry Back before the show.
Ms. Bishop contacted advertising and marketing managers at radio and media outlets about potential advertising deals, but half the emails bounced back. At least 14 contacts had been laid off or moved on. She scrambled to find their replacements.
Ms. Bishop looked at advertising on TikTok, Spotify and Reddit, in addition to radio, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
“I feel like the new kid in school,” said Ms. Bishop, 26. “Before I had it down to a system.”
Reopening added $50,000 or so in costs, figuring in salaries, equipment and other expenses. All 30 beer taps needed refilling, the food inventory replenished. A new ice machine replaced equipment the vendor pulled out during the pandemic, but it required a minor electrical upgrade. A rainstorm revealed a new leak in an office that had gone unused for more than a year. A mural on the side of the building still featured a 2020 lineup.
The revamp brought a new simpler food menu. The club scrapped most meat-based offerings and added pizza.
Mr. Cobb held a soft opening for family and friends May 31, two days before the first performance. Some television and video equipment didn’t work. One remote control couldn’t be located. The hand-painted beverage sign still advertised kombucha on draft, now unavailable because the local producer shut down.
Lindsay Ogden scoops ice ahead of the performance.
Worse yet, both the newly hired cook and kitchen manager went missing.
Mr. Cobb fled the chaos for some barbecue and a couple of beers with his father. When he returned, pretzels, pizza and chips and dip, the easiest items to prepare, were set out on tables.
“It had drama. It had friends and family. It had some pretzels and beers. It did not have dinner,” said Mr. Cobb. “If the car had four wheels, two of them came off, maybe three.”
The cook, it later turned out, had left because of a miscommunication; the kitchen manager for personal reasons. The cook was fired three weeks later for missing work again. The kitchen manager remained on staff but was reprimanded.
Showtime
Midnight North spent most of the pandemic split between San Francisco and Pennsylvania, working on a new album that is set for release in July.
The next day, with thunderstorms looming, the club texted Midnight North, the band it booked for its first show, asking permission to move indoors. The group spent most of the pandemic split between San Francisco and Pennsylvania, working on a new album, set for release in July. Most of the concert dates for the band’s first 2021 tour were scheduled for outdoor venues, but band members were fully vaccinated.
“We thought it was pretty inevitable,” said band member Grahame Lesh, who had also been tracking the weather. “These last couple of years have thrown us so many curveballs. What’s one more?”
On the June 2 concert day, it rained during the sound check, as predicted, but the sun returned by 5 p.m. when doors opened. The indoor show was a sellout. Only one ticket-buyer requested a refund.
The Covid policy proved a failure, with the number of people wearing masks dropping minute by minute as the evening went on. “It worked for the first two hours and then it was over,” Mr. Cobb said later. Had the team enforced the mask policy, “we would have failed. So, we changed the policy.”
Exit/In moved the concert indoors because of rain.
Midnight North played songs from its coming album. Grateful Dead band member Phil Lesh, who had played Exit/In a few years back, joined his son on stage. After 14 months off, Mr. Cobb suddenly remembered just how good the sound was.
“It was like I blinked or something. It was like nothing had changed,” Mr. Cobb said the next day. “If you had been in a coma for the last 14 months, there was no way to tell that there hadn’t been a show in over a year.”
The Path Forward
One month after Midnight North’s performance, Exit/In’s staff continues to adjust to the grueling demands of producing multiple shows each week.
“I don’t know that we are firing on all cylinders anywhere right now,” said Mr. Cobb. He said he is trying to be more understanding when problems arise that he previously considered unacceptable, such as the glitch-plagued soft opening. “You just can’t push that hard, unless you want people to break.”
Reopening Exit/In added $50,000 or so in costs, figuring in salaries, equipment and other expenses.
Photo: Laura Thompson for The Wall Stre for The Wall Street Journal
Employees have stepped in to fill in some of the gaps. One security guard has taken on cleaning chores for extra pay because the regular cleaner moved on. A bartender picked up the job of changing the lettering on the club’s marquee.
Other gaps may be tougher to fill. Exit/In’s normal stagehand provider recently said he couldn’t guarantee six people for a coming show because his workforce has thinned. The club turned to a bigger staging company that typically works with stadiums and other larger venues, but stagehands cost 20% more and the pay for shift leads was 52% higher.
“Exit/In can’t afford that in the long term,” said Ms. Mitchell, the operations manager. “It was something none of us were prepared for.”
As Mr. Cobb plots Exit/In’s rebirth, he remains mindful that a resurgence of Covid-19 or other unforeseen event could require further adjustments.
“Everything has changed and everybody has changed,” said Mr. Cobb. “If you just looked around, it feels like Covid never happened, but that’s certainly not the case.”
Exit/In has booked more local and regional musicians than it had in recent years and has stepped up efforts to showcase more diverse performers.
Write to Ruth Simon at [email protected]
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