In recent years, a lot of local Portland-area businesses have closed, re-opened, closed again, and then tried to open up once more, only to flnd their numbers in the red before they give up and pass the lease on to whatever SoCal-based taphouse owner is in town for the week. But, this has nothing to do with COVID lockdowns, the economy, or even location—there are several ways to run a business into the ground, and of all the businesses that I’ve seen trampled by bad decisions and internal clusterfucks, the majority have been live entertainment venues. How somebody manages to fuck up the "stare at naked women while drinking alcohol" business model is beyond me, but it happens all the time. On the fiip side, I have seen some of the least likely locations stick around like a post-nuclear-war cockroach, regardless of a pandemic, economic recession, or Yelp mobs. And, they do this by following some basic (but all-too-often ignored) rules.
To keep this column interesting, I will be avoiding the "what to do right" tone (which usually draws the interest of two to three readers) and replacing it with the much more appetizing and gossipy "what not to do wrong" format that keeps internet clickbait articles in circulation. It’s time to talk some shit, and over the course of the next few articles, I will be presenting to you, the entrepreneurial reader, a series on...
As with any form of entertainment, the easiest way to place a giant wedge between paying customers and onstage talent is to make sure that the entertainment (not the management) is in charge of the venue and its operations. Forget strip clubs for a second and let me first share two stories that come from the realm of live music and comedy, respectively, as these lessons apply to every form of live entertainment that doesn’t involve animals (and, even then, monkeys shouldn’t be put in charge of the zoo).
For a while, Front Avenue Nightclub was the best place for an up-and-coming band to perform, regardless of genre or following. Thanks to great staff, an even better location, and a properly promoted roster of live music, Front Ave was also the only spot in Town Omitted, or to perform as a live musician. As a result, rappers, rockers, indie folksters, and even industrial bands would grace the stage. This was the case until the summer lull hit, and most of the weekend drinker crowd took to the lakes and campsites, leaving venues at less-than-half capacity for the summer (if you think lockdown laws are bad for business, you should experience a summer in Oregon that reaches over seventy degrees for more than two days, resulting in a weed-fueled exodus that drives everyone from the barstools to the woods).
To fight the low attendance of music nights, Front Ave’s manager put a "resident" (house band) hip hop collective in charge of booking the venue’s live music for the summer. This was because said hip hop collective always had a packed house (and one that drank heavily, never asking for hookups or special treatment). The first few weekends were fine until it became clear that ninety percent of the new "regular" crowd were relatives, roommates, and friends of the collective. Further, the hip hop collective booked, well, just hip hop. No rock, no folk, not even "regular rap" or open mic freestyle nights—just the same twelve guys in backpacks, emulating Rhymesayers artists while rapping over dubstep (both of which were popular for exactly six months sometime around 2009). This was every night of the week.
With each week that passed at the "New" Front Avenue Club, the few former regulars who remained loyal eventually found other venues to patronize. Bands that were once popular got back from their month-long camping trips in August, only to find that they couldn’t get any stage time at the club. Eventually, the lead emcee of the hip hop collective was effectively managing the club because the club manager had turned over their power to the emcee. And, after one single, solitary disagreement between the two parties, the hip hop collective decided to boycott the venue by taking their friends, relatives, and roommates elsewhere, two towns away. With this, Front Ave turned into a ghost town for a few weeks before burning down after a suspicious "kitchen fire" (caused by either a microwave, a deep fryer, or the world’s dumbest insurance claims adjustor).
This is the first lesson—diversify your patrons or risk losing all of your investment by putting it into one basket/crowd. By putting your entertainment in charge, you are investing in exactly one "stock," so to speak. If everyone at the venue is friends with your staff or entertainment, then all it takes to lose your entire customer base is a simple falling-out or petty argument. And, in the case that you should need to regulate with some "fascist, dictatorial" rules, such as "no smoking weed in front of the OLCC" or "leave your switchblade in the car," a coup will dry up your customer base. Club owners don’t belong on stage, and on-stage entertainment doesn’t belong in management.
The next example involves stand-up comedy, a phenomenon that has all but died thanks to Generation Daycare. There is a life-and-death cycle that every single live comedy venue experiences, one that always signals a swan song (I challenge anyone to prove me wrong).
