Sound decisions

If you want to hear live music in Reno, you can—any night of the week. And you can find pretty much any sound you’re looking for.

Want to hear some big names or maybe a rock ’n’ roll cover band? The casinos have got you covered. If you want to make music with other people, jam sessions and open mic nights are in plentiful supply, from local coffee shops to Irish pubs. But if you want to get your fill of touring and local bands, you should head to the bars. (You could, of course, hit up Holland Project, but it’s an all-ages venue, and this is a bar guide, so we’ll leave it there—save for this one pro tip. If you’re 21 or older, join the mass exodus of adults that often happens between sets. They’re headed to 40 Mile Saloon—and, soon, Corrigan’s Bit O’ Ireland—for a drink.)

From punk shows at Shea’s Tavern on a Thursday to a double-header with bands in both of Jub Jub’s Thirst Parlor’s two venue spaces on a Tuesday, there’s live music to be had any night of the week. There are plenty of reasons for this, too. An obvious one you might have read about in publications ranging from Bloomberg to Rolling Stone is falling album sales, a reality that bands large and small have adapted to by touring more often. And then there’s the local music scene. The Truckee Meadows is home to a ton of bands that also play the bars.

The local live music scene is a symbiotic relationship wherein bands, bars and we—the drinking music lovers—benefit. For the most part, the community’s role in this relationship is to be good patrons, paying our tabs and door charges. The bands, of course, put out the word and put on a good show. And the bars bring them in and host them. It’s a beautiful relationship, really. And a look behind the scenes of some of Reno’s live music bars reveals that—like most relationships—it’s a lot of work.

Hitting the right notes

“There are a lot of things that go into making a music venue great—everything from your building itself to your equipment, but also your staff, and I think most importantly, how you’re treating the bands,” said Dave Masud, who does booking for Jub Jub’s.

Jub Jub’s has two venue spaces at its Wells Avenue location. Masud books for the smaller, barroom venue. In the end, he said, the key to a good show boils down to making people feel comfortable. But there’s a lot of work that goes into that.

Faith Zaumeyer, Jub Jub’s owner and the primary booker for the venue’s large showroom, explained that there’s plenty of research to be done before booking bands. One of the things she and Masud do is look to social media to see if a band has local fans. They check to see if there are conflicting shows that might draw a similar crowd to the one they’re considering. And they think about which local bands would make fitting openers.

With its showroom space, Jub Jub’s brings in some larger touring acts. Handled right, it can be a boon for the local bands that open for them.

“It looks great on their resume,” Zaumeyer said. “It makes them excited as a band. When you’re booking, out touring, you can put that on your profile.”

Masud, who is also a touring musician, said, in the end, he tries to provide the kind of show he’d like to walk into, and to take care of bands—from pairing them with openers to paying them.

Taking care of the bands that play at his bar is also a primary concern for Peter Barnato, who owns the Loving Cup on California Avenue and is also a musician. Barnato’s is a much smaller venue than Jub Jub’s, and providing a good show there comes with a different set of challenges.

“I probably only book three percent of bands that come to me, and it’s not because I’m being snobby or whatever,” Barnato said. “We’re just a very small bar, and it’s important for me to be able to bring a crowd enough to be able to pay a band properly.”

Paying bands properly is also a reason why the touring bands he books are only accompanied by a local opener about half the time.

“It’s nice to have someone that’s local open, but a lot of the times those local bands are donating their cut to the touring band—which is cool, if the touring band takes care of them in their city,” Barnato said. “We did that for years, where we’d play for free in Reno with a touring act, and then we’d go to, like, Seattle, and they’d do that for us.”

Barnato explained that 100 percent of door charges from his bar on live music nights go the band, so, with smaller shows and touring acts, it often works well to have just one band on the bill.

“And a lot of times there’s just not enough local acts in town to even support those shows,” he added.

Of course, Barnato wasn’t implying a shortage of bands in town. But there’s no shortage of bars hosting shows either.

So how do bars that host live music strike a balance to keep Reno’s scene thriving and themselves in business? In part, it has to do with cultivating a sound that locals can expect to hear at their shows. It’s something they go about in different ways.

Striking up the band

A few weeks ago, Barnato was preparing for a Sunday show with Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, a touring band he described as gothic country. After that, he’d booked a psychedelic band from Seattle. The two bands’ sounds are pretty distinctive, but Barnato said they both fit the general theme of shows he books at the Loving Cup.

“I mean, we definitely sit in that indie-rock scene for sure,”And we’ve had all of the subgenres here. I think of, you know, like college radio. If you were to listen to XMU on Sirius—that’s probably where we sit.”

At Jub Jub’s, Zaumeyer and Masud take a different approach. With two venue spaces, the larger of which is often used for all-ages shows, they try to book a bit of everything.

