Sour notes: How the Las Vegas music scene is surviving the pandemic

The honeymoon ended during his honeymoon.

In February 2020, Ryan Pardey got married.

The longtime entertainment director for downtown music venue The Bunkhouse Saloon then hit the Far East with his new bride to celebrate.

On Feb. 28, they were set to see one of their favorite musicians, singer-songwriter Kevin Morby, perform in Tokyo.

The show was canceled because of COVID-19.

“I guess that was my first wake-up call,” Pardey recalls. “Then we went to Thailand, and I started getting more S.O.S. calls from family and friends saying, ‘What are you doing in Asia right now?’ It was really during the course of that two-week period that I realized that there were big problems developing for my industry.”

Things got real, real quick when Pardey returned home in early March.

The Bunkhouse often has relied on gigs from bands traveling to and from big spring music festivals such as Coachella and South by Southwest. When those tent-pole events were shelved because of the pandemic last year, the venue’s schedule took a serious hit.

“Once those went down, the whole house of cards began to collapse,” Pardey says. “Right away, I had cancellations going into the summer. Once I saw things canceling six, seven, eight, nine months out, I knew that I had to rethink what I was going to be doing in 2020.”

So Pardey pivoted to another passion, real estate, helping people find homes for a living as his future with The Bunkhouse remains up in the air.

He’s hardly alone.

While the pandemic has impacted pretty much every industry worldwide, the music business has been dealt a particularly savage blow. Concerts and festivals have largely been canceled across the board for the past 10 months, impacting musicians, promoters, venue owners and the support staff that make shows happen, from sound engineers to stage hands to security guards.

According to industry trade publication Pollstar, the global concert business lost $9.7 billion in ticket sales in 2020 in addition to $30 billion in sponsorships, food and beverage, merchandise sales and other revenue streams.

Impacting things further in Nevada are the state’s capacity restrictions, which limit public gatherings to a maximum of 250 people or 50 percent of a venue’s capacity, largely making concerts financially untenable with such limited audiences.

With no work for nearly a year now, numerous local music industry professionals have been forced to relocate to other cities or switch careers to make ends meet.

“I feel terrible for our crew,” says Korie Koker, who owns and operates Count’s Vamp’d rock club with her husband, Danny Koker. “I’ve got people moving away or trying to do other things for work.

“That’s what happened with our light guy,” she continues. “He got fed up and moved to Florida because they are doing some concerts there.”

For those who are trying to weather this storm, the winds of change have accelerated into the kind of fierce gusts capable of uprooting trees.

“We’re trying a lot of different things to see what works, but right now, everybody’s struggling,” says Clark County special events director Brian Saliba, who also owns Bogus Productions and has booked shows locally for years. “I’ve only done six shows in the last 10 months — and three of them were streaming shows. I never in a million years imagined that I would be saying that, going from 300-500 shows a year to … two? It just sounds so surreal to say something like that out loud.”

What’s even more surreal?

That there’s currently no clear end in sight.

“This is like the mother of all nightmares for most entertainers,” says Michael Clift, producer and star of the Australian Bee Gees show at Excalibur, where he plays Barry Gibb. “We were the first to stop and we’ll be the last to go back.”

No shows, no income

When his phone rings, it now signals an incoming call and a sense of dread.

On Feb. 1, Michael Clift should be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Australian Bee Gees show’s debut in Vegas.

But due to the pandemic, the production is dark — as has been Clift’s financial fortunes for the past 10 months.

“Basically, we’re in a massive amount of debt,” the Australian native says of how he and his wife, Julie, who’s still employed, have been affected by his loss of income. “You max out credit cards; you can’t pay bills, so you put them off. You wake up every morning and there’s 1-800 calls coming at you. You don’t know what to answer anymore.”

Clift had shows booked all around the world in 2020, from here to Brazil to Germany — many of which have yet to be rescheduled.

“All of touring in the U.S. has been pushed back to the end of the year now, so we’ve lost last year’s and now pretty much this year,” he says. “People say, ‘postponed.’ ‘Postponed’ means you don’t get that income. It’s like postponing your salary. ‘We’re going to postpone your salary for the next year, but don’t worry, you’ll get your salary in May 2022.’ ”

Hip-hop artist and producer Jay Dubbler was on the verge of investing thousands of dollars in a music video shoot and had big shows lined up with Mac Lethal and Kool Keith when the pandemic put the kibosh on it all.

“We had tickets in hand already,” says Dubbler, who also lost his day job as a tech at the Clark County courthouse when it was shuttered, and opened a smoke and snack shop to generate income. “It was like, ‘Show’s postponed.’ ‘Show’s postponed again.’ I haven’t heard from the promoter in like six months now.”

Rockers The Roxy Gunn Project had five tours lined up in 2020, all of which have been scrapped. The band has no idea when it will be able to hit the road again.

“One of the things that’s the hardest is the uncertainty,” Roxy Gunn says. “Trying to plan for anything is impossible. Trying to make any big life decisions is on the back burner because you just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

For Clift, the only option is to try to press on.

He has an Australian tour booked for April, though it comes with considerable risk.

For starters, airfare is substantially more expensive with fewer flights to the continent, resulting in higher ticket prices. Once there, he and his crew will have to quarantine in a hotel for two weeks on their own dime, which Clift estimates will cost $3,000. On top of all that, the venues they perform at will be limited to 50 percent capacity.

