Hang out over ZOOM with Charley Ryan, co-owner of Brooklyn Bowl. Ryan curates and collaborates to create the iconic vibe and feeling, the cool factor of the legendary rock venue. Hear the backstory on designing venues and what to look forward to when the new one opens in Nashville including healthy measures to be put in place when the ban on live music lifts.
Transcript
Announcer: Every music venue has a story, a culture, and each is a portal to discovery. Kyle Lamont, host and producer of Concert Cast, is your guide on a journey through today's concert culture. Season one, a road trip around Maine was released in the wake of a global pandemic rocked by the cataclysmic shift, Lamont began to document the movement. In season two we'll connect deeper with thought leaders who are creatively adapting and recalibrating the next rendition of concert-going and culture. In this episode, Lamont hangs out over Zoom with the co-owner of Brooklyn Bowl, Charley Ryan, who curates and collaborates to create the iconic vibe and feeling the cool factor of the legendary rock band Brooklyn Bowl. Here's the back story on designing venues and what to look forward to when the new one opens in Nashville.
Kyle Lamont: The beauty of independent music venues is how each of them are imbued with their own personality, from underground jazz clubs to regal rooms with dripping chandeliers, half the fun of going to a venue is experiencing the design. Hi, I'm Kyle Lamont. And when I used to live in New York City from 2008 to 2013, the biggest wow factor venue wise for me was Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg. It was once a dilapidated building, but then it received the Midas touch from Peter Shapiro and co-owner design extraordinaire Charley Ryan, who just has a gift for creating space that activates all emotions. The venue screens personality. And on top of that, it brings in the biggest names in music. So it's no wonder that it was the catalyst of the musical movement in Williamsburg. I've connected with Charley Ryan over Zoom, who greets me with a big smile. His room is stark white, except for a cartoon esque black and white poster that says Smile. And in the corner I notice an iconic knock down punk which is perched on his windowsill. If you've ever been to Brooklyn Bowl, then you know what I'm talking about.
Kyle Lamont: I find that like, those are sort of synonymous with Brooklyn Bowl now. Was that intentional, do you think? Or was that sort of just happy?
Charley Ryan: You you it's just one of those things that fits neatly into visual identity. And we noticed right away as soon as people came to the place back in 2009, they would pose in front of those knock down the wall. We have knock down punks, so go with it. You know, it's a great thing. I mean, we just really stumbled upon initially the identity of using the iconography of Coney Island, that kind of identity. And that was one of those lucky things that sometimes happens when you're open to the elements around you, because we realized that that's part of Brooklyn. It's a very distant part of Brooklyn. But since we're Brooklyn Bowl, we could legitimately grab that and have fun with that imagery.
Kyle Lamont: Ryan is a former commodities trader.
Charley Ryan: It's really funny, actually, to think back on that. That was an environment where you had five thousand people on one floor, really cheek by jowl, really close to each other, yelling, inadvertently spitting, using the same phones, using the same patterns.
Kyle Lamont: And then he segued into trading physical metal.
Charley Ryan: I had a business with a partner and we had an office in Uruguay and one in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, Ivory Coast. So we were bringing metal from Africa and South America to North America, which invariably means Canada just the way the business works. But that's a business that is even more fraught with crazy people. But in the business, there are all kinds of people with all kinds of agendas in terms of laundering money and things like that. I really wanted to get out of that business is really counterfeit for me. So I thought, well, what do I really want to do? I really wanted to get back into food and beverage, but especially music, because I've done that as a kid. And I'd even worked as a low level gofer, really for Bill Graham, who's a legend in the business in San Francisco back in the early 70s. So I was just kind of a glimmering horizon. And it wasn't an act of bravery to do that for me because I didn't have a wife, I didn't have a mortgage. And I'd also made some money in the businesses that I'd been in. So I was really able to take that chance before I was too old and crotchety to do it. And it was one of the best things I ever did in my whole life.
Kyle Lamont: He started managing a little known club in New York City called the Wetlands.
Charley Ryan: That's where I met Peter when he came along to buy it as a young kid, relatively fresh out of college to buy it and carry on the two-headed monster ideals of this place, which was environmental activism, social justice, and on the other hand, the nightclub and the music club.
Kyle Lamont: The two completely transformed the place.
Charley Ryan: The bookings got fresh and the place got cleaner. Cleanliness is not always next to godliness, maybe in the case of all music clubs, but in the case of wetlands, the place definitely took on a second life like the second golden age, I would say. So that was really fun to do that for a few years.
Kyle Lamont: Is that then where you sort of started getting ideas for how you would design your own music venue one day?