“We try to do it all—because we just want to represent Reno, and Reno is like that,” Zaumeyer said. “We’re not cut into any particular box. I think Reno people are pretty eclectic, and so we try to share that.”

Show’s at Jub Jub’s regularly run the gamut from country to punk or hip-hop. Of course, at the Loving Cup, Barnato’s college radio sensibilities also yield a wide range of sounds—from noise rock to outlaw country. The bars have different approaches to booking, but neither is really interested in limiting the scope of shows they bring in.

The same can be said of the Saint, which opened in midtown in 2016.

“When we opened, I really wanted our main focus to be everything that stems off of the tree I would call American roots, so from country to rock ’n’ roll,” said owner Arthur Farley.

He didn’t intend for his new music hall and taproom to do much in the way other genres like hip-hop or hardcore.

“We do those things occasionally, as sort of like a special focus night, but mostly it’s like old country, classic country, rock, blues, jazz, you know, ragtime,” Farley said. “So everything in that American roots pantheon is where we want to be.”

A part of Farley’s aim with the music he books is to attract people of different ages. Reno, he said, is too small of a community to focus on younger audiences solely.

“We need the entire town to meld together and hang out and come down to events,” he said. “I think Artown does a really good job with that, but I think we need to carry that through the whole year.”

But, for Farley, it’s actually important that the Saint be associated with more than music—and that’s a challenge, he said, given the large size of the venue, which doubles as a barrel house for Brasserie Saint James beer.

“That’s the double-edged sword of being the kind of venue I think that I want Saint to be and that I like to go to—and that is that it should be intimate enough and warm enough and welcoming enough that you actually would go there for a beer or cocktail, regardless of whether or not there’s a show,” he said.

With a venue the size of the Saint, Farley often books shows on weekends, when there’s the potential to draw a crowd. But for Barnato at the Loving Cup, weekdays are actually a favorite for scheduling shows.

“I love doing touring acts on the weekdays, because people have a different mindset,” Barnato said. “I think people want to go out, and they’re a little more attentive on the weekdays, versus weekends, when people are in a little bit more of a party mode, which makes it hard in a space like this to have a show, to have people pay attention.”

Barnato actually has a standing show on Thursday nights—a jazz night featuring local musicians from the Reno Jazz Collective.

“I think it’s the coolest night in Reno, like, anywhere,” he said. “You’ll come in, and it’s dark in here. Everyone’s sitting down. There’s incredible music. There’s professors and traveling professors from the university jazz program who sit in. There’s improvisation. It’s just this really cool, almost community-feeling scene.”

The Loving Cup is well-suited to accommodate weekday shows in its small space. But Barnato books weekend shows as well. Unlike some of the larger bars, he doesn’t do presale tickets online and sometimes has to turn people away at door when the bar gets too packed. But Barnato thinks that’s a good thing.

“That’s a healthy thing for this music market, because Reno as a whole is really bad at presales, like, historically bad,” he said. “People in Reno do not buy presale tickets.”

When larger bands see poor presales, he said, they’ll sometimes cancel a show.

“But Reno always comes out strong,” Barnato said. “There have been shows where you’d have, like, 10 percent presales, and then the shows sold out.”

Bringing out the right size of crowd for a show can be a balancing act. Barnato cited the Slim Cessna’s Auto Club show—saying that had he booked it for a Saturday, he likely would have looked into moving the show to the Saint to accommodate more people.

“That’s another thing with this area, I think, is us working as a team with stuff like that and knowing what’s best for the market, and not necessarily just your own bar,” he said.

Calling the tune

In the end, Reno’s live bars try to look out for what’s best for the local music market in their own ways.

Zaumeyer and Masud strive to represent Reno through the eclectic and all-ages shows they book and work to give local bands a leg up by pairing them with touring acts. Barnato seeks to create a sense of community with jazz night and concerns himself with not oversaturating Reno with too many shows.

At the Saint, Farley envisions a place where people of all ages feel comfortable hanging out, regardless of whether or not there’s live music. And, as he looks to the future, he wants that comfort to spread beyond his bar. Farley thinks a key to that is having people in midtown who don’t just feel at home there, but actually are.

“I think that Reno’s on the right bell curve,” he said. “I do think that we need a little bit more density of population. We keep hearing about all of these people moving here. I’m not sure where they’re moving to, though. We need more people living in the center of Reno.”

Farley would like to see parking requirements for new housing construction in midtown done away with. And there’s a parking lot on the north side of the Saint he’d like see housing units built on.

“Ultimately, you can’t have vital businesses like this or restaurants or anything without population density that’s in a close proximity, and that’s something that’s still sorely lacking,” he said.