About a week before Christmas, Matt Goff decided to call off his New Year’s Eve plans.

The Berkeley musician, who plays drums in the blues-folk groupMarty O’Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra, had been watching COVID case numbers climb in the Bay Area. He was starting to think the band’s concert scheduled for Dec. 31 at the HopMonk Tavern in Sebastopol might not be such a good idea.

“It just seemed clear which way the wind was blowing,” Goff said.

He raised the idea of postponing the show with his bandmates, who ultimately agreed, pushing the concert to Feb. 11. That meant refunding tickets and starting from scratch with sales; money spent on promotion was a sunk cost. But to Goff there was no question it was the right choice.

“我们本来可以通过显示和没有啊ne would have stopped us, which is a little insane,” he told The Chronicle a few weeks later. “The reality is, we as musicians are not qualified to be making these decisions.”

How to help the Bay Area’s struggling live music community

As the omicron variant began to surge last month, some in the Bay Area arts community saw thewaves of cancellationsas reminiscent of the pandemic’s early days, when shelter-in-place orders brought live events to a screeching, definitive halt.

但是这有一个明显的区别s time around: Event organizers and performers are the ones doing the canceling. That’s because local officials’ current approach to restrictions is a stark contrast to the position they took in March and April 2020. Namely, there aren’t many.

“We are learning to live with COVID, and that means everyone assessing their own risk, it means making smart choices,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said during a Jan. 11news briefing。“It does not mean imposing new restrictions.”

For the Bay Area’s live music scene, that means the shows can go on. (Sonoma County, which recentlybanned indoor eventsof more than 50 people, is an exception.) In San Francisco, the current health order regarding venues dictates mandatory indoor masking except while eating and drinking, and proof of vaccination.

Starting Feb. 1 in San Francisco, booster shots will be required of eligible patrons at “mega-events,” which as of Jan. 15 means indoor events of more than 500 people. Producers of indoor mega-events of more than 1,000 people are required to fill out a Health and Safety Plan for the city, checking “yes” or “no” to questions about understanding and communicating mask requirements to attendees. There is no cap on gatherings of any size.

Some business owners have praised the hands-off approach. But many in the local music scene report feeling deeply conflicted, pointing to a lack of concrete guidance about if, when and how to safely host events. After nearly two years of financial insecurity, they describe a scenario in which painful decisions about whether to cancel fall to artists and venue staff — people who are increasingly desperate, demoralized and disincentivized from making choices with public health in mind.

“You’re backing people into a corner,” said Patrick Brown, founder of San Francisco music label Text Me Records. “When it comes down to it, most people will risk their health rather than go bankrupt if you’re not giving them any other options.”

For Brown, the decision to cancel the label’s scheduled New Year’s Eve party at Eli’s Mile High Club was made for him when one of the performers got COVID around Christmas. But the decision-making process had grown messy well before that. There were flights booked, hotel room deposits to lose.

Then there were ethical questions. Brown, who had a breakthrough case of COVID over the summer, still feels the occasional aftereffects. He also has a child at home who is too young to be vaccinated.

“Because there is no guidance (from city officials), it’s just a lot of texting back and forth with musicians,” Brown said. “‘Do we just call it in advance? Are we f—ed?’ I mean, what are we doing here?”

At Bottom of the Hill, New Year’s Eve proceeded as planned, with two nights of shows from the veteran San Francisco punk band Flipper— but not without a good deal of angst beforehand.

“There was a lot of pressure on social media and among my peers to shut down,” said booker and co-owner Lynn Schwarz, who has been involved with the venue for 25 years. But when she asked the bands, staff and venue’s co-owners, everyone wanted to proceed.

So they did, and the shows went great.

“After being closed for 17 months, to be able to get together and be in a pit dancing … there’s no high like that in the whole world,” she said, adding that she has not heard of anyone who got COVID afterward.

Schwarz said Bottom of the Hill has gotten more serious about mask enforcement during the omicron surge. But at this point, she said she is primarily concerned with keeping her staff employed and the city’s music scene alive. All told, she appreciates the city’s hands-off approach.

“It says they trust us to do the right thing,” she said. “I think they see the vaccination rates and (steady) hospitalization rates, and they’re not stepping in because they don’t need to.”

But others in the scene were less enthused about the lack of communication, and some questioned whether venues should be in the position of having to make their own rules.

