Booked and Released.

Chantelle Hylton, booking agent extraordinaire, talks about the politics and business behind our scene.

by David Also

It’s almost become a cliché just to mention the changing landscape of Portland’s music venues over the last several years. Old and new clubs alike have turned over at a depressing rate, but with each pass of the wave we find a new crop of clubs trying out new ways to bring in business. When Satyricon and EJ’s were booking shows, Twilight Lounge was a tiny pool hall with old drinkers and cabbies—sort of an after hours version of Mel’s Diner. Now, EJ’s is gone, Satyricon has become some kind of suburbanite dance hall, and the Twilight has firmly asserted itself as the model for Portland rock venue.

The days of beer, fries and loud music are over, at least in any lucrative sense. House parties and pizza parlors are where those shows are at now, and unless you’re under 25, you just might not get the invitation. So the serious-minded venue entrepreneur has had to diversify. It’s not enough to have a stage and affordable food anymore, now you need a space to relax with an area for a DJ. You need a great sound system with appropriate acoustics. You need a somewhat chic, but understated atmosphere. Then there’s the pressure of the OLCC. All told, running a venue may be the most difficult business to enter into in this city, maybe even harder than a coffee shop.

But let’s say you’ve got the passion, the drive, and the financial backing to make this a reality, none of it is going to mean a thing if you don’t have a good booking agent. Clubs in every city are familiar with the error in missing this critical element. Not only that, actually finding someone up to the task may end up being the most arduous part of running a club.

Perhaps that’s why Chantelle Hylton is one of the most respected and sought after agents in town. She’s fairly new to the industry, only 4 years of working, but in a field that generally introduces and releases new workers within 4 month, 4 years is just about retirement time, by comparison. Talented and humble, Chantelle started booking almost by accident. She put together a party one night at the Medicine Hat, mostly as an excuse to put her friends’ bands and her mother, DoryHylton, on the same stage. The next day, they offered her a job.

It’s no secret that the heyday of Medicine Hat ended with Chantelle’s departure. I met with her at the last night of the Blackbird. She’s now begun working at Berbati’s. To get started, though I asked her when she made the decision to leave the Medicine Hat.

I decided to leave about 2 months after I started. But I actually left a year after I started. There wasn’t anywhere else in town and I was loving what I did and getting good feedback from people and really feeling like I was contributing something that was good for some sort of blossoming artistic community that didn’t exist before. At least in that form in Portland.

So I quit. I don’t know if I’m being romantic but I remember it was the day that I quit I was at Chez What sort of crying in my beer, and Pat (Blackbird’s owner) was sitting at some other table by himself with all these papers and he sort of summoned me over and showed me this lease agreement for the Blackbird and said, “I want to do this if you’ll do the booking.” And I said, “Ok.” So that’s how the Blackbird started. At least, that’s how my booking at the Blackbird started.

Then with the demise of the Blackbird, I was in San Francisco and got a message from Pat saying we got evicted. Then I got a message from Leah (previous booking agent for Berbati’s) saying, “I know you don’t want to book anymore, but I’m going to get a new job at Reed College and I wanted to see if maybe you wanted to book Berbati’s.” These messages were like a half hour apart. I thought, “No no no. No way. I’m done. I’m going to go to grad school for media studies at Columbia.” But that’s not going to happen for a while. –laugh–

Before talking more about Berbati’s, I’m kind of curious if there was ever a point where you just went from someone who was just booking shows to someone who was well known around town? You’re kind of a celebrity.

Well I know every now and then the papers write an article like I’m going to book Satyricon or something, but I don’t feel like things have changed really. Maybe I ignore it or just don’t see it. I don’t know. I don’t have any perception of what other people’s perception of my work is really. You’re the first person who’s interviewed me.

Do you want some of that perception?

I don’t know. I think I’d feel uncomfortable. I know that one of the reasons the Blackbird did so well is that bands tour, and with the touring, word spreads that this is a really good, supportive place of innovative art, or at least non-grossly commercial art that’s headed toward certain commercial fame… Or some of them are. So I know that we got a good reputation for treating people well, which is nice.

