“Give me a room with electricity, I could put a stage and a sound system in there, sell cold beer and cold soda, and have zero overhead. I could hire bare-bones staff that would be dedicated, that I could pay off with favors, let their band play there, whatever. And you should be able to run that place on nothing. But realistically, there’s going to be rent, or a mortgage payment, then you have a staff payment, then you have insurance, then you have a liquor license, and all the other bills that come with it. And it just gets crazy really fast. Especially if, say, you lease the building ... you probably get a break on the first two years of leasing, they give you a good deal, then you do pretty successfully, then that deal runs out, the landlords double the rent, they think you’re really busy, they think you’re makin’ money. All of a sudden, boom, a business shuts down. Sure a music club can be really busy, but people don’t understand the behind-the-scene costs. At the Turf Club, advertising there, it was like 300 to 500 bucks a week – just to run an ad in the City Pages. That’s $2,000 a month just for one ad in the paper. A typical sound guy pays typically $50 to $100 ... per night. A lot of places have to lease a PA system, they have to pay a PA charge, or a rental charge every time it’s used. Of course, you know, bartenders don’t get paid much. You have to have a door guy – that person’s got to be paid something – you have to have some kind of security. Then you have your bar backs or waitresses. It gets crazy. Cabaret license. Another thing is the ASCAP and the BMI, just harass you to pay licensing fees. Those get really expensive. They own the rights to thousands of songs, so they get an umbrella fee of ‘x amount’ a year or per month. But the thing is, once you pay one of those people, all of a sudden half a dozen others come out of the woodwork. And they all want money, too.”