Just four months after opening with a lot of potential and promises, The Underground has permanently closed, according to co-owner Diana Larson.
The club — located in the old Club 97 space, under the Spotted Mule on Third Street — had a few concerts on its schedule, including a reggae show and a country show this weekend, plus a Sublime tribute band (not 40 Oz. to Freedom) later this month, but those shows are not happening at The Underground. If they move to another venue, I’ll let you know.
A note posted to the club’s MySpace said The Underground’s management team is cleaning out the space. In an e-mail, Larson said the team is “very sad and discouraged” about the closure.
“We so wanted to have a great venue for live music here, and we finally got minors allowed in, but the people just weren’t ready to support it I guess,” she wrote. “It was sad Friday night with a live country band and we only had 60 people. Saturday with heavy metal/rock we didn’t even have that many. I don’t know what happened or why, but it is what it is.”
Indeed, it is. Now let’s balance the bad news with some good news for the local music scene: Two former employees of the venerable west-side bar Players are now booking music at other Bend bars. Buck Bales, whose departure from Players caused a kerfuffle in June, has just begun bringing music to Mountain’s Edge, formerly Timbers South on Bend’s south end. And Becki Spor, who worked with Bales at Players, started booking music at The Black Horse Saloon in northeast Bend a few months ago, and has already brought in a few fine shows, including last weekend’s visit from The Lonely H.
Bad news, good news; sometimes it seems Bend’s music scene is like that episode of “Seinfeld” where Jerry always comes out even. Whenever one place or one person in town shuts off the live-music pipeline, it seems another is there to take its place.
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