How Venice Got Its Club Back: The Venice West Heats Up for Late August
Venice has always had a music mythology and a chronic shortage of places to actually see a band. The beat poets and the Doors and the Z-Boys gave the neighborhood its swagger; gentrification and rising rents quietly took away most of its stages. The Venice West, a mid-size room just off the Abbot Kinney corridor, is the neighborhood's stubborn correction to that trend — a proper club that books touring acts, jazz brunches, tribute nights and line dancing, all within walking distance of the sand.
Its late-August calendar is a clinic in how to program a neighborhood room without boring your regulars. Garage-soul howler Black Joe Lewis brings his band on Tuesday, Aug 18, with ZG Smith opening — a sweat-soaked, horn-driven show that's exactly the kind of touring booking Venice used to have to leave the Westside to catch. The very next night, Aug 19, singer-songwriter Brett Dennen trades the intensity for something warmer and more acoustic. Later in the month, the criminally good L.A. surf-noir trio La Luz headlines Aug 29, and Louisiana swamp-blues guitarist Tab Benoit closes out the month on Aug 30 with The Zac Schulze Gang.
Between the headliners is where the room shows its personality. There's a Sunday "Grateful Brunch" — Dead-catalog bands playing to people eating eggs — plus a Sunday-night jazz series with the Andre Bernier Trio, a "Venice Western" line-dancing night, and a rotating cast of tributes covering the Strokes, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin. It's promiscuous programming in the best sense: the room isn't chasing a single scene, it's trying to be useful to a whole neighborhood.
That flexibility is survival strategy. A single-genre club in a beach town is a coin flip against the rent. A room that can do a Tuesday blues touring act, a Wednesday tribute, a Friday indie bill and a Sunday jazz brunch spreads its risk across every audience Venice contains — the surfers, the tech transplants, the lifers, the tourists wandering up from the boardwalk. That's how you keep the lights on somewhere the lights keep going out.
There's a larger point buried in the booking sheet. When we say the Westside has a scene, we mean rooms like this: not the legacy landmark or the free festival, but the working mid-size club grinding out four or five nights a week of live music a bike ride from the ocean. Venice lost most of those. Getting one back — and watching it book a bill as strong as Black Joe Lewis one week and La Luz the next — is the difference between a neighborhood with a music history and a neighborhood with a music present.
Go see something there this month. Go see something you've never heard of there next month. The whole experiment only works if Venice keeps showing up for the room that showed up for Venice.
Sources: The Venice West — Calendar; The Venice West — Bandsintown