Word is that Bowery Presents and Higher Ground want to jointly buy the Calvin Theatre in Northampton. The Parlor Room has already purchased the Iron Horse Music Hall. The city license commission earlier this year canceled the liquor license for the Pearl Street Nightclub. And so Eric Suher’s local music empire comes tumbling down after nearly 30 years.
The Parlor Room seems like an ideal buyer for the Iron Horse, which has been closed since March 2020. A local group that converted to a non-profit in January, the Parlor Room has demonstrated a keen understanding of its audience over the past 10 years of hosting shows in its 70-capacity room on Masonic Street, including performances by Frank Black, Lake Street Dive, Winterpills, John Moreland, Robbie Fulks and a host of smaller local acts. Expanding into a bigger room — the Iron Horse holds around 170 people — will give the Parlor Room more flexibility with bookings, while also allowing for a wider range of performers.
Hopefully Bowery Presents will be just as good for the Calvin, which has hosted just a handful of concerts, mostly by tribute bands, since the pandemic started. Based in New York, Bowery Presents owns venues throughout the northeast, including Roadrunner, the Sinclair and Royale in Boston, and the State Theatre in Portland, Maine, which it co-owns with Higher Ground, a Burlington, Vt., concert promoter. Higher Ground owner Alex Crothers is familiar with the Western Massachusetts music scene: he does the booking for Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival, for example. The worry is that the Calvin will be just one more venue among more than two dozen the company currently owns or books (Bowery Presents already hosts more than 2,500 live events per year). Maybe in the hands of Bowery Presents and Higher Ground, the Calvin will once again become a desirable stop for bands on tours of the northeast.
It’s also not great that AEG owns half of Bowery Presents, a stake the company acquired in 2017 — shortly after it came to light that AEG founder’s, the billionaire Phil Anschutz, had been donating money to anti-LGBTQ groups, as well as to anti-labor and anti-marijuana initiatives. Anschutz claimed he cut off those donations after realizing they were going to anti-LGBTQ causes, though he didn’t provide any documentation proving it. To be fair, it seems like Bowery Presents mostly runs itself without interference from AEG, and someone who used to work for Bowery Presents said the company will likely do right by the Calvin, and Northampton.
In November 2022, I wrote for the Boston Globe about the changing face of the Western Massachusetts concert scene. A revived Iron Horse and reopened Calvin Theatre will join a host of other venues in the area, including Bombyx in Florence, the Drake in Amherst, Race Street Live in Holyoke, the Shea in Turner’s Falls, Hawks and Reed in Greenfield and the Marigold in Easthampton. DSP Shows also books concerts into the Academy of Music in Northampton. It’s still an open question what will happen with Pearl Street.
Will there be enough shows to go around? Is there enough of an audience in Western Massachusetts to sustain all those venues? After a decade or so in decline as a must-play market for certain kinds of acts (read: the buzzed-about young ones), maybe new ownership for two of the city’s iconic venues can be a key part of ongoing efforts to keep the Northampton scene vibrant well into the future.