Whether a professional stand-up comedy club or a "Yeah, we book comedy whenever the poker crowd is out of town" dive bar, the same sad, predictable story occurs with minimal variation (I call it "comedy Colombo"). First, a venue owner somehow learns that comedy shows draw more people than whatever tired cover band or karaoke night is driving out regulars. In the case of comedy clubs, this step is already covered (still, rest assured, Bob’s Laugh Den used to be a steak-and-lobster jazz bar before they went into the red and were forced to sell most of their speakers, replacing nine-member-deep musical ensembles with road comics and open-mic’ers). In the dive bar situation, this phase occurs after one of the regulars offers to book his comedian friends for a night; the night goes well, and then the owner says, "Hey, this comedy thing worked once, how about we do it every single Friday and Saturday night?"
Next, the owner tries to book comedy by themselves, which is next to impossible. For one, most of the good Portland-area comics aren’t available because they already moved to LA and are currently happily living in a ghetto while writing for the Late Late Later Show With Unlikeable British Asshole. So, this means that it’s up to local staples and touring road comics to fill the slots. Since there are approximately two good comedians for every twenty open spots at comedy shows, the duty of "booking funny people" is eventually passed on to the resident host, who is usually an amateur comedian or part-time strip club DJ. Of note, hosting is a win-win situation as a comedian because if you’re funny, that’s awesome, but if you bomb, you can just cut to "...okay folks, get ready for our next comedian," passing the mic to someone else, who now has to follow your poorly executed jokes. Being a comedy show host is like being a side dude—no one expects anything from you, and there is minimal responsibility (plus, the next asshole has to clean up your mess). Anyhow, the host is given the duty of booking comedians, and this is where the disaster starts.
At first, there will be a steady roster of good comedians... for about a month. This is because the host is already sitting on a dozen or so Facebook messages and/or favors from established comedians who think, "Hell, why not, I’ll give the Brewberg Oregon Pint Palace a try." Then, after a month of booking talent who will never, ever return for "twenty percent plus drink tickets" again, the pool dries up, and ninety percent of every bill gets filled with no-name amateurs, who were booked because they are friends with the host (and, likely share their specific style of humor, politics, attitude, etc.). Suddenly, it’s Amateur Night every night, and on the rare chance that a professional comedian attempts to get booked, they get told, "Oh, sorry, we’re full that night" and/or "That style of comedy doesn’t work here" (plot twist: their style of comedy would fucking save the establishment from going under, but the host won’t book them because of Eskimo brother status, political differences or simple jealousy—crabs in a bucket always pull each other down). This results in crowds (many of whom are carryover lunch crowd customers taken hostage, with the rest expecting actual talent for their ticket price) associating "stand up comedy" with "hipsters whining about Trump for six hours" or "inside jokes performed over a ukelele, in front of confused truckers" (a staple in rural towns outside of Portland). Sooner or later, the phrase "comedy doesn’t work here" pops up, a la "it’s not me, it’s you" or "I just need my space."
How does this apply to strip clubs? Simple— if a club owner puts a mediocre-but-enthusiastic dancer in charge of the booking process, the club will develop an unspoken theme and draw a specific type of dancer—that being, "whoever gets along with the dancer in charge of booking and/or fits her style/clique/class/ etc." Worse, once the trend is established, it will stick around long after the dancer in charge of booking retires, deterring any new breed of dancer from coming in. Any club that has had to remove the stigma of the previous owner/name/location knows exactly what I’m talking about.
When you turn Semi-Popular Dancer into Queen Bee In Charge Of Night Shifts, you get the same show, over and over. Friday night with two dozen girls? Every single one will dance to the same music, share the same hairstyle, drink the same thing and draw the same customer type. In Portland, this usually results in "Green- Haired Shoegaze PBR Night" every night. Bonus points for the touring pornstar or "I think I want to try stripping" girl-next-door that looks like a Playboy model because there is no way in hell she will land a feature night. The lesson here is, well, diversity matters. That phrase may be tattooed on the arm of every girl working the shift, but if every single one of them is the exact same, mass-produced, current- year model of dancer, it’s not exactly diversity, now is it? Fifteen angry white chicks who agree on [insert social cause here] are still fifteen angry white chicks, even if the black girl from the punk band does occasional guest spots.
