UGZ Magazine

My four year run as a booker at 924 Gilman came to an end recently, and while I think my decision surprised some of the club’s staff of volunteers, most of my inner circle were well aware that I had reached the end of my rope. In four years, three and half spent serving as the club’s head booker, I transformed Gilman’s booking department into an entirely different monster than the one that existed for the previous twenty years. There were changes that had to be made at first, and then it was a question of how much we could accomplish before hitting the wall. In the process I helped to elevate the head booker position to something akin to what the head coordinator position was in the nineties. I had a lot of influence, which now that I’m leaving I’ll readily admit to, but I put in the work necessary and the time needed to maintain that influence for the entire time that I was active at Gilman. What really set me a part from others during those four years was that I always had a vision when it came to the booking department. I updated my approach from year to year, but I envisioned certain details from day one, and then I methodically set about making those a reality. Since every other department at the club remained stagnant for the last four years, changes in booking took on more prominence and came to be seen as signs that I was drastically altering the course of the club. If that’s true, then it really just means that the booking department is, as I’ve always argued, at the top of the Gilman food chain and so every decision made by booking has a ripple effect on the entire club. This was a hard pill to swallow for many long time volunteers, and even for some of our newer, more idealistic volunteers, who got involved with Gilman believing that it was a non-profit community space where the rent was cheap and the shows were secondary to activism and sewing circles. At the end of the day, those persons who didn’t agree with my vision of the club, which really just meant that they didn’t agree with my idea that booking drives the club, were never willing to put in the same amount of time and work needed to make their own visions a reality at Gilman.

We had a chance to revisit the first half of 2010 at a recent membership meeting via a financial statement drawn up by the club’s treasurer. Heading into July of this year, the club appears to be thriving financially in it’s 24th year of existence. The numbers show a gain (profit) of $7605.10 after the first six months of 2010. Those numbers are based on deposits made by club coordinators at the end of shows, and do not include any profits from the Gilman stoar. The stoar (that is how we spell it) is set to post record profits in 2010 since t-shirt and tote bag sales have been through the roof.

So with a gain of $7605.10, and with another $15,326.72 having come in via the donate button on the Gilman website (run entirely by booking and the head of sound until July of 2010), Gilman is cruising into the second half of 2010 with roughly a $22,931.82 cushion.

It seems very unlikely that the volunteers currently running the club could blow through that much money in the next six months, and so you should expect to see a significant gain for 2010, even with the current rent increase. Without any noticeable attempts at fundraising by anyone outside of booking thus far, and with the club no closer to becoming a non-profit corporation than it was six months ago, one can only hope that those numbers, as impressive as they are, won’t lull the club’s staff into a false sense of security. It will be interesting to watch as the would be new leaders at the club, folks like Karen O’Brien, take the reigns finally. Can a booker driven club transition to a board of directors driven venue, while continuing to make similar financial gains, as well as needed changes to the corporate structure? Only time will tell.

If you want to learn more about my time at Gilman, then click here…