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The Day - July 18th, 2003
Reproduced below is an article that was published in The Day, a local newspaper in New London County, CT.Requiem For The Gee?
by Ben Johnson
Once The Focal Point For Live Original Music, The El 'n' Gee Club Faces An Uncertain Future
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| Jason Womble, right, of New London, owner of the El 'N' Gee club in New London, standing outside the club's front entrance on Golden Street speaking with a patron. (Photo by Tim Martin) | |
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| Right, an audience member sings into the microphone at a Blind Society punk rock concert at the El 'n' Gee Club in New London. (Photo by Tim Martin) | |
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| Freddie Stevens, left, of Easton, watches the crowd dance while The Virus plays at El 'n' Gee Club in New London. The club will close at the end of the month. (Photo by Tim Martin) | |
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| Freddie Stevens, front center, sings along with other audience members while The Virus, a punk rock band from Pennsylvania, plays at the El 'n' Gee Club. (Photo by Tim Martin) |
It's Saturday night, and the El 'n' Gee Club at the corner of Golden Street and Eugene O'Neill Drive is packed. The floor shakes and the walls bend, as percussive rock explodes out of a huge sound system with the ferocity of rocket-powered wrecking balls. From the large and simple stage all the way back to the entrance, bodies shake and bounce, and those standing still are the exception to the rule.
Business owner and club manager Jason Womble stands behind the large soundboard and nods his head to the beat. His tattooed arms constantly reach to make precise adjustments to the many knobs and faders that control the levels of the instruments being caressed by the tough-love only rock musicians can give. The music is good. The scene is appropriate. The audience is at home, and the proof is in the pounding of their limbs. This is how it is supposed to be.
But there's something different from most nights at the El 'n' Gee: the crowd is older than you might expect. The band playing is The Reducers, the most recognized but also perhaps the most seasoned band in New London.
Of the few young adults in the audience, half appear to be with their parents. This is not the crowd that frequents the Gee — at least not anymore — though it may be the best turnout Womble has seen in the last month: roughly 200 rockers who are old enough to buy beer and devout enough to head anywhere there is good music. Many nights, the club has fewer than 50 people.
At the end of July, the El 'n' Gee, which has been a stronghold of local rock for more than 25 years — despite many owners and managers — will close.
The two owners still involved in the business, Womble and 33-year-old Tracey Bombaci, are burned out. They are both staunch supporters of live, original music, but entering the business of running clubs has meant learning hard lessons in an environment where the bottom line is dollar signs, not sound waves. Womble began his story by saying, “Don't involve your friends. Because when you involve your friends and money, things get complicated. Once the business starts to go south, so does the friendship.”
Ownership of the equipment and rights to the name of the nightclub is split among three partners: Womble, 29, Bombaci, and Eric Johnson. Bombaci and Johnson are longtime residents of New London who have always supported and enjoyed live music, especially at the Gee. Womble was involved in music in Virginia, helping run a small independent record label.
In the fall of 2001, Johnson convinced college buddy Womble to move here and invest his life in New London's hub for live music. Bombaci came forward with the necessary capital for the purchase.
As of May 2003, Womble says he and Johnson are no longer friends. Womble is now booking and managing the club by himself with Bombaci's support. Johnson could not be reached for comment for this story.
Neither Womble nor Bombaci — whose day job is as a social worker in Hartford — would divulge specific figures, but both say they invested more money than either thought they would have to and they have recouped effectively none of it.
When the doors close in two weeks, Bombaci says all three business partners “will be paying money for a long time.”
Womble cites a short list of crucial mistakes he's made in two years of running the Gee. Advertising — which usually consisted of a strong word-of-mouth network, the marquee outside the club, peppering Mitchell and Connecticut college campuses with fliers, and an email list of about 1,000 — was not used vigorously enough. Having too many varieties of beer on tap at a place where most customers were looking for their favorite band, not their favorite brew, was expensive.
But there is one job that Womble admits is the most difficult and the most detrimental to business if done poorly: booking.
