As the spring weather and more widespread vaccinations converge, there’s something more than tulips blossoming in town these days: Live music is, well, alive once more. Memphis is singing and tapping its toes more than it has for over a year — and for many, the relief is palpable. That includes not only music fans, of course, but the artists, club owners, and employees who have suffered more than a few existential crises during the pandemic.
With new health directives changing the landscape of what’s possible, and more spaces privately making decisions to host music, here’s a look at where the area’s state of the musical arts stands today, starting with the science and policy that establishes what can and can’t be done, and moving on to see how that plays out on the ground and onstage.
As always, the default response continues to be fairly simple: Wear a mask!
The Health Department
Bruce Randolph, health officer for the Shelby County Health Department, concedes that the situation for music lovers has been confusing, given the ever-evolving approach the county has needed to adopt.
“It has changed,” he notes. “Part of it is, what is the logic behind those directives? First of all, the virus is transmitted through respiratory droplets and aerosols, so when a person who’s not wearing a mask is talking loudly, yelling, singing, or breathing hard, they can project the respiratory droplets and the virus even farther than six feet. One study has shown that it can travel as much as 20 feet. And certainly up to 15 or 18. So even though the CDC has recommended six feet of separation for social distancing, without a mask, six feet isn’t really far enough. And we know that in a lot of venues the audience is very close to the performers, many of them are not well-ventilated, they’re crowded. If you have that coupled with people not wearing masks, the risk of transmission was very high. So that’s why we had to implement the restrictions of wearing a mask, separation by six feet, or, if you’re performing, by at least 18 feet from the audience, just to provide that protection.”
With that as the foundational principle, music clubs serving food were able to open again after only a few months of lockdown. Shelby County unveiled looser restrictions on October 7th of last year, allowing bars and restaurants to stay open until midnight instead of 10 p.m. and raising the allowed table capacity from six to eight people. Restrictions were eased even more this month, with Health Directive 20.
“Now as more people are becoming vaccinated, we can at least begin to loosen up some things,” says Randolph. “So with the most recent Health Directive, we’re allowing some dancing indoors, but people still should be separated, unless the people you’re dancing with and around are people that you know, and you are familiar with their vaccination status, etc.”
As the number of COVID-19 cases has decreased, other guidelines have been modified as well. Music venue patrons are no longer required to sign in for contact tracing, and, much to the delight of punks and metalheads everywhere, music can once again be loud. “When we first allowed indoor dining,” Randolph explains, “where people could sit at tables and eat, we noticed that, if the music is played loud, people talk louder in order to be heard. With that increase in volume, you’re potentially projecting the virus farther. So that’s why we said, ‘We’ll allow music, but it should be kept at a decibel level where people could carry on normal conversation.’ But then we asked, did we really need that anymore?”
So now we can begin to imagine a more normal musical experience once again, albeit with a mask. And Randolph is eager to see that happen. “My desire is for us to get back as soon as we can to having live music. I think a lot of Memphians do not appreciate that, before COVID, you could go to almost any restaurant in Midtown or Downtown, and there’d be live music. I’ve lived in other cities, and that is not the case. So we’ve got this jewel here that we take for granted. I would love the day when we can return to that, and the truth of the matter is, it’s in our hands if we do the right thing. And anybody who wants a vaccine can get it now. Get that shot, so we can get back to enjoying ourselves!”
The Venues
Given the importance of live music to local culture, it’s not surprising that some venues have been hosting it for months now. Lafayette’s Music Room, for example, was one of the first to feature bands again, beginning in the second half of last year. With the size of their room and staff, they were well-suited to it, and soon settled into new work habits to keep the music flowing.
Brent Harding, who books bands for the club, explains that it required new working routines, in addition to requiring masks and making space between tables. “Everything is sanitized after each table becomes free again,” he says. “For the bigger acts, we’ll do an early show and a late show. We can roll the house, clean the place, sanitize everything, and then do another show. That’s really the only way it can work with some of these bands.”
