As co-owner of Seattle’s popular independent venue Neumos in Capitol Hill, Steven Severin has been a staple in the Seattle music industry for more than 20 years. Roughly 10 years ago, he helped create the Seattle Nightlife and Music Association to bring together the area’s live event insiders, and for the past 16 years has helped run Neumos with its sister club Barboza and the accompanying Runaway bar.
As part of Billboard‘s efforts to best cover the coronavirus pandemic and its impacts on the music industry, we have been speaking with Severin regularly to chronicle his experience throughout the crisis. (Read the last installment here and see the full series here.)
Has Neumos reopened for shows after the slow start to the year?
Sort of. So much is cancelled, but there are a few shows. It starts getting better going forward. The last two weeks of January were kind of the worst of it and it is following along with what [Dr. Anthony] Fauci said. That’s how it feels.
Starting Thursday, we have 18 shows playing in February and seven shows cancelled. We would have had 25 shows, so that’s not terrible. It sucks but at least some stuff is staying.
We only have 21 shows in March. That sucks. March is usually every day. Nothing much is going to change in March. Maybe something comes together. Normally, if you have a show that cancels in March, you have all these other holds behind it. But they are all gone.
I used to micromanage the calendar…to a fault. But now, I’m like, ‘you guys got it. You’re doing what you can.’ I am not going to push anybody to do anything right now because it’s just a sh*t show out there. I’m just happy we have things on the calendar.
Does the calendar look better beyond March?
April is the same. We will see what beefs up in there. I’m looking at May and there are cancellations or shows are postponed. So far, June only has one that is postponed or cancelled.
Do you believe all the cancellations and postponements are impacting consumer confidence?
Yeah, it is. Why wouldn’t it be? Consumer confidence is shaky and that is the reality of where we are at right now. It blows and I don’t know what else we can do until people aren’t talking about hospitals being filled.
So many people have their boosters now or have had COVID, so maybe it is moving in a better direction. I think that things are going to start changing and people are going to start coming back out. The next couple of weeks are going to tell us a lot.
It was announced at the end of January that a new group, including you, was going to take over Seattle’s famed Bumbershoot festival. How did that go over with local folks?
It went awesome. It went really really well. It is a 50-year-old event. People have all of their opinions about it. The last few editions, people aren’t super fond of it. But people were really positive about vision, which is great because it is what we thought the community wanted. I live here. I work in all these areas. I’ve heard what people have been saying for the longest time. This is what they want. We’re going to execute and it’s going to be the greatest festival in the world. [Laughs]. Just like that.
Instead of just a once-a-year event, it sounds like your group is planning to do the festival plus additional events throughout the year. Is that correct?
We aren’t going to say exactly what those events are yet until they are done. Once you say you’re going to do ‘x’ event, you have to do ‘x’ event or you get killed for not doing it. We’ve got to make sure that everything makes sense.
soul, classic soul, motown,