Since the management change two years ago, the El 'n' Gee has catered largely to punk and hardcore music. The genre draws underage and straight-edge listeners (straight-edge is a no-substance lifestyle associated with some hardcore acts) who don't buy alcohol, which is a large source of revenue in the nightclub business. While it can be lucrative for a club to become genre-specific so people can come already knowing what they're getting, it also means everyone who doesn't subscribe to that genre will cross that club off their map.
| Letter To The Editor: It's sad to see the El 'N' Gee have to close. As a former radio station program director, very active in supporting live music (particularly developing artists), I know it's not an easy business. In my college years, my friends and I drove a good hour to see bands such as Buffalo Tom and 17 Relics at the El 'N' Gee. In the past few years, whenever I'd see the schedule, I wouldn't have any desire at all to visit. Think of the number of high-caliber artists driving on Interstate 95 between Boston and New York City. Providence's best clubs have become disgusting and book mostly head bangers. The Ocean Mist (in Matunuck, R.I.) has good music, (blues, reggae) but too sparingly. Toad's in New Haven isn't always getting the names it once had. There's a great market out there to land quality acts (John Hiatt, Entrain, or Jonatha Brooke, for example.) And while they're going through Northampton, Mass, to perform, our shoreline is not on the radar. The Iguanas were just in town for Sailfest, and there was a glimmer of musical light in New London. They would have been a blast in the El 'N' Gee any time of year. And their crowd would have consumed all those beers on tap. - Andrew DiGiovanni - Stonington (Published on 7/22/2003) |
Today, Womble wishes he had booked a more diverse lineup of music — even a cover band once in a while to rake in the cash so he could book whatever he wanted the next few nights without taking a loss for the weekend. He describes the financial logistics as “equivalent to going to the casino and dropping all your money on roulette. That's the ebb and flow of the business.”
Many locals involved in New London's live music scene seem to echo the sentiment that more all-inclusive booking policies could have helped the Gee stay afloat and even prosper. Scott Magruder, who ran the club from 1989 through 2001 and still owns the building, agrees that booking makes or breaks a club.
“You have to have the money to put into it. You have to be able to give a big act a $5,000 guarantee for their performance and be prepared to lose that money on the gamble if no one comes,” he says.
Peter Detmold, front man of The Reducers and longtime owner of the nearby Dutch Tavern, feels that the largely unused reservoir of young talent and interest at local colleges could play a big role in helping the Gee return to the days of high attendance while at the same time putting local bands on the map by booking them with larger acts.
“The colleges seem to be a little bit insular and isolated, and I don't know if that's the fault of the town or the fault of the college or if there's no fault at all,” Detmold says. “You know, in other towns, the student body kind of feeds the creative pool, where as here it's an aberration when a Conn College band plays the Gee or Station 58. It's a good aberration, but it's not the norm.”
David Lewis knows the importance of networking and what the other ingredients are for a good local music scene. College involvement is just one of these key ingredients. Lewis has been a longtime promoter in the New London/New Haven circuit who has moved to a more vibrant scene in Chicago and joined Hopper PR. He says that many of the bands he promotes refuse to play Connecticut because the state has a bad reputation. Clubs that relied on “good-old-days” reputations for drawing new demographics and owners who were not willing to pay a band when the turnout wasn't good have made Connecticut a no-man's land, says Lewis.
Lewis' work in the Connecticut music scene is extensive, and he has seen the El 'n' Gee poorly managed under past owners who were not really committed to nurturing the music scene with long-term growth in mind.
“You have to book a diverse group of acts and pay everybody, even at a loss, so they'll come back,” he says. “Club owners in Connecticut either can't afford it or are greedy for fast money instead of lasting relationships. The networking is down. The older crowd has failed to some degree, and the younger crowd is crippled by the history.”
Many questions remain concerning the El 'n' Gee and whether its closing is an inevitable reflection of a faltering live music scene in Connecticut or merely another unsuccessful attempt at running a difficult business. Lewis's longtime friend and fellow promoter Rich Martin — local rocker of the band Low Beam — feels the Gee's closing has been a long time coming but can be revived with the right alchemist.
“Stuff in the music scene snowballs with the right momentum,” he says. “All you need is that one person to start it, and if the environment is good, you can really get things going.”