The first time I ever played in a band on stage, it was to a mostly empty room. Since then, I’ve played countless empty rooms. I’ve also played very full rooms, and when you hear about the experience of being in a band, most people’s tendency is to focus on just those shows and wipe all the crushing empty shows from the public profile.
But I want to talk about those empty shows, because I’m pretty confident that most musicians have had at least the same amount of experiences playing to empty rooms as they have to full rooms.
Full disclosure: this is all from memory and not fact-checked. There’s a great chance that I’m collapsing different events into each other and getting details wrong. It’ll probably be more fun to read and definitely more fun to write without trying to verify anything.
For my first ever show, I was in a band called 80 Proof. It was basically a jazz band—possibly some ska and funk (cringe!)—made up of maybe six players from the high school jazz ensemble. Two other acts played, my brother’s band Green Bar Bill and a band from the high school one township over, Bethel Park.
An odd personal side note: there was a John Vogel my age who went to that high school; I knew this because when I took my SATs at Bethel Park High School, the person who checked me off said, “We have one of those, too.” Although he was not in this band that we played with, he did sing one song with them that night and we met before the music started.
The Bethel Park band played popular covers, and they packed out the house. All the kids from their high school came out, and it was looking like it was gonna be an awesome show. As soon as they finished, Green Bar Bill started setting up, and everybody left, including the band. My brother’s band then played for the six members of 80 Proof, and after that we played for the four members of Green Bar Bill.
This is where most stories would take that as a starting point and then you get the equivalent of a training montage until the band comes out triumphantly playing packed venues every night. But let’s be for real, this situation will always be a possibility for most performers.
From about 2010 to 2015, Grandchildren was playing decent shows in New York City at places like Market Hotel, Glasslands Gallery, Pianos, and Cameo Gallery. We played with people who were pretty big—Toro y Moi and Sleigh Bells, as two examples—and in general during that time period most of our NYC shows had okay to really good turnouts. But before and after that time period, New York was not great for us.
My first show in NYC was at either the Continental or CBGBs around 2006 with my band Red Rocket (later changed to Rad Racket). We played both venues around the same time, but I don’t remember which was first, and both shows were pretty much the same. These shows were bills with six unrelated bands on a weeknight. It’s basically like a tryout, and each band brings its own crowd who leaves right when they’re done. We of course knew no one in New York, so we brought no one out and played to empty rooms.
There are two scenes in Gilmore Girls that I think represent the most and least accurate portrayals of what it’s like to be in a band. In the most accurate scene, Lane’s band plays at CBGBs on a Tuesday night. They are super excited when they hear they’re playing there, and then it cuts to them backstage, nervous about going on. The doorman—played by Esteban Powell, who also plays Ben, David Silver’s car wash coworker in later Beverly Hills, 90210, and one of the young friends of the main character in Dazed and Confused—comes back to tell them that they’re not going to play because it’s a Tuesday night and there’s nobody there except two old people who aren’t drinking. “That’s my parents,” says Brian, the band’s bass player.
I didn’t rewatch this scene, that’s just how I remember it. I think you’ll find it pretty accurate though. And when I watched it I felt like it was cut from my own life.
Later, around the time that Grandchildren was starting to have good shows in NYC, we played one memorably bad one at the Mercury Lounge opening for a band that Moby was playing bass for. We got there when we were supposed to for load in, and the venue had booked a showcase before our show. This was a show with an indie pop band whose name I forget. We talked to them while they were setting up and they seemed friendly and cool. They played to a mostly full room of people 30ish and up who were clearly there to check them out in a professional manner. This was not a packed and lively audience there to see their favorite band. But hey, at least there were people there.
When their set finished, the venue cleared everyone out so that they could start our show. At some point during the night, Moby came backstage to do a video interview. We were back there, and he sort of just did the interview around us and never said anything to us.
We then played our set to an empty room while the separated bar was packed. But here’s a part of my memory that I might be conflating. In my memory, we’re playing to an empty room and can see through windows at the back of the performance room into the packed bar of people having a great time. I think that detail of windows between the bar and stage is actually taken from The Knitting Factory setup, though (the newer Knitting Factory). And a similar situation may or may not have also happened at The Knitting Factory.
