The Loading Dock has no planned public return

It’s been a couple months now since the last public, live concert at The Loading Dock, which leads to questions about what happened and why the only true all-ages venue in downtown Aberdeen has closed.

“It got bigger than we were prepared to deal with,” said Larry Cowles, who is renting the first floor space of the Becker Building — sitting at the intersection at East Wishkah and South I Street — which turned into The Loading Dock.

According to Cowles, Terry Emmert — the building’s owner — is not to blame for the venue’s closure.

“Emmert himself has been great,” Cowles said. “I haven’t had any issues with him.”

Justin Kautzman, who helped put on shows there, talked more about why The Loading Dock happened in the first place. While the 15 months between November 2022 and February 2024 were a fun surprise, it wasn’t supposed to wind up as a live music venue.

Kautzman said The Loading Dock was supposed to be a space where a group of musicians, and friends of theirs, “would have a space to be able to come in and do stuff. … Have a practice space that wasn’t a tiny garage, be able to bring some friends in and play for some friends (and) record in here,” Kautzman said.

Help wanted

“When we got this space, Larry had asked those of us who were using the space with him to help cover the cost,” Kautzman said. “My part of helping to cover that cost was to put on a couple shows and that would help out. That was the entirety of what we were gonna do. We were just gonna use this space for me to help pay for that. I was gonna bring in a couple bands and some friends who I knew, make a little bit of money, pay them a little bit of money, and just have fun doing the music stuff we do in our own space. We wouldn’t have to go find a bar to do it in.”

For the most part when the couple shows per-month were happening, admission to the shows was $10 per person. In addition to attending the shows, people could also buy candy, pop and energy drinks.

And then The Loading Dock took off “pretty big.” It became a venue in which people look for shows to attend. It wasn’t a pop-up site for a surprise show.

“It got bigger than what, like Justin said, our plan was. (Our plan was) just to have something to help cover the rent so that we weren’t gonna have to come out of pocket every month,” Cowles said. “That’s all we ever wanted, was just to cover the rent. If there was any extra, we’d give it to the bands.”

Cowles described his relationship with Kautzman as one that solves problems.

“And so in that light, as we were going, we’re like ‘OK, this kind of worked, we could make this better,’” Cowles said. “It got big enough to the point where we’re like ‘OK, now we either need to shift gears, hire employees, open up and get a business license and go full-on, or we need to pull back.’ Nobody was getting paid. It was all volunteers. It became a lot of work.”

Kautzman pointed out the volunteers who helped make The Loading Dock a success had other jobs and other elements to deal with outside of volunteering at the venue. Kautzman and Cowles had other parts of their lives to deal with as well.

“To be able to come down here, even twice a month altogether, to put on a four-hour show, there were some shows where I was here by myself,” Kautzman said. “We’d put on the show and then people’s lives happened. It’s not like people didn’t want to be there. People’s lives happened.”

And then there’s the point that they weren’t at all trying to turn it into a business.

Venue’s future

“This place can still have music,” Kautzman said. “The other day we set up on the sidewalk. We weren’t a public show. We weren’t asking people for money. Larry put his drums in the entryway. We put a speaker out front and a microphone and we just played for two hours.”

Other musicians joined in, too.

Larry said it was “super fun.”

For now, the venue will revert to what it was intended to do — provide a place to practice. Cowles’ band This Way Out usually practices there once-per-week. The space is also open for Kautzman’s band, Black Shepherd, to practice.

Whether the venue returns to the way it was, remains to be seen.

“We were just trying to be a fun place for musicians and their friends to be,” Kautzman said. “That can still happen.”

Cowles added to Kautzman’s point, saying “that’s kind of where we’re at now.”

“We almost had a slogan when we first started,” Cowles said. “Built by musicians, for musicians.”

Contact Reporter Matthew N. Wells at matthew.wells@thedailyworld.com.

Matthew N. Wells A few weeks before The Loading Dock closed as a live music venue it hosted international musicians Greg Rekus, pictured, and Tim Holehouse, from England. Rekus, from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, played along with Holehouse and a couple of Grays Harbor musicians — Hollow Hound and Ty Wulf, on Jan. 15.