The live music scene in the Cincinnati area has been reeling over the past week following turmoil at one of the region’s oldest venues, the Madison Theater in Covington.
The operators of the theater announced unexpectedly last week that the venue would be closing. This turned out not to be entirely accurate – both the former operators of the venue and a representative of the venue’s owner later confirmed the theater was planning to reopen under new management. However, it did mean the shows that were scheduled for that weekend had to be moved.
“I found out Friday morning…,” said James “Sandwich Jones” Robertson, guitarist for Your Disease, one of the bands slated to play Covington Metal Fest at the theater before it got moved to Southgate House Revival in Newport. “I found out from a series of group chats.”
Sandwich estimated about 400 people turned out to the show in Newport, which was “pretty good,” he said, even if it was less than last year (possibly due to the sudden venue change).
Although existing information about the Madison Theater suggests it will remain a music venue, the suddenness of everything has stoked some anxiety among the DIY music scenes in the Cincinnati area, especially among the punk, hardcore and metal scenes, whose way of doing things at times puts them at odds with both mainstream cultural mores and the city.
Sandwich said the DIY scene in the Cincinnati area began seeing a resurgence around 2024, especially after several mainstays of the scene, such as Legends Bar & Venue and the Northside Yacht Club, either closed or reduced the number of live shows they were hosting. As a result, Sandwich said, trying to find reliable spaces to book shows became a game of “whack-a-mole.”
“There’s always been DIY venues, but Legends was a safe haven for all of that stuff,” Sandwich said. “It was not the greatest venue in the world, but it was ours to some degree.”
Newer bands and younger bands, especially, “they can’t play at Bogart’s. They’re starting out, they’re newer, they’re a hometown band. There needs to be spaces that are not alcohol establishments for people to be able to be in a community and enjoy music,” said DSGN CLLCTV Founder Julia Green.
Green is the daughter of nationally renowned cartoonist Justin Green and founded DSGN CLLCTV (literally the words ‘design collective’ without vowels) originally as an alternative art gallery and display space. In time, however, the organization also began hosting punk and hardcore shows for local bands. The building is currently being renovated to bring it up to code, but Green said the goal was to reopen in the future. They’re still organizing shows at Heart of Northside.
The nature of punk, hardcore and metal inevitably lends itself to a DIY ethos because it’s difficult to find a mainstream venue that’s willing to host what to outsiders looks like aimless violence and noise.
“Yeah, the music can seem a little aggressive and scary,” said Chris Phelps Carrillo. “The aggressiveness is kind of the point.”
Phelps Carrillo said he had been involved in the DIY scene for about a year, booking and running shows around town, “especially for newer bands.”
“There is a method to the chaos,” Phelps Carrillo said. “On the outside people are just like, ‘no, this is just straight up assault…’ The side they don’t see is immediately after, those people will turn around and check on them to make sure they’re okay. If they get knocked down, they’ll make sure they pick them back up. They always take care of each other, because everyone has an understanding of what the scene’s about.”
“If you’re a jazz band, or you’re a pop country act, you could probably get away with playing in the middle of a parking lot and a busy part of downtown Cincinnati,” Sandwich said. “And everybody would just be like, “Oh, that’s really nice, that’s great. We love that our city is so enriched with talent.’ But heavy music, if we even pretended to do that, it would be shut down.”
Green argued the loss of a DIY space erodes the region’s organic cultural reproduction, especially among youth, who may not have access to or the resources to break into mainstream spaces.
“It’s hard to find spots for these types of shows because when people hear kids…, moshing, any of that, they just are like ‘that’s a liability I don’t want,'” Green said. “Kids are stupid. They do stupid things, but they need a place to go.”
Phelps Carrillo talked about the closure of a DIY space earlier this year called The Abyss, located in an old warehouse on Spring Grove Avenue, which only managed to play a handful of shows before getting shut down.
The show that led to the shutdown occurred on Feb. 28, Phelps Carillo said, and was an anti-ICE show, aiming to raise money for families that had been displaced by immigration authorities. The venue, perhaps unfortunately for the show-goers, was right across the street from Cincinnati Fire Station 12.
“The fire department came in, and they were just like, ‘oh, we wanted to see what’s going on,'” Phelps Carillo said.
He added that the fire department went through the building and even seemed genuinely interested in the show before leaving. Then they came back with the cops, Phelps Carillo said. No one was arrested, but “they just opted to immediately get it shut down right off the bat,” Phelps Carillo said. “So, that ended up being the last show for there.”
A public records request for police communications didn’t yield anything, but CityBeat has also requested reports from the fire department to corroborate Phelps Carillo’s story. We will update this story once we have the records.
Given this context, it’s easy to see why the news of Madison Theater made people in the scene uneasy. An event like Metal Fest was open to all ages, hosted a kind of music that would make polite company blush (or call the police), had comparatively cheap admission, and gave an opportunity for young and new bands to showcase their work and build a fan base.
There’s no evidence currently to suggest this will be the case, but the fear within the local music community is that with the former operators gone, a concert conglomerate like Live Nation would come to manage the theater. Live Nation is arguably the antithesis of the DIY attitude—corporate, distant, expensive, inaccessible. To put things into perspective, a ticket to Metal Fest this year was $20 and gave you access to multiple shows. General admission to a Live Nation venue like Bogart’s could easily run double that, depending on the performer.
Not everyone who spoke with CityBeat was pessimistic, though. John Hays, who’s now 40, has been in the scene for years and said DIY spaces getting shut down was part of the process. Hays is currently in a band called Emanating Peace.
“I’ve seen it happen so many times,” Hays said. “There’s a little bit of a lull, and maybe a couple shows miss out on coming through, but it always comes together.”
He gave a view venues where shows and DIY spaces could still be found: Heart of Northside, Comet, Lambda, Swine City, where one of the acts that was slated to play at Madison Theater last week got moved to.
“This sort of the spirit of the whole thing…,” Hays said. “There’s always venues closing, and somebody else steps up, and you find somewhere else to be. The mouse trap doesn’t eliminate rodents.”
