Long-standing Columbia rock club gets new owner. How is it going to change?
When Carlin Thompson first moved to Columbia from Augusta, the rock club he came to work at became his temporary address.
“I lived out of my truck, actually, for a month behind the old New Brookland Tavern, for like all of November 2017,” Thompson said.
He’d lost a ton of money putting together shows amid what he said was an unstable music scene in Augusta, and he needed to get his finances in order before he could land a more permanent living situation.
A lot has changed since then.
Thompson started booking concerts that didn’t wreck his finances, building on his work at New Brookland to put on successful shows in Augusta, Greenville and Charlotte. His home club in West Columbia, a full-time music venue since at least 1998 and a hub for the Midlands music scene, decamped for Columbia’s college-adjacent Five Points neighborhood in December, unwilling to buy its old building or pay steeper rent when the building changed hands.
And now Thompson, who has largely handled booking and sound for New Brookland for a few years, is taking full hold of the reins, purchasing the club from Mike Lyons, who has owned it since 2004.
“I moved up here to work at New Brookland,” Thompson said. “After being employed by New Brookland for a few months, I knew that this was going to be a long-term thing that I wanted to involve myself with. I think it is a major staple in the music community here. And the idea of it not being here, it just doesn’t make sense.”
Lyons announced in May that he was looking to sell the club, with Thompson explaining that after 20 years owning it and pushing through the move, Lyons had grown tired of the intense effort it takes to keep a business like New Brookland going.
Now fully in charge of the venue, located at 632 Harden St., Thompson said he’s intent on making sure the venue sticks around, looking to implement some changes to make that happen.
Earlier this year, New Brookland announced that it would expand the club into a next-door space on Harden Street, which should open soon, giving the venue three rooms, including the upstairs main showroom and the bar beneath it. The new owner said this gives the club a succession of rooms to move local bands through as they get bigger, helping it to develop talent that will help sustain both the Columbia music scene and New Brookland.
Thompson added that the club sometimes gets passed over by tours that hit nearby spots like Charlotte and Atlanta due to the artists’ radius clauses, which dictate how close an act can play to another venue where it has a show. Being able to usher along new bands, both at New Brookland and the shows he books in other towns, helps him mitigate that challenge by creating a base of acts to draw from.
He also hopes to start doing even bigger things, saying he’s looking at putting on a metal-leaning music festival at the Historic Columbia Speedway in Cayce to fill the void left by the former Carolina Rebellion festival in Charlotte.
“That will again allow us to put locals on a bigger platform and just kind of progress them to being the next like Stretch Arm Strong or Crossfade,” Thompson said, referencing two of the bigger punk and metal acts to rise out of Columbia.
The new club owner said he’s also learning lessons from the boom and bust that New Brookland has seen shifting from spring to summer in Five Points. The additional walk-up traffic was a huge boon during the school year, he said, adding that the St. Pat’s in Five Points festival was a particularly big day for the club. But it’s been a struggle to draw crowds in the college-adjacent neighborhood with students out of town.
Themed DJ nights, such as a recent one keying on the cusping popularity of pop singer Charli XCX, have done well for the club, Thompson noted. He added that he also plans to open the forthcoming next-door space to rentals, hoping to catch more business available given its proximity to the University of South Carolina.
Thompson emphasized that he still wants to support local musicians. He hopes that a creative expansion of the club’s kitchen offerings, which currently consist of a simple selection of quesadillas, burritos and the like, will bring more business while putting more money in bands’ pockets.
“Something that I think we struggled with for a long time is that we’ve only ever been solely dependent on the shows. I want to make it to where, regardless of who’s playing in this building, there’s people in here,” Thompson said. “I want to cater some of our food specials and stuff like that more towards generating money for the local artists. Taking such and such food special and naming it after a local band. ... Running that for a month to raise money for their next EP, helping them get a touring van, marketing costs, stuff like that.”
This story was originally published August 1, 2024 at 11:01 AM.
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