Charley Ryan: Well, yeah, actually what we did was we would take the staff out. We took them out to a bowling alley, which I won't mention the name of. But when we had our little wrap up the next morning before either of us probably had even gotten out of bed. But on the phone, one of us called the other and said, wow, that was really fun. And then we got into the whole idea of it. It just seemed like it was really fun with this magic ingredient called bowling.
Kyle Lamont: They were inspired by how everyone felt like kids.
Charley Ryan: Again, what we had in mind was something that was going to be much more visceral and intense and connected than that. And so what we came up with was Brooklyn Bowl.
Kyle Lamont: The year was 2000, and they were both busy with other things at the time. But before they knew it, they were scouting around Brooklyn looking for a building to accommodate their vision.
Charley Ryan: We kind of did it by feel and we did it by going to neighborhoods and just kind of feeling it, and for awhile that seemed like a bad strategy. But then when we found what we found in that one moment, it turned out to be a great strategy. It's almost like sticking out your thumb and hitchhiking. Somebody picks you up and takes you to San Francisco. That was a pretty good strategy. Our identity was kind of wrapped around that particular physical structure, which was a complete mess at the time we saw it. But we did realize that the bones were there. It just took some imagination.
Kyle Lamont: The building was once an old iron foundry and it was completely rundown. The landlord even told them that they were crazy to be leasing it.
Charley Ryan: One of the walls really wanted to fall down the exterior wall on 12th Street. So there was just a whole lot to do. When you go into Brooklyn Bowl, one of the distinguishing characteristics is all the wood. Well, it was really badly cracked, concrete floor, not pretty at all. There was trash everywhere. And even the beams up above, we could see that they were wood. But you couldn't see any wood tons to them because it'd been covered by I don't know what color. Maybe it was originally white paint on all those beams, but it was like this kind of ghostly gray color. And the same thing goes for the brick walls. So you can see that they were brick wall.
Kyle Lamont: The two got to work to create a multipurpose building, a music venue and bowling alley in one. They brought in trusted collaborators, including Tristam Steinberg, who was able to translate their vision into tangible and eventually emblematic elements like the leather couches, the amber-colored lighting, the wood and the brick.
Charley Ryan: You know, we wanted people to feel like it was an oasis. After all, it is interior. We're not letting the outside in. We don't even have windows. So when you come into this place. What's the experience that you get, the feeling, what's the sense memory that you can walk away with? So Tristam understood that really well.
Kyle Lamont: And Ryan excels at picturing how people will interact with the space, how people comfortably move around. He draws up rough renderings for architects to run with, and he helps tackle structural problems.
Charley Ryan: You know, there are some columns that are going to be there and they're not going to go anywhere. How do we integrate them so that we can get the greatest mileage out of them, which to me, a lot of different things. In many cases, the best thing you can do with columns is make them seem to disappear. They're not going to disappear, but how you make them seem to disappear.
Kyle Lamont: Being the world's first LEED certified bowling alley is a source of pride for Ryan.
Charley Ryan: You have to file a lot of papers you have to pay attention to what is your HBAC System? Does it have variable frequency drive motors? Does it have CO2 sensors? Does it have things like that? You know, probably common now, but at the time, they weren't that common and many people wouldn't know enough to make sure that they had them or they wouldn't want to spend money to do it. So we tried to build a place that we would be really proud of. We just kind of took it as a given that people who are interested in this kind of thing might be just slightly emboldened or inspired by it.
Kyle Lamont: When I lived in New York City and first walked in there, I was completely bowled over, no pun intended, but sort of. It felt like a cool carnival with something to do around every corner from a fortune-telling machine to what felt like hundreds of TVs. It was sensory overload. And my favorite part is the giant disco ball. I can't even count the number of shows I've seen there. And that's not including the shows I've seen at the Bowl in Vegas. But one of the best memories was during a set break while Soulive, a Brooklyn funk band, was playing. Both Peter and Charley walked out on stage to thank us all for coming and then bought everyone in the room tequila shots. I looked around and the crowd was being flanked with servers, passing trays of tequila. I mean, who does that?
Charley Ryan: That was good tequila too.
Kyle Lamont: It actually was. I mean, like what was Peter like? Hey man, let's buy some shots for everyone. And were you like, no, no. Or Yeah. Cool. Do you remember that?
Charley Ryan: I went to get a lot of times ideas like that originated from Peter. Not always, but a lot of times they originate from Peter and I think that one did.
Kyle Lamont: When the bowl first opened, there happened to be a weekly summer music festival right down the street on the waterfront, which helped bring in first-timers.
Charley Ryan: So pretty quickly we were on the map and people would come in and be amazed by it just because they hadn't seen anything quite like it before and nobody done anything on that scale in our part of Brooklyn. So it was pretty easy to create a little buzz.
