Rachel Taft made her first visit to The Sidebar when she was 17 years old. A friend drove her from Annapolis to Baltimore to see a boyfriend’s hard-core punk band, and Taft remembers being awed by the scene she encountered inside the narrow basement bar across from City Hall.
“How can I be as cool as these people?” she wondered. Since that trip, she’s been back, by her estimation, for at least one show a year, and often many more than that — too many performances to count.
These days, Taft still spends a great deal of her time at the downtown Baltimore bar. Through her nonprofit, Feed the Scene, she’s the new owner of The Sidebar, which is in the midst of an extensive renovation aimed at keeping the venue around for decades to come.
More than 600 people have contributed to a fundraiser supporting the rehab project, which will upgrade everything inside the leased space from The Sidebar’s flooring to its sound system. The venue has been temporarily closed since late 2021 — with the exception of one show last year — to make way for the construction.
The effort will breathe new life into a Baltimore institution that struggled mightily during the coronavirus pandemic. For many in the city’s tight-knit music community, The Sidebar was too important not to save.
“Music venues of this size are dying,” said Taft, who works as an independent promoter helping bands book shows. Through Feed the Scene, she also hosts touring musicians at her “band and breakfast” hostel in Highlandtown.
For Taft, saving The Sidebar means preserving space for up-and-coming artists learning the ropes of the local music scene. The bar has been a haven for bands playing their first shows, as well as for those on the rise, including Turnstile, the Baltimore-based punk band that was nominated for three Grammys this year.
“Bands used to start in underground venues, but we’ve lost those spaces,” Taft said. “If we lose a venue of this size, we lose a piece of the ecosystem of the music scene.”
The legacy
Tucked away on a quiet street near City Hall, The Sidebar looks fairly unassuming from the outside, its presence announced by a single tattered maroon awning.
Inside, it’s a different story. Band stickers plaster the walls, the doors and even the ATM. Memorabilia like a beer tower with googly eyes and portraits of regular customers surround the bar.
The eccentric décor reflects a quarter century of history. The Sidebar opened in 1998, becoming a performance venue, Taft said, when the Ottobar, another concert spot that was a neighbor at the time, needed an extra stage.
Through the years, the bar has become home to a motley mix of regulars that echoes the quirkiness of the city itself. Before The Sidebar’s temporary closure, happy hour would bring lawyers from the nearby Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse — The Sidebar’s name is a nod to the courtroom discussions between lawyers and judges out of the jury’s earshot — as well as bike messengers wrapping up their work for the day. Later in the evening, punks in battle vests and mohawks would filter in for shows. The bar even made an appearance on “The Wire” as Kavanaugh’s, a watering hole popular among police officers on the HBO crime drama set in Baltimore.
The mingling of different crowds earned The Sidebar a reputation as a welcoming, inclusive hangout. Though known for punk and metal acts, the bar has also been host to hip-hop artists, DJs, drag performances and open mic comedy nights.
“You go into The Sidebar, it feels like Baltimore,” said Paul Przyborski, a sound engineer who has been visiting the bar since the 1990s. “It’s gritty, it’s gruff up front — but it’s got the softest teddy bear center.”
Przyborski, like many of The Sidebar’s regulars, is a musician who found a ready group of friends at the venue. He hosted his 40th birthday party there, and has years’ worth of stories about the place, including a night when his band’s planned performance was canceled after the actor Corey Feldman decided to take the stage.
Shows at the venue are known for their up-close-and-personal feel.
“The stage is 8 inches high: you’re not well above everybody else, you’re in the mix,” said Mitchell Nelson, another Sidebar regular who has performed at the venue dozens of times with pop-punk band BraceFace and ska-punk group Urban Crater. “People are right in your face, and there’s just this kind of organic energy that encompasses the place.”
Since the late ’90s, the landscape around the bar has changed, losing nearby music venues like the Ottobar, which moved to Charles Village, as well as Sonar and the Talking Head Club, both of which closed. The Sidebar stuck around, its own little island of punk rock camaraderie.
“Times change, but Sidebar has kind of always stayed the same, for better or for worse,” Przyborski said.
The work
If the “better” is the community, the “worse” would be the state of The Sidebar’s infrastructure.
Improvements to the venue have been few and far between over the years, Taft said, and they’ve been mostly patchwork in nature. When she took over the bar’s lease in August, she started an inventory of work to do: Repair cracked and dipped tiles, upgrade the HVAC system, replace a front door that won’t close all the way, allowing water to flow into the bar every time it rains.
A clean-out of the basement yielded four vans’ worth of junk, decades of detritus.
“It’s like cross-sectioning a tree,” Taft said. “No one ever took anything out of this building. Everything was just downstairs.” Once the trash was gone, she realized the basement had a black mold problem that needed swift remediation.
The more she looked, the more she found that needed work. “It’s like you pull a piece of string, and the sweater’s unraveling as you go,” she said.
Ultimately, she discovered the mezzanine floor was structurally unsound and would need to be replaced. Other improvements to the bar will include updates to the stage, acoustic tiling, new restrooms and a new HVAC system. She also plans to take down some walls to open up the space a little more.
All that work is pricey. Taft initially predicted she would need $80,000 to acquire The Sidebar and make repairs, but later raised the estimate to $100,000. It might end up costing even more, but “we can’t not do the repairs,” she said.
So far, she’s raised about $56,000 to pay for the improvements, including $46,000 through a GoFundMe campaign launched in December 2021. Taft said she is not drawing a salary for her work coordinating the repairs, and that all the funds will flow directly to the project.
Once The Sidebar reopens, the resources it generates will go back into its operations, paying for utilities, salaries, liquor purchases and upkeep.
The future
The idea is that the venue will need to earn only enough to subsist, rather than generate a profit, Taft said. She sees it as a public good: With the loss of local do-it-yourself spaces like the Bell Foundry in recent years, The Sidebar is one of the few remaining spots in Baltimore that offers a stage for artists of all ages and experience levels to perform.
Taft said she wants The Sidebar to offer the experience of an underground venue, but with the safety features of a concert hall.
“This place has to function as an underground venue and as a safe, aboveground venue,” she said.
Just how long all the upgrades will take is unclear. Taft hopes to have The Sidebar open again by the end of the year, but it could take longer, depending on permitting and the scope of the work.
For now, she’s in the thick of it. On a recent trip to the venue, the bar was littered with trash bags and boxes, construction gear and relics of the past. Contractors were busy taking down the bathroom walls.
Though the bar’s infrastructure is getting an overhaul, Taft is conscious about holding on to The Sidebar’s aesthetic. She’s saving all the stickers and tiles she can. Some paneling that can’t be saved might be repurposed for use on the bar top.
“All those stickers and graffiti are a part of the bar,” she said. “Realistically, we have to straddle the line between functionality and nostalgia.”
She plans to paint any new walls black. And fresh stickers will be welcomed.
While it may look a little more bare when it first reopens, Nelson doesn’t expect the updates to change The Sidebar’s soul.
“I’m sure it will feel different, just aesthetically. But I don’t think it will feel different as far as the feeling I would get being there,” he said. “It’s like comfort food almost: You can just go there and everything will be fine.”
