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The "F-U" in FU*BAR stands for Financial Underperformer - bad news for both local and national acts

Comments (0) By Jeff Stratton Thursday, Nov 9 2000

However, according to Spran, the thrill those few patrons felt that night failed to boost the bar's reputation as a concert destination. "If some new customer comes by just to check out the club," he says, "and it's $8 to get in, and it's some Alejandro guy playing they've never heard of, they're going to say, "Fuck that.'"

Hall, who promoted the show, admits that he staged concerts like Escovedo despite the unlikelihood of doing more than breaking even. "It could be argued that I made a huge mistake putting Alejandro at FU*BAR," he says now. "Maybe I should have put him at some older venue like the Poor House. Maybe I did put it in the wrong place. I did the best I could, and it just yielded flat results except for the actual performance. But at least it happened."

Joshua Prezant

Strip mauled: The former FU*BAR sits empty

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Somewhere, both Hall and Spran agree, there's a lesson to be learned from the brief life of FU*BAR. Spran hints that the club's eclectic nature may have contributed to its downfall.

"If you have a wide variety of national acts, different genres of music, then you're not building a regular crowd," he explains. "It's not consistent."

Hall acknowledges that life ain't gettin' any easier for small-time promoters in the region.

"When you live at the end of a peninsula and bands have to go out of their way to get down here, it makes the live-music scene a real fragile beast," he says. "It really helps to have venue continuity. You hit a bit of a stride, and you get into a rhythm, and then it breaks. And it doesn't help when the powers that be -- city government -- make it that much harder to pull it off."