Kyle Lamont: And you basically took the model and ran with it to Las Vegas, to London and now to Nashville. So was that part of the original plan the entire time to sort of take it around the country? Or was that an organic decision that was made just through time and success?
Charley Ryan: You know, I think anybody in the restaurant business or bar business. People open up corner bars, I've been part of them myself, but if you have a place that has a real identity to it, you know hopefully, it's not a phony identity. But if it's a place that really is somewhat unique, whatever that means, then you probably are wondering, in the parlance of the restaurant business anyway, will it travel?
Kyle Lamont: Do you love that process of the creation? I mean, there's so much that goes into it. What is your happy place when building?
Charley Ryan: Yeah, I mean, there is so much that goes into it. And when we first got into this, I think my view was each one of these places can be Brooklyn Bowl. We can make it look and feel how we want to live. It's cool. It can be Brooklyn Bowl. And Peter corrected me on that and said, no, we have to repeat a lot of the same design elements that we've done before, which takes some of the creativity out of it. But there's still plenty of room for creativity in each one of these projects.
Kyle Lamont: In December of twenty nineteen, it was announced that the Brooklyn Bowl was moving to Nashville. They broke ground in Germantown, which is one of the city's coolest neighborhoods. The venue overlooks the baseball field and has enough room for an outdoor deck. Unlike the Williamsburg location, he was not repurposing the building, but rather creating from the ground up, which for Ryan presented a fun design challenge.
Charley Ryan: Yeah, each one of these places, there's a huge amount of things that you can bring to it, things that you can do. For example, in Nashville, that's not a square, not a square at all. When that was first brought to me as a possibility. These days, it really does come to me originally because I do the spatial layout, I guess primarily, and we had this opportunity and it could be as many as three hundred and fifty feet long when they brought it to me. But it could only be less than one hundred feet wide. When I first looked at that, I thought, well, I don't think we can do that, but it would be really foolish to just say we can't do that. Let's see if we can really make it sing in dimensions that we've never thought we could do before or never even tried to do before. And it was very challenging. But eventually, we did it.
Kyle Lamont: And then covid.,
Charley Ryan: And then covid. And we were scheduled to open up for friends, family and industry on the 13th of March, but open to the public on the 14, 15, 16 and on and on and on with a fantastic I mean, really amazing, brilliant job by our talent buyers and our whole team in terms of lining up what was going to happen over the next few months there. And then all of a sudden, really relatively very much at the last minute, we had to pull the plug on it and just say it's not going to be a responsible thing to do.
Kyle Lamont: I just can't imagine what those first conversations were like when covid was really closing in on us between you and Peter. And just sort of the reality of the situation, it must have been heart-wrenching to pull the plug on such a big project.
Charley Ryan: Well, I would say it was driven in large part with discussions with touring bands, touring bands had to take a very serious look at this early on and decide whether they were going to be canceling their spring tours. Nobody wanted to pull the plug on their tour. We didn't want to pull the plug on our opening there. We didn't want this to be happening. Still don't. But it became obvious to us that this is the way to go.
Kyle Lamont: Jason Isbell broke in the stage with that live stream show. But as of right now, the only way you can see the venue is with a virtual walking tour offered on their website or by watching a high-end live stream concert on fans live.
Charley Ryan: So for the most part, people haven't seen this place and they certainly haven't seen it in what I would consider its full glory. When you have just a band that you really want to see, you're in a prime spot. You're having a great time with your friends. You got the food that you want. Maybe you've got a bowling experience that you want. You know, it is a little bit of heaven. And, you know, we're coming up now pretty quickly on a six month delay for people to be able to really come in and feel this. And we don't know exactly when we'll be able to do it. But eventually, I think this is the same question as before we opened up Brooklyn Bowl, the original in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is, are people going to love this? And I think at this point, we can say they're absolutely going to love it. We know the concept. We know how people will relate to it. But this place has really fun things for people to tie in to and love. And I just don't see any way that they won't love it.
Kyle Lamont: A cool design touch that Ryan is proud of is a wall of windows, which was inspired by an old apartment of his in San Francisco, where each window had a different color pane of glass.
Charley Ryan: What we did there, which actually inadvertently harkens to the Ryman, which I wasn't thinking of, has some color to their windows in the back of the house there, which is Nashville. But this is much more of an unforgettable kind of colored window experience. I think anybody who comes to our place is going to notice it and remember it, and I think a lot like it. There are new ideas there in terms of aspects of decor and the people really responsible for that are the architect. That we have now, they're awesome. It's so great to have somebody on your team like that. And very often I find myself saying, OK, that's better than the idea I have. Let's go.Let's do that.