More than any other factor, Lafayette’s has a key advantage: space. Even with more spacing between tables, “I believe we can do about 150 people at a time,” Harding estimates. B.B. King’s Blues Club, which Harding also books, has a similar advantage. But just across Beale Street, the Blues City Cafe has not fared as well. “We have a small room,” says Jason Ralph, booker for Blues City, “and until I can fill it up with people, it’s hard to justify entertainment in the band box. We just need some rules to relax.”
Bar DKDC is in a similar boat. While the tiny club has mainly carried on through the pandemic as an extra seating area for its adjacent sister establishment, the Beauty Shop restaurant, owner Karen Carrier says the much-loved venue will open again in a big way once space is not an issue. “Once they drop the distancing mandate, we’re going to let it rip!” she says, with a hint of big events to come.
Other clubs, however, might have the space, but are baffled by what they feel is ineffective guidance from the county. One club owner describes the frustration of not having a clearinghouse of the ever-changing regulatory guidelines. “I have to look at the Shelby County Health Department page religiously. Nobody’s coming around and telling you what to do and what not to do. You’re supposed to go to the website, but it changes all the time. We have to hear about it through Facebook, and network about it, and talk to other places to see what they’re doing.
“For a long time, you were not supposed to have music louder than people talking at a table. But what does that mean? We were told four months ago that we could have tables pushed up to the bar; you just couldn’t sit at the bar. Well, the health department came in and said, ‘You need to move these two feet from the bar.’ We said, ‘But it says on the website we can do it.’ They just said, ‘No, move ’em back two feet.’ Okay.”
Some have dealt with the reduced attendance capacity by playing up other strengths. Brian “Skinny” McCabe, owner of the Hi Tone Cafe, says, “Before COVID, we had live music every day, and then great food, too. But now we’re focused more on food. We’re now a restaurant that happens to have acoustic shows on the weekends. And open-mic comedy on Tuesdays.”
One silver lining in all the restrictions has been a greater reliance on local bands, while national touring acts continue to wait it out. Jack Phillips of Railgarten says, “We’ve got a lot of Memphis-based bands booked, and some regional bands, as well. We really want to invest in Memphis right now. We want to focus on local musicians because they’re struggling. Also, bigger acts are not traveling that much, so it’s mutually beneficial. I think it’s a great time for everyone to realize what a treasure we have.”
Another advantage Railgarten has is its outdoor stage, and the exponential decrease of risk that comes with an outdoor setting. Now that spring has sprung, that may be driving the area’s resurgence in live music more than any other factor. In just the past month, porch parties have become more common, from impromptu soirees like that recently hosted by Will Sexton and Amy LaVere for a Dead Soldiers show or full-on, coordinated celebrations of the concept such as the Cooper-Young Community Association’s Porchfest on April 17th, with dozens of performers. Upcoming shows at other outdoor venues also herald a proliferation of live music, including the return of the River Series at Harbor Town, the spring music series at The Grove in Germantown, music concerts at the Memphis Botanic Garden, and six ticketed events planned for the Levitt Shell in Overton Park between May and July.
As Natalie Wilson of the Levitt Shell explains, that’s only the beginning, as they make plans to offer their free concert series this fall. “With the impact of COVID-19,” she says, “we can’t do our normal four nights a week, but we are coming back Friday and Saturday evenings in September, through the third weekend of October. We’re going to focus on supporting our local musicians this fall. And we pay our musicians at the market rate because we believe in not just presenting music, but also empowering music. And that includes supporting our musicians and their livelihoods. It’s been our mission since the Shell was built in the 1930s.”
Other music festivals can be expected in the fall, from the outdoor stages of Mempho Music Fest, which returns in October, to the mixed outdoor- and indoor-venue approach of Gonerfest, planned for September 23-26. A foreshadowing of how those might fare just took place in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where the Juke Joint Festival, held only virtually last year, went on as a live experience once again in mid-April.
