Mottley's Comedy Club
written by J.J. Leslie
“We opened in conjunction with the Boston Comedy Festival,” recalls Tim Mcintire, who along with comedian Jon Lincoln, runs the six month-old stand-up spot in Boston, Mottley’s, “and we had the Smothers Brothers down here for a workshop. Tommy Smothers turned to me and said that Mottley’s reminded him of the Purple Onion in San Francisco. Okay, I can die happy having heard that.”
The club resides in the basement of Trinity Bar, nestled at the crossroads of the bustling business centers of Boston’s Financial District, the retail mecca of Downtown Crossing, and tourist-driven Faneuil Hall. I sat down with Tim and Jon before a Friday evening show. The two were at the club early trying out a new configuration of the sound system for the evening show.
While Boston is lauded for its comedy roots, many of its performers have complained loudly about how its clubs have been run. “A guy on my board,” says McIntire, “is actually a musician in Boston, and was just dumbfounded at how comedians were treated, mostly about the fact we dealt with getting paid by check three weeks later (if we were lucky), and not getting a piece of the door. Bands in Boston are responsible for packing their shows because they get a door deal. It’s the easiest way to make money doing this, and for a comedian to play a comedy club for a weekend and only get paid a fraction of what he could make with a door deal, it was absurd. And we all agreed. Jon approached me to see if I wanted to essentially put my money where my mouth was.”
Jon Lincoln had experience booking shows at colleges in the area and had already started a club with Jeff Fairbanks, The Comedy Lounge in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
“I fell into booking,” says Lincoln, “more as a chance to set up professional shows that I could perform in. I felt that I would improve as a comedian if I had a chance to get in front of an audience, and also get to work with better comedians. It sort of evolved from there to the point where I was working on booking and managing a room just as much as I was performing. That’s where Jeff Fairbanks came in as a business partner. He had a background in pro sound and theater tech, so at first I asked him to help with the Lounge to get the lighting better, make it sound good – to make it sound like a more professional show. The more he got involved, the more we started working on other aspects of running the business. Which was great, but my focus was always to make the rooms for the comedians, and myself. But, I also kept thinking I wanted to open a room in Boston itself. The whole idea grew from my experiences. Because of my experiences running the Lounge, I think Mottley’s is already showing signs of being more successful because this time I had a better idea of what I was looking for in a venue in Boston.”
Going in, Tim McIntire had a list of twelve mandatory things the new venue had to meet. “I spent the better part of three years looking for a space in Boston,” says McIntire. “Some of it was as simple: did the club or restaurant have a separate function room? I did not want to do comedy in a bar with the televisions on, a guy screaming at the Keno screen, and someone messing with the jukebox. Another was a focus on the restaurant. I did not want a comedy show to clash with the rest of the entertainment or ambience of the place. Nor, was I looking for a place where the comedy was squeezed between karaoke and trivia nights. I wanted some place that was willing to let comedy be one of the main attractions for the club. Room layout was important. It had to be a space that could be made so that the focus went towards the stage, not the bar, or whatever. Audience was important too. Boston is notorious for having bars that do not attract an open clientele. I did not want the club to get audiences that were too anti-comedy, or would mess up a show. I wanted it to be a place where an audience would come in spite of the venue to see a good comedy show.
“Tim came with a lot of performance experience,” says Lincoln, “and brought that to the table in terms of looking for a venue that was as close to ideal as possible. The more he became involved, the more he was out searching with me. A key thing that we really wanted to hit was intimacy of the room. We didn’t want the room to be absurdly big where local headliners would struggle to fill it, nor a room with a ceiling so high that the sound would be lost. So, it was a lot of technical things. Boston is not an easy place right now to find a venue that meets most of just the technical demands. We found Trinity Bar, this room, and saw that it had a ton of potential. It had everything on the list.
That’s not to say the room was ready to go, right out of the box. McIntire and Lincoln built the stage and installed the lights. The layout of the room had to be shifted. They brought in the long tables and chairs and were allowed to change the room from being another bar to being a more proper venue.
For their part, Trinity gave them the green light to do shows Wednesday through Sunday in the space, and not have to work in other entertainment. The two had to put some elbow grease to get things the way they liked them, but admit they are few venues that even came close to letting them do what they had to do to make the room work.
“Well, I have 16 years,” says McIntire, “of just working for the shadiest bookers and shittiest rooms on the planet. So, I was the one spearheading the idea of what we should and should not do for shows. I was the one who was pushing our model of paying our headliners half the door for every show we do. Because that, to me, made sense. Here’s the thing, Bill Blumenrich, who runs the show for the Comedy Connection, now at the Wilbuer Theater, always said that local comedians, though he’d love to have them and they were very funny, cannot and could not draw a crowd. Maybe around 1989, that was true. But in the age of Facebook, Myspace, email, and cheap marketing there more of a possibility for a comic, if given the right motivation, to draw a decent-sized crowd to a show. I used to resent that because I was a comic with a headlining act and was seeing these new comics put more people in the seats with less of an act. They had a full fledged marketing machine and no act. But, then it worked around in my head that I should not fight it. On one hand, yes, they did not quite have the polished act, but if they could bring people to a room, what club should say no to that? Let them develop and put people in the seats. I can be part of that as well. Today, it’s not like 1989. Back then, what was a comic to do, take our a newspaper ad? Mostly what you had was your name on the marquee to draw people.”
