Tom DeGeorge sounded like there were tears pouring out of his eyeballs. The 46-year-old, deeply empathetic, co-founder, co-owner and general manager of Crowbar spoke to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay just hours after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced a 30-day closure of nightclubs and that’ll shut the lights off at the Ybor City live music stronghold he and his staff have run for more than 13 years.
“It’s heartbreaking, and that’s without the already big losses that my staff is going to incur. Family dynamics are going to change in ways that we can’t even control,” DeGeorge said.
“Every generation has a big event that changes the course of their lives. I’m trying to be a community leader on this, but thinking about what’s going to happen to people—our friends, the homeless, parents and grandparents—it’s just really hard.”
The Dream Stream
w/J.T. Brown/Nick Ewing/Kerry Courtney/Forrest Hoffar/Mountain Holler/Shawn Kyle/George Pennington III/Kristopher James/Adam Randall/Jake Simms/Erin Murphy
Next Fri. March 27, 7 p.m.
Donations accepted.
local.cltampa.com
Like the rest of Tampa Bay’s live music venues, plus the musicians and bartenders who work inside of them, DeGeorge and Crowbar have seen their calendars decimated in the wake of the local response to the global novel coronavirus pandemic that’s killed seven people in Florida and 7,426 worldwide (more basics on the coronavirus are on p. 10.) When DeGeorge’s club finally gets the big all-clear to go on post-coronavirus, it’ll be like “starting the business all over again from day one.”
The cancellations started last Thursday and included news that promotions giants LiveNation and AEG planned to postpone all tours worldwide. The hits rolled into the weekend, taking down shows of every size, from DIY gigs to music festivals, every hour. Even The Rolling Stones canceled their date at Raymond James Stadium (the situation is dire when Keith Richards doesn’t want anything to do with it.) By Tuesday, private and public gatherings of more than 50 were temporarily banned in Tampa and St. Petersburg.
Even with incomplete data, Forbes indicated that the $54 billion global music industry could lose as much as $5 billion; most experts and analysts agree that the financial fallout is still virtually immeasurable at this point. Locally, the coronavirus led to canceled SXSW trips from bands like Fever Beam, Gat$, They Hate Change, Charles Irwin, Hello Joyce and Glaze who were headed to the Texas megaconference for official and unofficial showcases (in 2019, SXSW’s 2019 impact the economy of its host city, Austin, totaled $335.9 million.)
The live music scene was how so many music makers—plus the offstage crew, including sound engineers, light techs, tour managers and more—had a chance at making a living. Locally, the scene gave fans a community.
Still, there are ways to help your favorite local artist (who’s probably self-employed and ineligible for unemployment) right now.
- Buy band merch online—everything from T-shirts, to koozies, to pins, posters, panties, music downloads and everything in between.
- Reach out to bands and indie promoters to find out their cash app information, then donate what you might’ve paid for a cover charge; if you can, pay that musician’s practice space or apartment’s rent for a month.
- Ask for online music lessons.
- Commission a local musician to write a song for you or your loved one via Patreon or Downwrite.
- Hire a musician (or any artist in general) to paint your house, cut the grass—anything legal—to help offset the losses.
- If you’re an accountant, then help a musician track their losses for tax filing purposes.
- And when the scene opens back up, commit to bringing a new friend to shows—take care of their cover and ask them to pay it forward by bringing a friend of their own to the next local show.
Streaming royalties are pretty much complete shit for independent artists, but you could still create a local music streaming playlist and leave it playing for the rest of your life.
And speaking of streaming, some bands are livestreaming their canceled sets (punk outfit Low Season does so on March 20.) Downtown Tampa’s Symphonic Distribution has also offered its Symphonic and Symphonic Latino Facebook and Instagram pages for our artist and label clients affected by the coronavirus to use for their livestreams. One local virtual event takes the concept of a streaming concert even further.
Last Thursday, as the live music scene crumbled around the world, Nick Ewing reached out to me on behalf of a group of friends to pitch the idea of hosting a streaming show with no fans. I was lost in the madness of all the coronavirus-related cancellations unfolding on my computer screen, but the 26-year-old fiddler reconnected a few days later with “The Dream Stream” in hand.
The fan-free concert happens next Friday, March 27, at 7 p.m., with the help of Best of the Bay-winning online concert series Tampa Sessions. It takes place at Ewing’s Corporate Create space in Temple Terrace, which is closing at the end of the month. Before the ban on gatherings went into action, Ewing envisioned having a big, sensory-driven concert and art show to help close out his time at the creative co-work complex. With that dream squashed, Ewing connected with Bay area songwriter J.T. Brown and Tampa Sessions’ Joe Giannotti who both helped the concert concept get across the finish line and become a reality.
“[Brown] was the catalyst for the show being able to hopefully get all of the artists get paid to some degree. He’s brought attention to how art is life and how we need it,” Ewing told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “The show is nice, too, as it’s kind of a fond farewell to something that I poured a lot of my heart, skill and time into.”
The venue is a closed set, and in lieu of hard tickets, the Dream Stream team is providing a donation link on the streaming page. Viewers can drop off as little or as much as they are comfortable giving.
“I heard from so many friends being impacted by these circumstances…. the reality is that it’s preventing a lot of very good people from being able to put bread or cauliflower on the table,” Ewing said. “I wanted to be able to do something with the people that I know and love. We want to let people now that no matter what happens, music still gives us the ability to cling to something in such wavering and terrifying times.”
A cavalcade of Central Florida’s best songwriters—Brown, Ewing Kerry Courtney, Forrest Hoffar, Mountain Holler, Shawn Kyle, George Pennington III, Kristopher James, Adam Randall, Erin Murphy and Jake Simms—are on the bill.
“The goal is to raise money for the artists whose work has been decimated, leaving them with little to no income stream,” Brown, who’s had no less than seven shows canceled over the next three weeks wrote on social media. “Please join us for a full evening of song, as you veg out on bbq and beer in your underwear.”
Live music in your skivvies without having to be at a camping festival in a South Florida swamp? We’re in.
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This article appears in Mar 19-26, 2020.
