Some observations on how San Francisco nightlife seems to be transforming into early-evening, get-to-bed-at-a-reasonable-hour life.
I had noticed that many of our live shows were ending really early: a couple times recently, the last band was done and we were closed by 10pm. That seems weird and wrong to me. Especially in the summer: who wants to show up at a night club while the sun is still up? "Why are we doing that?", I asked. Well, Devon did some research, and the answer seems to be, "Because everyone else is doing that too."
From a non-exhaustive survey of local venues of our size or smaller, and a smattering of out-of-town venues as well, the trend now seems to be that doors are at 7 or 7:30 (maybe an hour later on Friday or Saturday) and every show is over by 10:30 or 11. There are almost never more than three bands on the bill, and it's increasingly common for there to be only two bands.
Back in the olden days -- by which I mean the Twenty Tens -- it was pretty standard at a three band show for them to hit the stage at 9, 10 and 11.
That still left you time to hoof it back to BART to catch the last train under the bay, which was a thing that people still did, because that was back before Uber and Lyft had managed to destroy public transportation and normalize paying $60 just to leave the house.
And DJs? Headlining DJs used to go on after 2! That was normal!
This change doesn't seem to be something that has emerged organically from customers, at least not entirely: there is pressure from the bands and their agents to end earlier, and do even shorter changeovers between sets. You can't get a band to agree to go on at 11, because they say they have too much driving to do. (Upside: they don't ask us to pay for hotels as often.)
In the eighties through the aughts, shows started even later: if you dig through our ancient flyers, you'll see plenty of shows where the first band went on after 10; plenty of events that were free before 11pm, because nobody showed up that early; and even a few flyers advertising "DJ dancing every night until 4am." Yes, that was a thing that used to happen! You could go out any night of the week, and there were still places to go at 3am! There was even food! At multiple different restaurants!
Even "last call" doesn't really mean anything these days. It used to be that the most difficult and intense part of the evening for our staff was "hard pull", that time just before 2am when we had to tell customers that they could no longer have that drink in their hands. But nowadays we hardly have to do anything, since even on a busy DJ night, the club has already begun emptying out well before 2, and we're always closed by 2:30. If we stayed open any later, we'd have like 30 people lingering. "Last call" used to mean a rush at the bar. Now it means "start cleaning".
Reader, I do not like it. I do not like it one bit.
I guess in this modern world, now that the downtown office buildings have hollowed out from remote work, everyone has to get to bed early so they can get up on time to not put pants on and not commute to the office.
So welcome to the sleepy seaside town of San Francisco.
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