Lincoln says, “With Blumenrich, he was right, but it’s an old perspective. At the time when he started turning away from local comedy, comedians had the act, but did not have the means of promoting and marketing that they do today.”
Lincoln and McIntire contend that comics in the past also not given the incentive to promote themselves. At the time, and still in some places today, coimedians might perform for two hundred people in a room but they were getting paid $50. There was nothing to motivate them to try and bring more people in the room, because they would no see the financial increase from it. The two did not want to be club owners that just found a room, set up a microphone, and be done with it. They had seen that with countless rooms, where the interest in the place on behalf of the owner, booker, comics, and audience just faded out.
“Now,” says McIntire, “if you have three comics in this room, each attracts twenty friends for a good show, and the club attracts an extra forty people, you have a packed room. The legal capacity of Mottley’s is 135. So far for our Saturday shows have had about 101 people in the room. Just with word-of-mouth, and giving the comedians an incentive to promote their own show.”
“One huge factor with this space,” says Lincoln, “was the relationship we have been able to develop with the owner of Trinity Bar. He did not want to just slowly develop things or put restrictions. He basically left it to us to do what we wanted to run a successful business. He was open to it. There were too many other places that just did not want to bite on working a full comedy club. Trinity’s owners saw that we were willing to put our own money into making it a better club. We built the stage, bought the tables, chairs, lights, and everything before we even opened. We are still investing in the club too; working on a new sound system, making changes to the wall décor, adding televisions and a screen for people who want to do movies, video sketches, or Powerpoint. We are putting that money back into making it a cool room, making it a great place to perform, but also to make it a great place for an audience to come see a comedy show. I think the owners can see and respect that. It was just hard to find owners willing to be that open minded in other venues.”
Keeping an open mind is also a key component, they contend in expanding what they do with talent, expanding and developing it from the bottom up.
“My old school attitude,” says McIntire, “having started comedy back in 1992, is that weekends are sacred. They are the king of the hill of the showbiz week. It drives me crazy when I see people booking weak shows on a Saturday. I used to get yelled at if I did not show up in a suit jacket on a Saturday show. For weekends, Mottley’s is looking to book a mix of high level headliners, and/or comedians who have the potential to become high level headliners and are not being given a chance via other clubs running this format in Boston. We are not out to book the same 20 guys who have been headlining in Boston for the last 25 years each weekend. Those guys are extremely talented, and we want them to be part of the Mottley’s lineup, but we want to expand outwards to other comics from outside that loop and business model. We are booking comics to headline from other cities. We have had guys from New York, Los Angeles and Philly coming in.”
“When I was performing on road,” McIntire continues, “before moving to Boston, everyone knew everybody. I could be in El Paso, and a comedian I was working with on a given weekend would ask who I knew. I’d say who I worked with the previous weekend, and they’d know the guy. Then I moved to Boston, and the comedians asked who I knew. I’d mention the same names and most of the headliners would be like “who?” There were a few exceptions, but very few of those guys worked Boston, and a number of guys considered headliners in Boston really worked the road back in that day. Today, things have changed a little, but Boston still has that bubble where certain professional comedians just can’t break into the Boston club scene, even though they work all over the country otherwise. That cannot continue to happen, especially with shows of this format. So we are giving those guys from outside the city, those with really good quality acts that we think could hold up well with the right exposure to this scene, and we are giving them a foot in the door. Even if Mottley’s is the only place they end up being able to perform, at least they can add the stop on the road, and bring their act to this city.”
“I am seeing the same thing,” says Lincoln, “with my career now. I started in Boston, but I am doing weeks in New Jersey, Seattle, Florida, elsewhere in the country, and it’s not so much that those guys don’t know the top notch Boston headliners, they just don’t know Boston, because they have not had a chance to work with a lot of these guys.
“Boston is still thinking very provincial,” says McIntire. “Most of the clubs booking headliners do not provide a comedy condo or a hotel room. We are just starting to be able to do it. The Comedy Lounge did it in Hyannis. It’s not economic for a comedian to come into Boston, work for scraps, and then have to pay for their own hotel. So, comedians have been avoiding the city. The flipside is that some of the headliners make enough being local to stay local, and that’s fine, but other clubs have gotten comfortable with just having that available to them. So the bubble was created. Mottley’s does not want that to happen. What I have found in booking this room is that there are a lot of people around the country that want to work in Boston. I think the Boston Comedy Festival was the first to really work at bringing people from outside the city to perform, and I think that opened the general interest. There’s no doubt that comics outside the city know that the city has a reputation for developing good comics. But they don’t specifically know who we are. We are trying, as a club to work with that, or arrange a hotel for a weekend, or things like that to let the door be open. Our door deal makes things really simple for that in terms of paying. The headliner pays his openers out of whatever he or she makes for the evening. It simplified things on our side and on the headliner’s side, I think. And it gives a comedian the motivation to try and put people in the seats.”
Lincoln adds, “Tony V [veteran Boston comic] after his show here gave us a great compliment, ‘This is what comedy clubs used to be like.’ He had a sold out Saturday and just ripped it.”
For info on the club, visit www.mottleyscomedy.com.
J.J. Leslie is a comedian and writer from Boston.
Visit www.jjlesliecomedian.com.