Well, my perception, which maybe isn’t a general perception, but as a musician in Portland, we all know the Blackbird is a great place to play. We all know that Chantelle books the Blackbird. And being that I knew you from the Medicine Hat, and I think that a lot of people are familiar with your history that far—like, the Medicine Hat used to have great shows and Chantelle left and they didn’t any more.

-laugh- Well, that was their own fault.

Ok. Well let’s talk about Berbati’s. Why did you choose that?

I went to shows at Berbati’s when I first started going to shows. I’ve seen lots of good shows there, and I enjoy going there. The drinks aren’t too expensive and the atmosphere is good. I think they have a reputation for being a good solid venue. It’s twice as big as this place. The thing that I’m really hesitant about is that I’ve never worked with an outside promotion company. I’ve never opened this place to someone else. Often a band will bring their friend’s band or whatever, but I trained with Leah and so much of it is just renting the space out. It’s so much more business, but they’re only open 4 nights a week. So I’m hoping that one night a week I can bring the Blackbird’s spirit over there for local shows. But it’s harder, because they have numbers to meet and a big space to fill and lots of employees to pay.

This place (Blackbird), we just needed 3 or 4 really good shows a month that sold out and made tons of money at the bar to sustain us financially for the shows that were smaller and local. But I think a lot of bands didn’t really realize that we weren’t going to be here forever and didn’t realize that promoting their own shows as well as they could would determine whether the Blackbird stayed in business or not. Bands often don’t really understand the business aspect of the business. I didn’t, and I sort of pretended to ignore that we had a business. I would just book whoever I wanted to have play here.

But you were just saying that artists didn’t realize that they needed to promote themselves.

Promoting is good for them, too, depending on what they want to do with their music.

And if they don’t want to try to pack clubs then they can play house parties.

And it’s not a hard thing to understand that for a club to stay in business a lot of people have to come and either drink or pay a cover. There are some clubs—I was looking at a website of a space in Milwaukee called The Warehouse, and they have this whole manifesto and this advice to bands: We’ll be supportive but you have to understand that we have bills to pay, so if you don’t think that you can bring 50 people in then maybe play some other places first and gain an audience and then play here. The Bottom of the Hill, in San Francisco, has something like that too. They’ve worded it in a way that’s still supportive and might lead a band to understand there’s a financial interaction or relationship that a club has to have with a band for it to be beneficial to everybody. I think I wasn’t as strict about that as I should have been. But then again, how do you tell that to a band that may not have friends come to their shows, even though they may be one of the greatest bands on earth at that moment…

Well did you have a realistic ideal of what the Blackbird was? There’s the Crystal and there’s Roseland, there’s Berbati’s and then there’s Tonic, Blackbird and Ash St. You know, so you guys, as small as you are, were only the 4th rung down.

Yeah. I had an idea of what our place was in the pecking order of clubs in Portland—but philosophically we were—I mean, there were incredible touring bands that should have a place to play who should play here and who fit really well here but who no one had really heard of yet. But no one will hear of them unless they tour and play places like this. So it’s chicken or the egg. So really, the best scenario is to book two solid local bands with the touring band that nobody knows about. A lot of bands took this place for granted and just figured we’d be here forever and if they got a show here just figured, “We’re going to have fun playing at the Blackbird,” and didn’t really feel like they had to do much else. A lot of the bands who supported us really heavily the first year started to take for granted that we had a business to run. And Pat, he had never run a business before and his idea in the beginning was that Portland, after the Medicine Hat, was really lacking a good place for bands to play where they could feel like they were at home. Touring bands knew that they would have a meal and have a couch to crash on if they needed to and hopefully make gas money.

What do you think is going to fill the void?

I don’t know. That’s what makes me the most sad right now. There are a lot of people who want to open venues. There are a lot of people who ask me to book for whatever they want to open, which I would like to do but I don’t know that it would be the same scenario as this place. I don’t know a lot of these people and I don’t know what their ideas are about how to treat bands and how a venue fits into the larger picture of supporting creative evolution of music globally. –laugh– I think a lot of people just think, “Oh, fun! We’ll open a rock club and we’ll get chicks and we’ll drink lots of beer.” I don’t know what will fill the void. I think for a while maybe people will go back to doing house shows and gallery shows and some warehouse shows here and there. Maybe someone will open a venue that’s really solid overall.

