Reflecting on a year without concerts: interview with the Fox Theater

On March 10th, 2020 I published a concert review covering a Thundercat show at the Fox Theater in Oakland. Reading the article back now, it is comical to see just how naive we were about the impact that coronavirus was going to have. I wrote about the concert being the perfect way to relieve anxiety about the virus and how beautiful it was that we could all come together to enjoy an amazing performance.  Now, an entire year since that concert, we are in a different world. While we desperately are in need of that feeling of being surrounded by people while enjoying good music, we can’t. 

It is no secret that countless industries have been hit hard by the pandemic, but the music venue industry is one that has been continuously ignored. Having been forced to close last March, these businesses have been struggling to stay afloat, and unfortunately, many will not survive. To hear more about the status of music venues, I had the opportunity to speak with Tony Leong, the Production Manager of Another Planet Entertainment and General Manager of the Fox Theater. 

So you are a Cal Alumni, what did your journey look like from studying at Berkeley to where you are now as General Manager of the Fox? 

When I went to Berkeley, I was working with Superb, and by my sophomore year many of the leadership had graduated and my group and I took over as managers and set out to redefine the organization. We wanted to run it more like a business. Because of that, I had this passion for advocating for entertainment. I found myself down in the basement of Eshleman Hall more than in my apartment or in my class to be quite honest. Back then we were able to do shows at the Greek Theater and I had met the folks at Bill Grahmn Presents and eventually, that group I met became Another Planet Entertainment. Through Another Planet, I became the House Manager of the Independent and eventually the production manager there. When The Fox opened up, I became the production manager and later the general manager. I remember everything like it was just yesterday, but that was 16 years ago. 

Interestingly enough, the last concert I went to was the Thundercat concert on March 6th at the Fox. About four days later, I was on a flight back home because of Covid-19. What was that initial chaos and response like? 

That show was on a Friday, and the following week we had Keane on Monday, and that turned out to be our last show. It was pretty crazy actually; I remember having a conversation with Keane’s management about if we were going to shut the concert down. We were waiting to hear something concrete and mandated before we did anything. I remember thinking to myself, this might be it, this might be the last time we do a show. The next day after Keane, word came down and we postponed our shows for the weekend. It’s funny because, at the time, we booked those shows again for the summer, thinking that the worst-case scenario was just a couple of months. 

Now here we are, a year later, how has the Fox and other venues in this industry been hit in this year? 

We are actually about to do a small campaign making people aware of the fact that we have been closed for a year. You know one of our taglines has been “We were the first industry to close, and we will be the last to re-open.” At this point, there aren’t really any concerts happening and there’s no other industry that can really say that they have been in a complete stand-still. We bring people together and unfortunately that has been our downfall for the past year. 

By August of 2020, we anticipated that we would receive a relief package that would help small businesses like us in our industry, and the more we looked around the more we realized that we are severely underrepresented when it came to legislative support from congress. Everyone can say they are a music fan, but no one really knows how the industry works, and people kind of assumed that our businesses would be fine and just go back to normal when the Pandemic was over. In reality, especially in California, rent costs are very high, and for every month that goes by we are paying astronomical overhead costs. From rentals on gear to property taxes to employees to take care of. All of that adds up, I mean we are looking at 30-60k dollars a month. As time went on, and news of venues closing kept surfacing, we saw that our colleagues with independently owned venues were falling.

Can you speak a little bit about the East Bay Venue Coalition and how that came to be? 

So around October, I started calling around and checking in with other venues in the area about how they were holding up, and in the process, I realized that many of these independent venues felt very helpless and didn’t know how to communicate to the state or local officials.  When the Save the Stages Act gained some traction, people wanted to know how to get involved and be part of the movement and I decided that as the General Manager of The Fox I needed to step up and be that voice so we can come together and help each other out. It started with a couple of venues and grew as we had made a list of all the local venues that were a part of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA).  Our main goal is to create awareness and take the assumption out of the public and our elected officials. The more we came together, the more we saw that it’s not that we are in the back of the line for receiving any federal or local funding, we aren’t even in line. In December, the Save the Stages Act passed which should include grants for our businesses but we still have not seen an organized application process for this. 

When we do have the okay for concerts to return, what might that process of opening back up look like?

When we have the go-ahead to do shows, it’s not like we can flip a light switch on and be all bright and going. It will be a slow ramp-up. You need time to book artists, put together a staff, and sell tickets. When we get the green light for shows to open in full capacity, it won’t be for a couple of months after when we actually see concerts return. We need time to get ready and unfortunately, a lot have staff has moved on from this industry. When we come back from this, a lot of the people who we started with, won’t be there at the other It’s a long road ahead.   

Follow @ebvenuecoalition and @sfvenuecoalition to learn more and find out ways you can help. 

Written by Daniella Ivanir

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