20 Years of Shank Hall

Even before he opened Shank Hall 20 years ago this month, Peter Jest was the promoter some Milwaukee music fans loved to hate. “I’m an aggressive competitor and I speak my mind,” Jest offers in explanation, and for once he’s being diplomatic. He got his start by steamrolling the unimaginative, established entertainment committees at UW-Milwaukee; his own student organization, the Alternative Concert Group, put the college on the map during the ’80s as a destination for musicians such as Warren Zevon, Black Flag, T-Bone Burnett, The Replacements and Iggy Pop.

An outsider on campus and in the local music scene, Jest was driven by an outsider’s ambition to knock down the door and sit at the table. Jest was never subtle and poker wasn’t his game. Football was more his sport, and more often than not he scored touchdowns, even if it meant bruising someone’s feelings on the way to the end zone. The forward pass from nowhere to one of Milwaukee’s longest-running rock clubs was a long shot, and Jest did it without the benefit of deep pools of money. He made enemies, but also loyal friends. Some of his employees have been with him for more than 15 years; some of the artists he booked from the beginning, including Arlo Guthrie and John Prine, continue to work with him in preference to promoters with deeper pockets and a longer reach. He has made a living from music without growing rich in an industry where the margins have shrunk. He could have made lots more money running a bar business with happy-hour drink specials. One can only believe him when he says he did it for love of music.

In high school Jest entered every concert ticket contest and usually won; he collected attendance figures and box-office numbers the way some kids collect baseball statistics. His knowledge caught the eye of Steve Mandelman, a Milwaukee concert promoter who set him on the first gopher rung of the business, and Jest, barely out of high school, scrambled up the ladder. Within a few years he worked as tour manager for the Violent Femmes, booked shows for Cellar Door Productions (later absorbed by Live Nation), promoted concert tours around the Midwest and dominated live music at UWM as president of the Alternative Concert Group (full disclosure: I was vice president) before opening his own club.

“I was 25 and decided I needed a base instead of always renting other people’s venues,” he explains. Named for the imaginary Milwaukee concert hall in This Is Spinal Tap, Shank Hall was a local nightclub pioneer for smoke-free concerts and early start times for music fans who work for a living. Shank has excellent sightlines. There are no bad seats. And unlike many bar owners turned promoters, Jest opens Shank only on show nights.

With its legal capacity of 300, Shank Hall filled a niche for bands too big for the city’s smaller clubs but not popular enough for the Pabst or the Rave. Shank was an early career stop for Liz Phair, Alanis Morissette and Smashing Pumpkins and a comfortable venue for legends like Sun Ra, Mick Fleetwood and Richard Thompson. Veteran Milwaukeeans Paul Cebar, Pat McCurdy and Sammy Llanas play Shank along with younger bands such as Chapman Party of Five and the Stereo Addicts.

Despite the track record, one local music fan and club DJ summed up the public attitude this way: “There are people who’ll gladly go to Shank Hall, people who’ll go grudgingly to see their favorite bands and people who won’t go no matter who’s playing.” Some local musicians criticize Jest for charging for the use of his soundboard. He counters that it’s not his soundboard, but belongs to a contractor who needs to be paid, and that the quality of the PA at the club has seldom been questioned. Other fans complain of heavy-handedness in enforcing the 21-plus law, tightness in guest lists and what some see as ill-disguised sensitivity to criticism and outright hostility toward all competitors.

“It's no small thing to keep a live music club in business for 20 years,” says Mike Benign of Blue in the Face, one of the ’80s-era Milwaukee bands that reunited for the club’s 20th anniversary. “So as a musician and music fan, I appreciate the commitment Peter and Shank Hall have made to live music. As a fan, many of the best shows I've seen over the years—Black Francis, Redd Kross, Del Amitri, Trip Shakespeare, The Posies, Glenn Tilbrook, Jonathan Richman, John Doe, Marshall Crenshaw—were Shank shows. It's a�great place to see and hear a show. Not a bad seat in the house, and a great-sounding room.”

“My accountant thinks I’m crazy to keep it open, but I think a club this size is important to the city,” Jest says. “Every time you book a band you take a chance. Some things work, some things don’t.”