Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker responded to COVID-19 swiftly by imposing a statewide shelter-in-place order on Saturday, March 21. But even at that point, Chicago music venues had already been dealing with the onrushing pandemic for more than a week. Venues began to cancel shows en masse on Thursday, March 12—the same night Goose Island sponsored citywide concerts (some of which went on as planned) as part of 312 Day. In short order, the torrent of tour cancellations and refund requests turned the live-music industry upside down. That Friday, the Hideout became one of the first venues—if not the first—to shut down in response to the virus.

Last week two more bills responding to this crisis were introduced in Congress. Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) responded to NIVA’s pleas with the Save Our Stages Act, which would create $10 billion in Small Business Administration grants to help venues through the next six months—each venue would be eligible for up to $12 million, or 45 percent of its 2019 operating budget. The bill also promises to define independent venues narrowly, to prevent Live Nation and other concert-business behemoths from siphoning off the lion’s share of the money. The ENCORES Act (Entertainment New Credit Opportunity for Relief & Economic Sustainability), proposed by representatives Ron Kind (D-Wisconsin) and Mike Kelly (R-Pennsylvania), would give a wide variety of entertainment venues a tax credit equal to half the value of the tickets they refunded during the wave of pandemic-related cancellations.

The National Independent Venue Association has built an action page to allow supporters to send a letter to Congress about the RESTART Act and the Save Our Stages Act.

You can also call and e-mail your congressional representatives directly: directories for the House and Senate are here and here.

The Chicago Independent Venue League is accepting donations as well as aggregating fundraisers run by member venues.

The choice facing venue operators today—stay closed and almost certainly fold, or reopen knowing you might spread a deadly disease among your staff and customers and still lose money—would be a difficult one even if the future were clear. But we can’t know if the federal government will address its grotesque leadership vacuum and belatedly develop a coherent and compassionate response to the pandemic. We might still be stuck with a bigoted, ignorant proto-fascist who ignores and lies about the virus, denies science, politicizes and contradicts public-health agencies, pushes dangerous unproven treatments, and clearly cares more about graffiti and Goya beans than he does about more than 150,000 dead Americans.

To gain insight into the behind-the-scenes processes that are informing live music’s patchwork response to Phase Four, I spoke with 17 people—owners, operators, talent buyers, programmers, and employees—representing 22 local music venues. I’ve edited these interviews for length and clarity, but everything is in the subjects’ own words. I’ve also included the date of each interview, to help you interpret references to time frames and account for any changes that have happened in the interim.

  • The socially distanced seating arrangement at Cole’s Bar, before it closed again

We’re lucky that we have enough floor space to try to make it work. But the guidance is, you have to be sitting down, at fixed seating, in order to take off your mask. And fixed seating has to be six feet away from other fixed seating. We took the whole floor space, including the stage—we have church pews, and so we broke it up into sections of seating all the way back and onto the stage. We’ve taken down all the bar seating, and we put up a 20-foot-long plastic tarp hanging from the ceiling. It looks like some kind of a murder scene. That’s sort of acting as a physical barrier between the staff and the customers, and between the customers and the service area.

We’ve only been open for two weeks. We’ve been lucky to have DJs a couple times. We had one Pride event—but again, an event means 40 people sitting at tables not dancing. People reserved the tables, and we had a great DJ. It was as good of a party vibe as you can get sitting down with 40 people.