Live Wire Music Hall closed for good on Saturday night.
The West River Street music club hosted some spectacular shows in its nearly five-year existence.
Brit folk sensation Laura Marling played before a hushed audience a few months ago. The room was a bit more raucous for some of my favorite shows last year, including the Dirty Dozen Brass Band from New Orleans, G. Love & Special Sauce and Trigger Hippy featuring Joan Osborne.
Live Wire also provided an intimate stage and a great sound system for great Savannah-based acts such as Eric Culberson and a wide variety of aspiring artists.
It’s worth adding that Live Wire’s business was certainly hampered by some civic decisions that occurred before the club even got up and running.
I’ve written often about the difficulty of doing business on West River Street, which has far less foot traffic and visibility than the east end.
But the playing field was a little more level back in the day when there was on-street parking and two-way traffic. As a result of those restrictions, fewer River Street visitors see or walk by the businesses at the west end of River Street.
And the 2006 ban of 18- to 20-year-olds from live music venues that are primarily bars certainly restricted Live Wire’s clientele. Laura Marling, for example, has a huge following of younger fans, a number of whom sat rather forlornly outside the club during her 2012 gig.
While many downtown bars and restaurants program live music, we are left with only a couple that market themselves primarily as music venues.
At the same time, we have an active and growing music scene.
The dedicated music clubs are competing these days with a variety of alternate venues.
Unregulated house shows have proliferated in recent years, and a DIY spirit has led musicians and programmers to explore alternative spaces. Often those efforts are to ensure that young adults aged 18 to 20 can get in the door as they can in other Georgia cities, including Athens and Statesboro.
Some of those shows have run up against ambiguous city ordinances, but the muddle has been a logical result of the city’s own restrictions on dedicated music venues and on hybrids, those restaurants that essentially turn into bars at some point in the evening.
But no matter how adventuresome the DIY crowd gets, there’s really no good substitute for dedicated music venues run by professionals who book a mix of local and out-of-town acts as Live Wire did.
There is near constant buzz about attempts to open other venues, despite the man-made obstacles. Maybe some would-be entrepreneurs will finally take the plunge in 2013.
And Live Wire’s Brenden Robertson isn’t going away. He tells me his business will transition into booking and promoting concerts in new locations around town under the Live Wire name.
More on that soon.
City Talk appears every Sunday and Tuesday. Bill Dawers can be reached via billdawers@comcast.net and http://www.billdawers.com. Send mail to 10 East 32nd St., Savannah, GA 31401.