A Projectionist's Palace: The Wellmont Theater and the Ghosts of Hot Tuna
Every North Jersey music fan has a Wellmont story, and if you don't, you will. The Montclair theater at 5 Seymour Street has been the market's main mid-size touring house for so long that it's practically load-bearing infrastructure: roughly 2,500 capacity, a flexible floor that flips from GA pit to seated show and back, all of it built on the original single stage that opened in 1922.
The history is genuinely great. The Wellmont went to film in 1929, and here's the detail that stops people at parties — Sean Baker, the director who'd go on to win the Palme d'Or, worked here as a projectionist while he was a Montclair high-schooler in the 1980s. It's now a Montclair Film Festival venue too, which means the room that helped shape a filmmaker still shows films. That's a nice loop to close.
But you're here for the music, and the Wellmont's summer has been doing exactly what a good mid-size room should: swinging wide. On July 13 the theater hosted Flyleaf's 20th-anniversary tour, Lacey Sturm back out front, with Convictions and Young Other opening — a full-throated night of 2000s post-hardcore for the people who never took the eyeliner off. Comedy holds a slot too: Chelsea Handler brings a stand-up night August 7 (mind the genre swerve — that one's laughs, not licks).
The show I'd circle, though, is Sunday, August 2: Hot Tuna at the Wellmont. For the uninitiated, Hot Tuna is the long-running vehicle of Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, the guitar-and-bass core that came roaring out of Jefferson Airplane and never stopped chasing the blues. Five-plus decades in, they remain one of American rock's great two-man conversations — a guitarist and a bassist who've been finishing each other's musical sentences since the Summer of Love. In a 2,500-seat room with a real floor and a real history, that's the kind of show where the songs breathe.
Why the Wellmont matters is almost embarrassingly simple: without it, half the national tours that touch North Jersey wouldn't. It's the rung on the ladder between the club and the arena — booked in the Live Nation orbit, big enough to land a real touring name, small enough that the name is close enough to touch. An act that's outgrown White Eagle Hall but isn't ready to fill Prudential Center's 18,000 seats has, in North Jersey, exactly one obvious home, and it's this one. The flexible floor is the whole trick: pull the seats for a rock crowd that wants to stand, drop them back in for a night that wants to sit. Same 1922 stage, a dozen different shows.
Montclair built a lot of its cultural identity on that stage, and it shows — a room that helped shape a Palme d'Or winner behind the projector still doubles as a Montclair Film Festival venue, still throws the doors open for everything from post-hardcore to stand-up to a two-man blues institution. That kid running the projector in the 1980s grew up to win the biggest prize in film. The building's still here, still lit, still betting on the same thing it always has: that if you build a good enough room, the good acts will come to it.
Looking just past the window, the booking stays cheerfully all-over-the-map: Trap Karaoke on August 22, and The Wiggles for the stroller set on August 23. Range, in other words, is the Wellmont's love language.
Sources: Wellmont Theater — Wikipedia; Wellmont venue page; Concert Archives — Wellmont