In both of the above examples (of which I have witnessed dozens of times over), management decides that it would be easier to pass off the duty of giving a shit about one’s business to someone who has neither the skill set nor the investment to perform (literally and figuratively). I can’t count how many venues I (as a promoter, comedy show host, and hip hop DJ) have walked away from as flames lit the pathway of the bridge I just burned. My investment as a host who books talent? Two Fridays a month and maybe a few hundred dollars in weed bribes. The club owner’s investment? Six to seven figures, depending on how bad the lease was.
This brings us back to the theme of this column—strip clubs. People come to strip clubs to see beautiful performers, end of story. This applies to traditional strip clubs, male strip clubs, dive bar strip clubs, steakhouse strip clubs, vegan strip clubs, virtual strip clubs, drive-thru strip clubs, and strip mall strip clubs alike. And, trust me when I say that the easiest way to make sure beautiful performers stop showing up to perform at your strip club is to put a beautiful performer in charge of booking the beautiful performers.
Because I’ve mainly worked in traditional, naked women strip clubs, I cannot speak to male strip clubs. With that said, my experience has been as follows: oftentimes, semi-hot women who compete for money and attention don’t want hotter, more attention-worthy women competing with them. Is this sexist of me to point out? Very much so—but it’s true. "Misogyny" is when men treat women the same way that women treat women—put simply, many women just seem to hate other women. Okay, let me correct that... women hate other women who are more attractive/ successful/fat/skinny/blonde/ brunette than they are. Make no mistake— the phrase "Oh girl, your hair looks so good" is an insult, with the amount of emphasis put on the word "so" being proportional to the amount of hatred behind the sentiment. Whereas men will beat each other up and then have a drink, women will offer each other a drink, but poison that shit before it’s served. Put another way; if Tupac and Biggie were women, there wouldn’t have been any diss tracks. Instead, they would have penned "RIP to my sister" tracks that were written while the respective guns were still warm. There may be some comradery between strippers who work together, but once a stripper is put in charge of the schedule, you can kiss the hotter dancers (and most customers) goodbye. Of course, this doesn’t apply to former strippers who book strippers—in fact; this can be a gold mine due to the networking factor alone (not to mention the "I used to do what you do, so listen to what I say" factor that a retired dancer can flex on baby strippers). And, to roll back the sexism a bit, I think that the perfect booking agent would be a woman (preferably, a butch lesbian in her fifties, one that used to be a dancer—someone who can tell if a girl is hot, but has no current interest in taking a shift). But, as long as the girl doing the booking is also picking up shifts, the club is destined to fail.
Don’t believe me? Find a club that "used to be good." Find out when it started going to shit. Then, look at their schedule changes. See that name that suddenly went from Monday mid-shifts to Friday and Saturday nights? That’s the bitch who took Destinee and Crystale off night shifts for "stealing customers." Worse, if the dancer in the champagne room is as old as the champagne, she’s the owner, the booker, and the reason there’s no hot dancers on Fridays.
Like music, comedy, journalism, politics and whatever it is that activists pretend to do these days, skilled, talented, and experienced parties are wedged out of the strip club scene because they pose a threat to the lazy, mediocre, and unskilled people who took it over once a tyrannical democracy took over. Mediocrity will never book talent, and talent doesn’t need the money that comes with doing the schedule.
In all of the above examples and/or extremely biased and sweeping, overgeneralized arguments, there is one person to blame—the club owner who got lazy. As a rule of thumb, anything that is made easier by passing it off to someone who has more ambition and charisma than they do qualification or ability will eventually fail. This applies to live entertainment, cellphone apps, presidential administrations, and anything else that requires time, investment, and risk.
If you own a club, own the fucking club—don’t perform at it, drink at it, or use it as practice space for your friends. If you own a comedy club, spend at least two hours a day on YouTube looking for bookable talent. If you own a live music club, spend at least two hours a day harassing Kate Brown on Twitter about venue capacity restrictions. If you own a strip club, spend the two hours a day it takes to vet the talent you’re featuring at your establishment. The point is, do whatever you have to do to keep your club open and running. But, for the love of all things sober, bored, and bad with money, don’t put your entertainment in charge of entertainment—it’s like putting an alcoholic in charge of managing the bar because they "know beer."
Next month, we will be going over part two: the ability for a nightclub DJ to utterly destroy a strip club. Stay tuned.
