Feature

It’s 8 p.m. on a Saturday night in Downtown Mobile. With the exception of the Elvis Costello easing out of the speakers of Picklefish, the streets are silent and sparsely populated. Three or four hours later, cars begin to slowly glide down Dauphin Street, and live music finally begins to echo out of the various urban caves.

It’s 1 a.m. before the second band or set begins, and the live talent toils on through the wee hours of the morning. To some Downtown regulars, this has become the usual schedule for enjoying live entertainment. The bands begin around 11 p.m., and the shows could last till 4 a.m., but why is that? LoDa is not the exception. There are bands across the Port City who won’t to begin until after 10 p.m.

This catches many newcomers and visitors to our city offguard and leaves them with the question “Why do the bands start so late?”

Some locals who must rise at early hours and actually have to go to work are sometimes discontent with this practice. In the good ol’ days, when LoDa was in its infancy, the late shows were not an issue. It was almost written in stone that the first band went on at 8 p.m. sharp and wrapped up around midnight at just about any live music venue.

It became my mission to seek out the perpetrators of what some see as a late night conspiracy against the “old folks,” aka “30-somethings” at Mobile’s most popular music venues.

My investigation first brought me to Soul Kitchen to question my first suspects, its owners Brad Young and Dan Merker.

Soul Kitchen has the reputation for bringing in popular jam acts along with scores of people. Without having to employ any torture tactics, Merker confessed that the later shows cater to the demographic they are targeting.

“With the bands that we’ve been booking, besides Galactic and the national acts, we pretty much target the college crowd with the cover bands,” Merker explains. “Brad and I have talked about starting earlier at 10 o’clock with the bigger national acts.”

Phar Fletcher was set to take the stage on the night I interviewed Merker and Young. Merker explained that they would not go on until 11:30 or 12:30. I stuck around to see the results. The back room of the new Soul Kitchen was empty at 11 p.m.. Lo and behold, the venue began to fill with people around 11:30. By midnight, there were 150+ individuals sipping drinks and waiting patiently for the band to begin as many others filed in the door.

“Mobile is a late night city for the sheer fact that we have a loophole in our Class 2 liquor license that says we don’t have to shut down,” Young says. “If it was the same case as venues in other cities that have to shut down at 2 a.m., then we’d be done at 1 a.m., and people would be home at 2 a.m.”

Soul Kitchen’s crowd doesn’t seem to mind, and they have taken a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach thus far.

“We could advertise our shows as being much earlier, but being that Mobile is a late night city, it’s not like you could go to other bars where people start their nights out before they see some music,” Young says. “Because those bars aren’t really that busy either.”

So, how did these LoDa late shows get their start in the first place? Young and Merker both point their fingers to one person: Noell Broughton.

When I spoke with Broughton, he explained that having late night shows was not his original intention.

“This April 16, I will have owned my venue for nine years, and when I first bought it, my goal was to start things a little earlier,” Broughton explains. “At that time, most of the big shows started around 11 o’clock, and starting earlier was the one goal I had. It’s just gotten worse ever since.”

Broughton views Mobile’s lax curfew as the ultimate culprit, although he’ll share some of the blame.

“I think Mobile and New Orleans are the only places left in the country that don’t close,” Broughton muses. “Mississippi’s is midnight, from what I hear. With no curfew, people don’t even show up until 1 a.m. If I have to take the blame, then I’ll take the blame. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I’ve busted my butt to try and change it.”

Broughton has also tried to get the shows during the week to start earlier, but hasn’t found much success with that either.

“Actually, the only shows that I start early are the ones during the week, like on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday night. I bust my butt trying to start those early too, but they usually get started after 11 p.m., which is early compared to the weekend shows.”

So that leaves one question: is there any music venue in the Mobile area that caters to people whose alarm clocks actually go off before noon? This question was answered on The Causeway by Harry Johnson, who owns The Blue Gill Restaurant and Beach House Grill, where shows sometimes start in the afternoon.

“Just the regular dinner music that we have goes from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.,” says Johnson. “For a concert show, we try not to start too late. It’s an outdoor setting and outdoor clientele aren’t the type that would want to stay awake till midnight. Even when we bring in Wet Willie with Jimmy Hall or (Marc) Broussard, we try not to start any later than 8 p.m.”

While Monsoon’s and Soul Kitchen are more attractive to the college crowd, Johnson describes his clientele as an older one. Johnson has been very successful in his endeavors and packs the house on Sunday afternoons at 5 o’clock when bands such as The Tip Tops perform. The early show rule reaches into the Beach House as well, and Johnson has no plans to change anything.

The conclusion to this is that music venues are in the hospitality biz. The point of the hospitality industry is to cater to the needs to the majority of their clientele. If people don’t show up for shows until later in the night at a particular venue, then the venue will cater to that. If the clientele desires music in the afternoon, then the venue will cater to that. So basically, the power to start shows earlier is in the hands of each and every one of you. If you want earlier shows, then you need to start showing up earlier.

Stephen Centanni is Lagniappe music editor. Contact him at scentanni@lagniappemobile.com.

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