At the Great American Music Hall, general manager and talent buyer Fred Barnes had been hoping to spend 2022 focusing on the venue’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Instead, he’s had to become “part booker and part health official” since he reopened the historic concert hall in August.

“We’ve had to make a concerted effort to really look at everything, find out the rules and apply them to ourselves,” he said. “The clearest guidelines we’ve gotten have been mandates in press releases along with everyone else.”

The venue has countered the dearth of information by going above and beyond with its own safety policies, Barnes said, doubling security staff to enforce mask rules and constructing barricades to maintain distance between performers and audiences.

Indeed, in the absence of new citywide mandates, an increasing number of Bay Area venues have voluntarily adopted new policies aimed at keeping staff and attendees safe. SFJazz Center and the San Francisco Symphony will require boosters of eligible patrons for crowds of any size starting Feb. 1, with the Symphony also requiring patrons to wear N95 masks as of Jan. 20. DNA Lounge implemented a booster requirement this month as well.

“We are getting no guidance or support from the city,” DNA Lounge owner Jamie Zawinski told The Chronicle. Zawinski referred to Breed’s recent statements as “the Trump approach: telling people to ‘personal choice’ their way out of a structural, societal problem.”

“If the mayor cared about protecting people rather than protecting capital, all restaurants and bars would be closed right now … (but) for us to just unilaterally close down, while every other nightclub is going full speed ahead, isn’t really an option. For that to happen, we would need support from our government, both legal and financial, and that support doesn’t exist anymore.”

As for what would be useful from the city, some suggest it should set up free rapid test sites at mega-events, help venues pay for high-quality masks for staff or assist with upgrades to HVAC systems. Others would be glad just to see an increase in frequency and clarity of communication.

“We do talk to bar owners and venue owners, and we haven’t heard a desire for more restrictions or a desire to shut down again,” said Jeff Cretan, the mayor’s spokesman. As for the suggestion of testing sites at mega-events, he pointed to those venues’ vaccine requirements and echoed recent statements from San Francisco Department of Public Health Director Grant Colfax to describe the city’s stance that “we are entering a different stage of living with COVID … the goal is not to prevent every case of omicron; it’s to prevent serious disease, hospitalization and death.”

A representative from the San Francisco Entertainment Commission emphasized that it is beholden to the current public health order, and therefore not in a position to advise venues or individuals on if and when to cancel live events. As a city agency dedicated to regulating and promoting nightlife, the commission does aim to have an “open-door policy” for the arts community, and it sends out monthly e-blasts with a goal of clarifying current orders, grant opportunities and other news.

In terms of financial support, most venues have survived during the pandemic thanks to a patchwork of loans and grants from federal, state and local entities, with organizations like theNational Independent Venue Associationhelping to drum up support for legislation such as the Save Our Stages Act, and community efforts including theMusic and Entertainment Venue Recovery Fund。(作为应对ο变体、镍VA reopened its emergency relief fund Jan. 19.)

In San Francisco, the city-runJust Add Musicprogram was designed to make it easier for venues to host live entertainment outdoors, with active permits recently extended through June 2022. Cretan said another $500,000 from the SF Venue Fund, a supplement to the California Venues Grant Program, should be distributed in 2022. And thanks to $2.5 million in state funds, an outdoor music series called SF Live is expected to launch this year.

That might sound like a lot. But even under the best of circumstances, the live music industry runs on passion and razor-thin margins, and it has no profitable online- or takeout-based pivot. After a year of zero income, followed by a year of reopening in fits and starts, most venues are nowhere close to recovered.

For small clubs like Albany’sIvy Room, efforts like NIVA have been crucial during the pandemic, as were creative efforts like the venue’s “Tiny Towns” outdoor concert series in Alameda. Still, the Ivy Room’s owners said they were in no position to voluntarily shut down.

“In the past, we’ve been one of the first venues to say, ‘We want to close. We don’t want to take a chance,’ ” co-owner Lani Torres told The Chronicle in an interview just before New Year’s Eve, when the club went ahead with its scheduled show. (The venue, like many others, has seen multiple show cancellations in the weeks since.) “But we are in year two, and businesses go on. We have staff we have to think about paying, we have fans … you can’t just keep closing every time.”

Mickey Darius, a San Francisco booker and owner of the label Broken Clover Records, said he doesn’t think a blanket shutdown would necessarily be the right move, even if venues could afford it.

