Willamette Week has a great, sobering look at local music venues during the pandemic shutdown, who have banded together to lobby for greater financial support and protections, quoting Jim Brunberg (“owner of Mississippi Studios, Polaris Hall and Revolution Hall, and the founder” of the lobbying group) on historical parallels.
“I’ve been going down rabbit holes of research,” says Brunberg. “The year after the [Spanish] flu, what was the music scene like in 1919? Music took a huge hit because people didn’t want to gather.”
There really needs to be an all-out and concerted push generally to recognize “small, independent business” as a quasi-industry collectively considered “too big too fail” every bit as much as airlines and banks.