Art Bar | photo by Thomas Hammond
Most businesses that reach their 25th anniversary are in some way quintessential. And Art Bar, which hit the mark on Sept. 18 and celebrates throughout this week, is definitely that. Bedecked in a retro-sci-fi aesthetic — dominated by those locally iconic robots — the Vista club has long positioned itself as a meeting ground for many of the city’s underground niches, hosting dance parties, rock shows, comedy nights, karaoke and more on a weekly basis.
But it hasn’t always been a smooth ride. Following a vibrant period of live music during the previous decade, the creativity of its Saturday concerts had waned until recently, often pulling from the same small stable of local rockers, failing to represent the breadth of the Columbia scene or the talent in nearby cities. But Andy Rodgers, who has co-owned the club with Clark Ellefson for about 11 years, reports that recently installed music booker Abigail Thames is making a new push for diversity.
Last year, controversy swelled after a Memorial Day rock concert where local hip-hop producer Marcum Core wasn’t allowed to present his planned between-set playlist because it didn’t fit the rest of the programming. Accusations of racism swirled on social media, but Art Bar never responded — and never responded to Free Times’ request for comment.
Ahead of Art Bar’s big anniversary, we sat down with Rodgers to talk about the club and the challenges it faces. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Free Times: Are you trying for a cohesive vision with the live music?
Andy Rodgers: Crazily enough, I’d say probably no. It is what works. We try to vary it. We’ve had everything from bluegrass bands to [local rapper] Fat Rat da Czar. We try to run the gamut. We try to keep the lineup similar. If, for instance, a folk band is playing some night, then you’re not going to pair them with a metal band.
We tried an experimental cross-pollination thing for a little while to see if that would work. People would come to see the one band that they wanted to see and then leave and not stay for the other ones.
We’re actually trying to get more into bands outside of Columbia, bands that are passing through on tour, just quality music. Before we were a lot more centralized to, “OK, we don’t book a lot of out-of-town bands.” Customers in Columbia are a tough sell. And they don’t come out to see music on the chance that it might be OK. They want the sure thing.
But you run out of bands if you’re just running Columbia bands. Next thing you know you’re repeating the same bands every two months, and that gets stale. Which, for a little while, we were caught in that cycle. Even a lot of the bills were the same. It’s like, “Jeez, guys, you’re kind of phoning it in on this.” We needed to mix it up.
Do you see these shifts in live music as having a big impact on the crowd?
Art Bar’s definitely evolved. You can’t be a business for 25 years and follow the same patterns. When we first opened back in ’92, we were a dance club. During the week, it was more of a cool, hangout, lounge spot. But on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, it was a straight-up dance club. In a lot of ways, it was the dance scene that kind of flagged and propelled us into live music scene.
The bar business is formulaic — in that, “OK, what are we going to do for entertainment?” And the reality is there are a limited number of options. You can either try to recreate or reinvent yourself into the dance scene. You can go live music. You can go karaoke. You can go trivia. There’s only so many promotions or things that you can do to bring customers in. I wouldn’t say that we were forced into live music, but we found our way into live music.
The Vista’s changed a lot in the last 25 years. Has that made things difficult?
I think it has become more difficult. Property values have gone up. When property values go up, you have to make that money somewhere, so typically prices go up. One of our No. 1 complaints we get are, “Drink prices are too high.” Well, we think that Vista real estate prices are too high.
And the Vista has gotten so corporate. Because the property values did get so high. I would never in a million years have thought we’d have a Panera next to us.
It sucks. We liked it when there was a lot more smaller businesses versus corporate, franchise businesses.
Does that make it tough to remain a counterculture hub sitting in the Vista?
Yes and no. When you say counterculture — to me, counterculture is every day now. Back in ‘92, gays weren’t comfortable going just anywhere. They went to gay bars or gay-friendly bars. Back in ‘92, if you had tattoos and piercings, you might not have felt comfortable going to certain places. If you were a goth, if you were a candy kid, whatever, if you had your little subsect, you were looking for your little niche. Back then, Art Bar filled that necessary role. Now, everywhere is a lot more open. You can walk into a franchise barbecue place and see people with multiple piercings and tattoos or a gay couple holding hands. And it’s cool that society in even Columbia, South Carolina, as podunk as we are, has progressed to that point. But it has kind of hurt Art Bar in the sense that we were counterculture. We were the alternative. And now the alternative has become the norm.
Coming out of the Memorial Day cookout controversy, there were many accusations of racism lobbed at Art Bar. How do you feel out such situations where divergent aspects of your identity come into conflict?
We didn’t see the friction of that situation. We saw it as, “I don’t understand. This doesn’t make sense.” If Fat Rat was playing, if ColorBlind was playing, then we would have understood the playlist. But to us, it didn’t make sense that it was a predominantly hip-hop-biased playlist for that event. The bartender made the call. I would have made the same call if I had been there.
Now, pretty immediately, accusations of racism were thrown around. There was a lot of online discussion about it. And then it became the decision for us of, “Do we hit this head on? Or do we say, ‘You know what, let’s ignore it and the momentum will die out and it will go away.’”
We’ve been in business for 25 years. We’ve been independent. We were probably one of the first and only gay-friendly bars in Columbia, to the point where [we were voted Best Gay Bar in Free Times’ Best of Columbia poll for many years]. It’s not the gays that are voting us Best Gay Bar. It’s the straights who have never been to Art Bar who are like, “Oh, I heard that’s a gay bar.” And it’s funny because we’ve always joked that that has helped and hurt us. It’s helped us because it keeps the rednecks and people who are prejudicial, the closed-minded folks, out. And it helps us in that people know, “Hey, whatever I am, I can go there.”
I guess that’s what makes it so hard and so hurtful to hear — “Wow, people actually think that my business is racist, that we have some racial bias against African-Americans.” And it’s like, if I can’t even wrap my head around this, how do I fight it? How do I combat that?
We’re still open to booking Fat Rat or ColorBlind, local hip-hop artists who have made an impression on Columbia who are promoting a positive image. A lot of the gangster rap and a lot of the negatives, we’re not going there. I guess I’m old-fashioned that way.
Art Bar 25th Anniversary Festivities
Wednesday 20 — Linda Carr Presents a Pirate Karaoke Party, 9 p.m.
Thursday 21 — Useless Trivia/Jasper Magazine Fundraiser, 9 p.m.
Friday 22 — Art Bar Players Reunion, 9 p.m.
Saturday 23 — (Live Music) Stereofly Presents: The Poor Decisions, Carolina Chupacabra, Grand Republic, King Vulture, Shallow Palace (final show), Radio-Friendly Unit Shifter (Nirvana tribute); 5 p.m., $7
Sunday 24 — NUTS Tough S#!t Video Game Tournament, 6 p.m.
Art Bar: 1211 Park St., 803-929-0198, arbarsc.com.