“People are dying from lack of contact,” he said, citing industry peers he has lost tooverdoses and suicideover the past two years. “I know that having venues open and being able to see people and connect to culture in that way can be a remedy.”

Still, the lack of guidance given the current spike in COVID cases feels “negligent,” said Darius, who has seen scheduled shows by three bands he works with disappear off the calendar in the last two weeks. “It seems like venues are getting thrown under the bus.”

If shuttering venues by mandate was akin to blunt-force trauma, some argue that the current constant uncertainty — cancellations, no-shows, refund requests, endless contract complications — amounts to death by a thousand paper cuts.

Low ticket sales due to COVID fears aren’t helped by the reality that people don’t want to buy tickets if they’re not sure a show will actually happen. Then there’s the fact that most hourly venue staff have no safety net when they’re called off work because a performance was canceled — as opposed to when clubs were shuttered and they could file for unemployment.

Formalized support for staffers who miss work due to COVID would be a particularly welcome form of assistance, said the Great American Music Hall’s Barnes. San Francisco’sRight to Recoverprogram offers two weeks of financial assistance to workers who test positive for COVID and don’t have sick leave, allowing them to quarantine. But there’s no equivalent for lost income as a result of COVID-related cancellations.

For Darius, after months of conversations around canceled tour dates and health protocols, “it would be so nice to talk about music again without it being a life-or-death situation,” he said. “I would love to go to a show and then just, like, talk about how much the singer sucked.”

与COVID的很多方面,当前数以万计ion in the music industry tends to cleave along socioeconomic lines. When Stevie Nicks, Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift postponed planned tours in 2021, no one was happy. But it’s a safe bet those artists could make those decisions without worrying about making rent.

The specter of music industry collapse looms largest for those who have no choice: people who need that next show to put food on the table.

“We don’t want anyone to get sick, but to me the bigger epidemic right now is the poverty being visited upon the service industry and musicians,” said Bottom of the Hill’s Schwarz. “At a certain point, we’re all going to have to be responsible for our own comfort level, because we have to go on with our lives. We have to be able to make a living and we have to support the arts.”

a reminder that it’s relatively easy for massive, wealthy artists to cancel tours and totally devastating for mid level artists to do so so don’t expect them to when there’s zero financial relief being offered

— nigh eve6 (@Eve6)January 21, 2022

Ben Einstein, a keyboardist in the Oakland swing-punk bandVan Goat, feels confident that the group did the right thing when it canceled its Jan. 22 show at the Starline Social Club. But he was quick to note that he might feel differently if he didn’t have a day job.

“(The band) is not any of our livelihoods, ” said the musician, who works for a nonprofit and also teaches music lessons on Zoom. “I can only imagine for people who depend on it for their only source of income.”

For him, the loss of live music has more to do with community, passion, mental health: “The thing we want to do more than anything else in the world is constantly in jeopardy.”

爱因斯坦是沮丧的回到这个位置some 22 months after Van Goat first started losing gigs due to shelter-in-place orders. But he’s also been heartened by peers who have voluntarily canceled or postponed shows, like Marty O’Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra. (Though that band’s rescheduled show, set for Feb. 11, it must be noted, was subsequently canceled due to Sonoma County’s ban on indoor events with more than 50 people. The health order is scheduled to sunset the following day. Said drummer Goff, “You just have to laugh.”)

“It does seem like we have to make these calls ourselves, which sucks,” said Einstein. “I’m not a health care expert. I’m doing my best to read the news and follow the thread as it changes. But this shouldn’t be our job.”

Cretan said the mayor’s office empathizes with artists who are confronting questions of personal responsibility to one’s community amid the surge but has no specific advice for them. Given San Francisco’s vaccination rate, he said, people who are vaccinated and feel comfortable going out should “do their part” to support the local nightlife industry.

Varying comfort levels with COVID based on age, health and other circumstances are nothing new, of course. And the music scene has never been a monolith. Ask a dozen artists, bookers, bartenders and live music fans what they think should be happening right now, let alone what the government’s role should be, and you’ll get wildly different answers.

But nearly everyone interviewed for this story agreed on one goal.

“I will fight for this business tooth and nail, no matter how long this thing drags on, because it’s worth it,” said Schwarz. “Especially in dark times, we need music. We need that kind of joy to live.”

Bay Area freelance writer Lauren Sloss contributed to this report.