THE name on the marquee was Air Supply, and the line went halfway down the block. It was Saturday night at the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill on 42nd Street in Manhattan, and I had no ticket. But I walked right in.
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Snob that I am, I was not there for Air Supply. (Although, in truth, “Lost in Love” gets heavy play on my iPod.) I was there for the band at Lucille’s, a restaurant within B. B. King’s that often has notable blues acts and doesn’t charge for entry. The attraction this night was neither bluesy nor very notable: a pedestrian local covers group. But as I bobbed my head to Bad Company and Black Crowes songs, I couldn’t have been more pleased. I was warm, I was being entertained and I hadn’t paid a dime.
New York is a paradise of live music, but much of it can be discouragingly expensive. Tickets for the major concert halls typically start at $40 or $50 and rocket upward from there. Even in clubs it’s not unusual to pay $25 or $30 to see a hot touring band.
But in a kind of alternate universe for the modestly compensated (and the merely stingy) the city also has a vast network of bars and restaurants that waive a cover charge. At most you may be asked to buy a drink, but as I found in seven nights of budget-conscious concert hopping, waitresses and tip jars can be avoided, if you can bear the guilt. In 27 sets at 22 rooms, I paid a total of $30 for drinks and donations, and only $18 of that was compulsory — a few times I was just thirsty.
If you’re lucky, you might even get that drink free. After B. B. King’s I went to Hill Country, a barbecue restaurant on West 26th Street where the Doc Marshalls, a first-rate Cajun and country band, were celebrating a new album with three rug-cutting sets. At the end of the first, at 11, two waitresses climbed on the bar and asked for attention. It was easily gotten. For a moment I think every man there thought the same two words: “Coyote Ugly.” Instead we were treated to free shots of bourbon, with a request from one of our cowboy-hatted hostesses.
“At the count of three,” she hollered, “I want to hear the biggest Texas ‘yee-haw’ you can muster!”
No yee-haws or any other hoots or yawps were held back a few nights earlier at a show by the Defibulators at the Rodeo Bar on Third Avenue, which styles itself a honky-tonk oasis in Manhattan, with Lone Star beer, peanuts by the basket and free country and rockabilly every night. The Defibulators, from Brooklyn, are quintessential Rodeo Bar. Like a hoedown band from a Warner Brothers cartoon, they played raucous and slightly surreal “whackabilly,” as they describe it, and featured two washboard percussionists, one in crimson long johns, the other in a Viking helmet.
When there is no charge, you sometimes get what you pay for. An “Old Time Jam” at Freddy’s Backroom in Brooklyn was too sparsely attended to live up to the advertised hootenanny. And while I have enjoyed previous editions of Cross Pollination, a series in which two acts perform separately and then collaborate for a third set, an unrehearsed-sounding version of R.E.M.’s “Fall on Me” by Bess Rogers and That Fleeting World fell flat.
But Cross Pollination, Tuesdays at Pianos on the Lower East Side, is an impressive feat of indie gumption. Run by two young musician-promoters, Jay Goettelmann and Wes Verhoeve, it has been going for three and a half years, with some big names passing through — big for the indie universe anyway — like Nicole Atkins, Cloud Cult and Jaymay. (I saw installment No. 169.) Its success owes much to the central financial axiom of gratis entertainment: If you don’t charge, they will come and might even spend more than they would have otherwise.
“It just makes more economic sense,” said Mr. Goettelmann, a St. Louis transplant. “It’s better for the audience. The artists frequently make more money in the tip jar than they would after the venue has taken a cut, and we’ve taken a cut. We frequently make more with our percentage off the bar than we would after we take our cut off a ticket. And the bar is making more off the bar.”
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