It’s all akin to a roll of the dice on a suddenly active fault line.

“We’re having to re-think the economics of touring,” acknowledges Clift, who’s been able to get by with local charity HopeLink of Southern Nevada assisting with his mortgage payments. “Really, this next Australian tour, it’ll be a miracle if we get through it unscathed, but you sort of have to do it.

“You have to try to get back to normal and take those risks,” he continues. “The alternative is far worse.”

Adapting on the fly

What’s 1,895 miles between brothers?

In December, guitarist Ryan Patrick was supposed to join singer and older sibling Adrian Patrick in the studio in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to track new tunes for their hard rock band Otherwise. Instead, he was confined to bed in Las Vegas with a 102-degree fever for five straight days after catching the coronavirus, ultimately being sidelined for three weeks.

He had to participate in recording sessions from afar.

“I produced tracks from my laptop literally laying in bed,” Patrick says. “There’s nothing like the songwriting process in person, but it’s sink or swim — and you find a way to swim. Always.”

As Patrick’s words underscore, adaptation has been crucial, the lifeblood of survival, for those attempting to keep making a living in the music business during the pandemic.

For The Roxy Gunn Project, this has meant embracing weekly livestreaming sessions on Twitch, which they now do every Tuesday and Sunday.

“It has been such an incredible experience to entertain people from all over the world at the same time,” Gunn says of the band’s online performances, which are seen by thousands. “We have gained so many new fans. It’s been an awesome outlet.”

Still, Gunn acknowledges the toll the pandemic has taken on her industry.

Her former roommate, who works in production, had to relocate to Ohio after losing his job here.

“Literally, in one day, our entire household was unemployed,” she says, having simultaneously lost all of her paying gigs. “It was a pretty big hit.”

Clift too, has seen a number of his co-workers come and go of late.

“We’ve lost a lot of guys to other jobs, a lot of our subs, the guy who used to take photographs at our shows,” he says. “They’ve all had to go and do other things.”

Jordan Hoss, a veteran stagehand who worked at the Hard Rock Hotel for more than a decade and hopes to continue there when the property reopens as Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, says a number of his peers in the music business have had to change careers, but that he plans to hang on until its safe to have shows again.

“This is a feast and famine industry,” he notes. “Sometimes you don’t have a day off for a month and then sometimes there’s no gigs for three weeks.

“For people like us, we just hunker down,” continues Hoss, who also fronts Rat Pack rock ’n’ roll act Franks & Deans. “We go find another gig if we need to for awhile, because we’ve all had to go flip burgers or work in a bar or do something else to make some money. But we always end up coming back to it.”

Big bounce back?

It was a dream job consumed by a nightmare scenario.

Patrick “Pulsar” Trout has been booking shows locally since he was a kid, beginning with all-ages concerts at now-shuttered coffee spot Rock N’ Java, followed by a successful stint as an independent promoter before landing a gig last October as a talent buyer for the House of Blues.

When COVID wreaked havoc on the concert industry, Trout did side work at a warehouse for a time before Live Nation, the parent company of the House of Blues, laid him off last month.

He hopes to return to the HOB when the pandemic ends, but expresses concern about the impact the lengthy shutdown could have on all of the promoters working for themselves.

“If I hadn’t been working for Live Nation in March when all of this went down, if I had just been an independent promoter guy, I’m not 100 percent sure if I would still be able to keep doing this,” Trout says. “At that point, it’s a very different conversation. It’s no longer, ‘I know my healthcare is covered for the next few months; I know I’ve got unemployment.’ It’s what most people have unfortunately been dealing with, which is basically, ‘Oh (crap), I’m starting from zero.’ ’’

And it’s not just the promoters whose futures are uncertain, but the rooms they book as well.

“We’ve watched a lot of the venues that we were supposed to play or had played shut down due to the pandemic,” Gunn says. “That’s been kind of a gut punch, because it’s like, ‘Oh man, that was one of four venues that did live music.’ ”

Pardey says that an infusion of cash will be necessary for more modestly sized venues to survive.

“There’s just going to have to be a massive amount of financial investment into this industry,” he says. “The small amount that the government has started to shell out to our industry is laughable.

“It is not going to help prop it up and get it back on its feet,” he continues. “I think the smaller venues like The Bunkhouse are going to be the ones that are going to have the hardest time recovering.”

Still, there are signs that the industry is stirring back to life, albeit on wobbly newborn fawn legs.

Patrick says that Otherwise has booked a five-date run of shows in the Midwest for April.

“We’re going to have a one-week tour, which is really, really exciting,” he says. “It’s nothing that we would have hoped for overall, but it’s something. There’s a small glimmer of light.”

Saliba has a number of dates held for shows later in the year, should the pandemic subside.

“If the market holds up, we’re five, six holds deep in September, October and November,” he says.

In a matter of months, then, the getting could be good.

Now, everyone just has to get there.

“I honestly believe that if everything does open back up and the vaccine is successful, we’re probably going to see the most lucrative fourth quarter we’ve ever seen in our career,” Saliba predicts. “And it’s not just me, it’s not just the venues I work with.

“From what I’m hearing from my counterparts and my colleagues in the industry, it’s like that in almost every city,” he adds. “Everybody is kind of planning for a big, big fourth quarter.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter and @jbracelin76 on Instagram