What do you think is going on with Portland’s venues?

I think it’s less with the venues and—Maybe in the days of the Medicine Hat people heard that Portland was a really good, fresh place to come. I get demos twice a week from bands who say, “Hey, we just moved to Portland. We’re really, really excited. We’ve always wanted to come here. We’ve heard for the last few years that it’s a really good place for bands.” I think the weather’s great, I don’t know what other people think. We’re an hour from, depending on how fast you drive, the beach and the desert and mountains. It’s a gorgeous place, so it’s an attractive place to live but I think it’s also an attractive place for bands to come. So I think part of the problem is that there are so many bands in town, and people sort of have these rock star mentalities that they want you to come to their shows but they don’t need to support other bands—and so everyone’s really critical. I just think there are too many people demanding support and not willing to give it. There are a lot of venues in town right now, many more than when I was at the Medicine Hat. But I don’t think that’s as much of a factor as the mentality of people who should be supporting local music… At least in my experience, which is sort of limited, and I kind of have tunnel vision being here. I went to other shows, but I was buried in band demos, trying to give everyone a show.

So bands need to go to other band’s shows. What does it take to be a successful venue?

A restaurant that supports itself. (pause) Have you seen the documentary on the X-Ray Café? It’s gorgeous. The X-Ray was on Burnside. It closed in… I’m not sure. Elvis played there. Everything was unexpected, and it was this supportive place for people from all walks of life. People would not have a place to sleep so they would sleep there. Or at least they could come in from the cold. It wasn’t a judgmental place. I think this place (Blackbird), `because of peoples’ false perceptions of the bands who play here and the attitude that we had toward different kinds of bands and different kinds of music—um, I forgot where that sentence started.

It started with, “They weren’t judgmental at the X-Ray, but. Here it was different…”

I feel that the perception from the beginning of what we were, maybe because the bartender wore black, horn-rimmed glasses or because people looked like pretentious indie-rock hipster snobs—and I know that I’m not one of them, but other people don’t know that. And “one of them,” what’s a hipster snob anyway? People who are insecure and have to dress a certain way so they either are or aren’t approached by people who may be critical of them and—I don’t know. It’s too bad. I think that might, partially, be one of the 9 million elements that led to our demise—people thinking that we were just some snobby, hipster bar, which is a shame. I don’t think we were. But people didn’t get good service at the bar and the door guy wasn’t always smiling and I’ve heard all kinds of complaints like that, which hurts my heart. I like to think that it’s a really supportive place, of all kinds of customers and people and bands. But that wasn’t really the perception, I don’t think.

We asked Chantelle to do us the favor of sharing some tips on getting booked:

PRESS KITS:

Keep in mind there are zillions of other bands approaching the same people for shows and press coverage, and put yourself in the position of the writer/booking agent. What would be refreshing to get from a band? Stay away from the boring press bio, etc. on 8 1/2 x 11 white paper. If someone gets something that looks like a creative person spent some time on it, that speaks volumes more than an awkwardly-written bio that sounds like every other awkwardly-written bio. Don’t bother including raisins or cheese or Jell-O pudding or stickers or buttons.

Don’t try to describe your music if you feel the process is a drag. That’s what the recording is for.

Be liberal with humor, humility and made-up words.

Don’t’ describe your band as the northwest’s hottest up and coming rock band. Just be honest.

GETTING SHOWS:

Send an email and the press kit on the same day. Mention in the email you’ve just sent music and will follow up in about 3 weeks.

Follow up with an email 3 weeks later.

Be persistent, but don’t contact people more than once every 10 days if you’re not getting a response. Keep the tone in the emails friendly, even if you’re not getting a response.

Mention shows you’ve played recently (where, with whom), and suggest other local bands with whom you’d like to play.