Kyle Lamont: I think that's the cool part about all of your venues, is they have this timelessness to it within the decor, within the space. I know that has to be a lot that goes through both of your heads. You know, is that legacy is leaving a venue to hold up.
Charley Ryan: Thank you for that. I don't really have a saying, but if I had won, it would be something like, you know, everything to some extent is contrived as soon as you design it. But, you know, you're contrivances really need to feel genuine. And how do you do that so that it's not arbitrary? It's not stupid in a way, it's using a charged word that you're kind of taking the charge out of. But hopefully, our contrivances are never obvious. A place either feels like an old shoe that fits you perfectly or it doesn't. But when you get that, you know, forget it. And in my lifetime, there have been so many places that have gotten to that for me have really meant that much to me. And, you know, almost invariably they're gone. And it almost seems like a fever dream, you know, in the back of my head, almost like that really happened, was I really there? And so I constantly remind myself, these places do come and go savor it while they're around when it comes to Brooklyn Bowl. And I think it really is a special place as well as a special idea and execution of that idea. I think coming out of covid, people will be starved and, you know, certain places have magic. And I guess you can create magic or you can mind the magic that you find in a place, but you need that magic.
Kyle Lamont: What has it been like for you to walk around inside these empty venues?
Charley Ryan: You could get a sadness to it because nothing's happening. But when you walk around, you get the same feeling and get the same feelings of comfort. And I think probably for most people, if they were in there, they would feel it's kind of a relief to be in this place that I have a real attachment to. So there's nothing going on, really. It's quiet, but it's the same place and it's just ready to go. And there's something really reassuring about that. And by the way, we will make it to the other side. A lot of people are not going to make it to the other side. And they have already have had to give up the ghost, not just venues, the bars, and restaurants. And it's a sad thing. We need some help from our legislators, especially at the federal level, because that's where the money can really happen. That gets people through.
Kyle Lamont: Are you readjusting things in anticipation of reopening?
Charley Ryan: Yeah, I mean, we'll be doing things with ultraviolet light in the whole HVAC system to cleanse it. There's some discussion about that. I think most people in the business feel that that's going to be quite helpful. But to me, the most important thing we can do is make sure that the air that's in the system is as clean as it possibly can be. As we come back from this.
Kyle Lamont: Not surprisingly, Ryan has lots of ideas on the subject of airflow, ways to mix in more outside air and potentially clean it with UV light. And he's sure that this will become a way of doing business for the foreseeable future.
Charley Ryan: We had a leg up in terms of the realities of coming back from Covid because anybody who's come to our place in the last, I don't know, three years or whatever it's been knows that, is that we have a technological but simple way of checking people when they come in. We just want them to walk through like an airport, walk through, and for them to be deemed fine because they are fine and let them in. We don't want to touch anybody. We don't want to invade their personal space. We never did so, you know, cost money to do it. But we've always said the customer experience is the most important thing. I mean, you can't go broke emphasizing the customer experience, but if you spend a lot of money on a customer and customer experience, it's just what you need to do in order to be a good operator.
Kyle Lamont: Today, Ryan spends a lot of time on the phone working with other venue owners on how to receive government funding.
Charley Ryan: We do think all the time about how our places can look on the other side of Covid, when we can open up. And I would just say about that, that you can grab it too tightly, you can oversteer and you could easily get brought up in solutions that will be passé by the time we get to the other side. I think the important thing here is to pivot and not to panic, to constantly be reading, talking to people who are also reading and smart people and try to figure out what the best solutions are rather than just buying a whole lot of plastic and putting up sheets of plastic everywhere.
Kyle Lamont: And have you and Peter's relationship grown or changed?
Charley Ryan: We do work on things. We do discuss and work on decisions together. But again, at the heart of it, I think the best of it is really when you're brainstorming and thinking about new things that you could do and new things that you should do, and I think we do pretty well in that.
Kyle Lamont: What I would give to be in the room when these two business partners hit on their next new idea. I have no doubt that the same design genius that turns dilapidated into thriving will turn pandemic challenges into visionary solutions. And when we're on the other side of this, the only thing we're going to have to worry about is what show we're going to see first at the Brooklyn Bowl and to not forget to take that selfie in front of their infamous knockdown punks.
Announcer: Little things that go a long way donate to NIVA, the National Independent Venue Association, to save our stages and watch a live stream from Brooklyn Bowl on fans.live. Our resident mastermind is Mark Tekushan. Editor and engineer is Peter McGill. Our supervising producer is Heidi Stanton-Drew. Special thanks to Charley Ryan, Pepper Little, Amy Charley, Cara Romano, Eddie Contento, Jesse Couto. And thank you for listening.