Once our set was done, the band Moby was playing bass in took the stage and the room filled up.
We all know stress dreams. Probably the most common stress dreams are some permutation of public nudity or being unprepared for a test of some sort.
But performance stress dreams are also totally a thing. Getting on stage and none of your equipment works. Realizing that you don’t have or can’t find all of your equipment while you’re getting ready to set up. You start a song and can’t remember how it goes. You forgot that you were actually supposed to play a show. You’re about to play a show and realize that you haven’t practiced or learned the material. Which leads to the least accurate scene from Gilmore Girls about being in a band, which also provides a note about performing cover songs.
Lane’s band is about to go on stage to perform at an outdoor event of some sort. They’re supposed to play a specific cover song, and in order to prepare it, they listen to a CD before walking onstage. In my memory they don’t even like strum along to it while it’s playing, trying to pick out the different notes. They just listen to a recorded copy of the song and then go out on stage and nail it.
That’s some legendary story-telling shit about people who have abilities far beyond almost every other player. If given the chord changes and knowing the song generally, a fair amount of experienced players could passably get through a song without trouble.
But in my experience, being able to perform any song takes hours and hours of practice, and learning a cover song is pretty much the same process as learning a song that a bandmate wrote. If your bandmate wrote it, they might be able to show you with their hands, which could be a little easier, but we learned most of Grandchildren’s music through recorded stems.
So in real life, this scene from Gilmore Girls would literally be a nightmare scenario.
I’ve also personally had stress dreams about the spectacle and general lack of privacy inherent in traveling in a band. In one, I remember sitting outside some building at a merch table when an entire circus comes over the hill to march through and wash over the entire event.
In another, I walk into a bar directly from a long van ride. I ask the bartender where the bathroom is and he points to a thin stairwell running behind the bar. I walk up and there’s a lone toilet, sitting in the middle of a large room. There’s a beam of light shining through a skylight on the toilet, a long piece of cloth hanging from the high ceiling to the floor, and cast-aside chairs, cleaning items, and furniture lined in piles along the walls.
I sit down on this toilet, and while I’m pooping, a caravan of lively people come dancing into the room led by one of my previous roommates. She sits on my lap while everyone parties in the periphery and I give her a look of, “Really?” Then I wake up.
But the stress dream that touches the most directly on clearing rooms comes from my friend and bandmate Russell. In it, Grandchildren is playing a show. The first band goes on and plays to a packed room. Then, while we’re setting up, all the people clear out and the staff literally put all the chairs upside down on the tables. We play to an empty, closed room, and while we start packing up our gear the staff take the chairs off the tables and the crowd starts to filter in while the next band sets up. They then play to a lively and enthusiastic audience. I can’t help but wonder if this was a direct processing of our gig with the band Moby played bass in. But lord knows that different versions of this happened throughout our time playing.
The biggest shows that we played were opening for more popular bands, and there was a very marked difference between our experiences playing for more radio hit bands versus opening for more independent and niche bands.
The two most impressive shows we landed were with Thievery Corporation at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, and for Peter Bjorn and John at the Theater of the Living Arts (TLA). In both of these shows, we played first out of three acts, and we played to very large half-full rooms of people who seemed to enjoy it but were not enthusiastic. The room was full by the time the headliners played, but the audience in general was not hungry to see the openers.
This is not to say is wasn’t awesome to play in a few of the bigger venues in the city for hundreds of people. I’m super grateful that I got the opportunities to play those shows. I’ll take that over an empty room any day of the week, even Tuesday.
But our best big shows were definitely opening for Man Man and Caravan Palace. We played a lot of shows with Man Man around 2010 - 2012, and they were all amazing. Our first time playing with them was at the legendary Trocadero. We played first out of three and the sold out show was packed and live from the very beginning.
Caravan Palace I had never heard of, and I had no idea what to expect. We went through our whole routine of setting up and sound checking, and I didn’t really realize what we were walking into. They had almost sold out the TLA, and the whole crowd started cheering as soon as we went on stage. This was the first time that I’d ever encountered the subgenre of electro swing.
