Stephen Montoya
Over his tenure as a restaurateur and champion of all things Fort Worth, celebrity chef Tim Love has been called many things. However, no one has ever accused this business mogul of being lazy. In fact, he currently has a roster of restaurants that number a baker’s dozen, most of which are located right here in Cowtown. It was at one of these locales that we had a chance to sit down and talk with Love about something other than food.
We met at Tannahill’s Tavern & Music Hall, one of seven venues he owns in the Stockyards, to continue talking about a subject we’d written about last month — the state of the local music scene. Love, a self-proclaimed music lover, says he was caught off guard last December when the news of Lola’s, one of the city’s best known live music venues, closed its doors for good. To make matters more dire, the news of two other live venues closing followed suit all within a few days of each other. But when many people look at this as a sky-is-falling scenario, Love chalks it up to the ebb and flow of the times.
FM: In your opinion, is Fort Worth’s live music scene in jeopardy?
TL: I don't think that the music scene is gone. I feel like there's been a lot of this negativity written about the Fort Worth music scene. I don't think that's actually true. I think it's just some evolution as well. I think there's still a lot of great things going on in the city, and I hate that people have kind of attached to the negative side of that as opposed to all the positives. I mean, there's a lot of great music venues in Fort Worth and to concentrate on one or two that have closures I think is counterproductive, but I'm a positive person. I don't want anybody to close, but it's a tough business, and a smaller venue gets even tougher because you have to be full in order to get by. And by the time you pay the band, all you got left is the food and beverage [sales]. So, you have to sell beverages, and if you don't sell beverages, you don't open the doors. December and January are tough months for music venues just in general. The ‘J’ months, especially January, June, [and] July, [are the] toughest months to book music. In June and July, not many people hang around Fort Worth.
FM: What about the notion that younger people aren’t going out as much to hear live music?
TL: That's a good question. Are the 22-year old’s going out? I think they are, but are they going out like we did when we were young? Maybe not. I love going to shows. I don't want to watch it on a TV screen. When people get excited at a show, that makes me excited and I'm a big festival guy, so I love all that kind of energy. I think the younger kids, it's maybe more of a stewardship on our part. We need to take them out. We need to convince them to come out to the shows, so they get that with you. Because if you don't ever feel it or know it, then you're like, why do I want to get it? It's like food. If you’ve never tasted great food, then you don't crave great food. I think we have set our younger people up to have this thought that the experience they're seeing on their iPad or in their home is the same as a live show and it's really not. And they don't know that until they actually go to a live show. To me that's why things like the Fort Worth Music Festival are so important.
FM: This being the second year for the Fort Worth Music Festival and Conference, what lessons did you learn from the fest’s inaugural run in 2023?
TL: Last year, because we put the festival together so fast, we had a lot of country; red dirt country, and not as much expansive genres of music as we really wanted. So, that's one of our biggest improvements this year. This year’s lineup is more diverse, plus there’s more artists. It’s huge. Last year, one of our partners was Larry Joe Taylor. He's the king of red dirt country, period, end of story. So, we had to use a lot of his influence in our booking and stuff last year to get people to come play. However, it wasn’t all rushed, we had the song swap (where a group of singer-songwriters to play a song each) last year with all fabulous guys. It was just insane. And he wants to do it again. This year's awesome. But our goal is to really expand the conference side. To our point, we want to educate people more on, ‘If I'm in a band, what do I do? What management do I use? Do I need an agent? Can I rep myself? How does the food and beverage side of things work?’
That conference component to me is super important. And that's actually our biggest challenge is to get people to show up for the conference, which is what SXSW originally was, right? It's like you've got a band, you want to be cool, you want to make some money. Well, we've got all these experts coming here to tell you how to do it, show up and hang out and then go play your show later. And that's really what our push is this year. We really want to drive the confidence. We really want venue owners, especially small ones that don't get the advice of large companies and lots of money and all that to come hang out. And you can ask people who know how to do it. When I was up and coming and cooking, I would go to every food and wine festival there was, just so I could ask, ‘Hey, how'd you do this?’ All those types of questions are important. It's the music business. The talent's not the easy part, but the talent's, what you were given, the business of it is what you have to earn.
Stephen Montoya
FM: Do you consider some of these live venue closures a slow result of the Covid shut down from two years ago?
TL: My first guess would be. — and it's a guess, but it's probably a fairly educated one. A lot of these businesses close because they start chasing Peter to pay Paul. It comes down to scenarios like we just got all the cover for last night's band, which is $3,000. I can write a check to the band. The band's not going to cash the check for another four days, so I can pay the Miller light bill. And now here we go. Now you're on the hamster wheel and that's a bad position to be in because then all of a sudden, it's cold out and people don't show up for the show, now your short on cash. And then you close. It's that fast. It takes two years to earn something, you lose in two weeks in any kind of entertainment business. I tell people that all the time.
Covid taught a lot of people to keep enough cash on hand to last four or five days in the restaurant business. Restaurants have a lot of cash, its revolving cash, so when you have a snowstorm that shuts everything down for five days, that's disastrous for restaurants. The bills are still coming, and the cash isn't. And then once you open back up, you got to build the cash back, but you've still got more bills and it envelops you very, very quickly. The same in the music business, anything that involves entertainment and cashflow.
Flashforward two years past the pandemic shutdown and you’ll see many businesses tired of the chase, to the point where they just say, ‘I’m done, I’ve had enough of this cycle.’ They just can't get over the hump. And the next thing you know, they've gotten out a couple of credit cards like, oh, it's coming. We're going to get it this time, and then it pours rain on the show that was supposed to do $10,000. I know I've experienced all of them, so I'm not speaking out of turn about anybody else. I'm talking about myself. And even when I had three businesses in Houston that opened the day that everything started shutting down and we ran it for three years. That was my license agreement, and I'm like, no way. I didn't renew the license agreement. I'm like, I've got a lot of money in this, but I'm not going to keep putting more money in it. That's just not smart and it's due to the pandemic. I mean, we made it out of the pandemic, and we opened back up and all that …we had so much on the front-end expenses, and we got shut down.
I don't think the music scene was having trouble before. I just think some of the venues got clipped by Covid. I'm not saying this in a mean way at all. I'm saying it in a sympathetic way actually. It happens to us all, especially if you're in business. That's just the risk that you take when you do it.
FM: What is your prediction for Fort Worth in terms of music a few years down the line?
TL: I already think of Fort Worth as a combo of Nashville and Austin together. That's how I've viewed it for the last 15 years because it's, it's got some real family rooted things, which Austin I don't think really has. It's got this really rich heritage of these families that took care of the city. I may or may not agree with them, but you had these families that gave a crap about the city.
I mean, not many big cities have that, right? The [13th], largest city in the country, and I know most of the people that do things in the city, which is also really cool. You've got a mayor that you can call and probably set an appointment with, you got big cities that don't have that, but we do. That means everybody in the city cares.