As Roger Stolle, president of the Clarksdale/Coahoma County Tourism Commission, explains, their festival did everything right, and may serve as a model for those to come. “We put a ridiculous amount of time and money into it, trying to make it safe,” he notes. “We bought touchless hand-sanitizer units, gallons of hand sanitizer, thousands of paper masks, stanchion barriers to keep people back from musicians, clear plexi virus shields for the smaller venues, thermometers. A whole lot of stuff. And a lot of extra security, not because we were going to be arresting people, but just to help control the situation, in case there were problems with compliance.”
And yet, much to his delight, audience respect for the “suggested guidelines” of the festival, such as wearing masks and practicing social distancing, was greater than expected, as crowds saw music on 13 outdoor and 19 indoor stages. “Compliance was really great, except perhaps on Saturday night in the bars. The beauty of it is, people know what they’re supposed to be doing. Until alcohol gets involved, people are pretty good about it. But once they get drinking, and they’re excited and haven’t seen music in a year, that’s where some of it breaks down a bit. We just tried to give people plenty of space, and people took advantage of that pretty well.”
They also took advantage of a more proactive approach taken by the Juke Joint Festival: free vaccinations. Though use of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been suspended by the time of the festival, they did offer Moderna shots and cards facilitating a second shot wherever festival-goers might go home to.
The Players
Vaccinations have been the biggest game-changer for musicians themselves, without whom there can be no shows, no matter what restrictions are lifted. John Paul Keith, who became a fixture in the Memphis live-streamed music world last year, credits vaccines with his return to playing live shows, starting with a show he played with Amy LaVere at the Bartlett Performing Arts Center (BPAC) this month.
“The main reason that I felt better playing live,” he says, “was that the [case] numbers were going down, and the vaccine became available. Once I got the first round, I felt there was an acceptable level of risk in performance. And it didn’t hurt that BPAC did a half-capacity show, with masks.”
Even as clubs began opening last fall, many musicians had mixed feelings about it. Victor Sawyer, trombonist with the Lucky 7 Brass Band and teacher with the Stax Music Academy, recalls, “when we played a show last November, I honestly felt pretty guilty. Just by performing, we were ultimately drawing people together.” But that’s less of a concern now, and he’s rapidly taking on more gigs for the rest of this year, largely due to what he sees as the effective local response to the pandemic.
“The city and Shelby County have been doing a great job,” he says. “I hate how our mayors are just getting pooped on. When you look at Tennessee and other mid-sized cities around the nation, Shelby County has had one of the lowest infection rates out of a lot of cities, and they should get credit for that. They’re doing a great job. Also, we’re all vaccinated now. Starting in May, we’re booked pretty much through October. When everything goes away, you feel like it will never come back, but once we said ‘We’re ready to rock,’ the booking requests came in like clockwork. It was a really emotional moment to see that we weren’t forgotten.”
For Keith, the emotions cut both ways, from elation to anxiety. Before the BPAC show, he says, “I was nervous for the first time I can remember. But it was really wonderful. I was grateful they had a stage large enough to have the big band be spread out. And on a stage, you’re separated from the audience.”
The stage at B-Side was one reason he settled on that venue for his first regular live residency since the pandemic started. “I’m much more comfortable if the place has a stage. Otherwise, you can’t get away from people. Once they get a few drinks in ’em, forget it. We know that singing spreads droplets, and that’s why the audience is supposed to be 18 feet from the stage. And the other night, I actually saw a couple droplets arcing through the stage lighting, out past the microphone as I sang. And I thought, ‘There go some droplets!’ It wasn’t even a lot of them! But you’ve still got to be safe. It’s not over.”
And yet, Keith is ultimately relishing the return to live performance, noting that when live performances stopped, “we musicians lost something very precious to us all. I don’t think we’ve processed it yet. Now, I definitely have a renewed appreciation and respect for music. It’s powerful, and it’s a human necessity. It’s like language. It’s something we need for our society to understand itself. And I care about it more now, because I know what it’s like not to have it.”