A lucky personal side note: I had recently started dating my future wife when this show happened, and she invited all her friends to come meet me for the first time. I feel like it was an incorrect impression of my musical life that really worked in my favor.
Caravan Palace had come from France and didn’t bring any merch because of the taxes and logistics. When everyone came to buy their stuff and realized that they didn’t have anything, they diverted their already-decided-to-spend money on ours instead. We ended up selling $900 in merch that night. When they came back the next year and asked us to play with them again, it was an instant yes and a similar experience. Only they brought their merch that time.
If I could put into words my own thoughts about why these experiences were so different, I think it breaks down to a spectrum between two poles of “diggers” and “receivers.” For Man Man and Caravan Palace, their audience had to find them through digging or being involved in a niche community, and their hunger to find new music clearly showed in their reactions to our sets. Thievery Corporation and Peter Bjorn and John gained a lot of their fans from their songs being publicly recognizable, and amassed fans who are more likely to be passive listeners of music.
I’ll always have more affinity for the diggers because that’s what I’ve been throughout my life, an enthusiastic music fan who follows rabbit holes of taste to wherever it might take me.
To be fair, almost all of the situations of playing to empty rooms in this essay weren’t technically “clearing the room”. In order to properly clear a room, you need to start playing to a room with people in it, and then the majority leave because they’re not into it. I’ve had my fair share of those experiences, too, but the ones I recounted here stuck to me more. I kept the title, though, because “Playing to Empty Rooms” didn’t feel like a better one.
When Grandchildren played our last tour in 2019. We took one more shot at New York. And honestly it was pretty much my first show ever repeated about 23 years later. The band that played before us was a young, all-white cover-playing funk band who brought out all their friends and family, and everyone cleared out before we even started playing.
While it was definitely yet another depressing moment in time, I do feel like I had more of a perspective about these kinds of experiences. They don’t feel great, but they’re also a little inevitable if you’re going to gamble on playing live music.
And this isn’t limited to low-level artists. Before I joined Grandchildren most of my Rad Racket bandmates were in Grandchildren. They played at the Virgin Mobile Fest as accompaniment for Tim Scofield’s Aerial Sculptures, and one of the stories they came back with was She and Him getting booed by Lil Wayne fans. I have a friend whose band opened up for Wheatus, the band with the hit “Teenage Dirtbag.” No one came and my friend’s band left before they started playing. One of my bands (can’t remember which) opened for an empty show by Fiction Plane—Sting’s son’s band—at the Northstar Bar. We stuck around, and watched with three Fiction Plane fans. Grandchildren played empty shows in Florida with Yip Deceiver, featuring two members from Of Montreal.
Not all empty shows necessarily feel bad. If there are enough bands present, and everyone is legitimately supportive of each others’ sets, then even an empty show can be pretty fun.
I’ve been writing this while traveling around playing small shows, and although I haven’t been clearing rooms, every time I walk onstage it feels like a possibility. And there have been shows where I’m clearly not for everyone there. Sometimes those people do leave, but the people who stick around tell me afterwards about how much of an impact my set made. So even the lesser shows have had positive aspects.
I want this piece to serve as a foil to the pay your dues format where this is something that you go through once, and then you don’t encounter it for the rest of your life. With the exception of a VERY limited few, for almost all musicians every show is to some degree a crapshoot. I think it’s more of a matter of the cyclical and fickle nature of popularity. Sometimes you’re in favor with the popular culture and sometimes you’re not. Almost all musicians have different projects that hit differently and fluctuations in the attention paid to them. But that’s largely out of your control. The only thing you can do is keep doing it.
Context is also a key factor here. Being well-fitted to the context that you’re playing in is obviously the goal, but also when you get thrown into a situation where you’re ill-fitted and everyone’s still on board, that can feel like a pretty great win. And that’s where you have to take a gamble. Sometimes it’ll work, but other times it can flop. Hard.
Luckily, I’ve played enough good and fun shows to balance out the bad ones and keep me motivated. I know the awesome feeling of having a shared experience with a crowd. I’ll probably keep chasing that as long as I live, even if it means risking embarrassment.