This year, FestivALL celebrates 30 years of music at Charleston's best known dive bar, The Empty Glass.
Tonight and next Friday, the festival and the city pays tribute to the bar with special performances at Live on the Levee at Haddad Riverfront Park. This week, Zach Deputy plays with longtime bar regulars the Spurgie Hankins Band. Next week brings indie rockers Red Wanting Blue along with local stalwarts the Carpenter Ants.
Zach Deputy and Red Wanting Blue used to frequently play The Empty Glass, but this was before they started playing big music festivals and getting booked to perform on shows like "Late Night with David Letterman."
They don't come around as much now.
Empty Glass sound engineer and booking agent Jason "Roadblock" Robinson shrugged and said, "We can't afford them."
Nobody was mad. Robinson was glad to know them and proud that he could say they played The Empty Glass.
Stories of up-and-coming bands playing The Empty Glass are legion.
In the 1990s, Warren Haynes with Gov't Mule played The Empty Glass. The building was packed and, Robinson said, the crowd was so thick that Haynes took the band's blind keyboard player back to the bus.
The bar has also seen well-known performers before they were really famous, like The Avett Brothers, David Mayfield and guitar sensation Derek Trucks, back when he was a teenager.
Posters and fliers covering the tops of tables and vast swathes of the wall document the history.
Empty Glass owner Chris Chaber said simply, "The name is bigger than the bar."
The Empty Glass was named after a 1980 record by rocker Pete Townsend. The name came from bartender Jimmy Kaysar, who bought the place in 1985.
Before that, it was a lunch counter. It was a pool hall. It was also built somewhere else besides Elizabeth Street.
In the early 1970s, the building was one of several relocated after interstate highway construction changed the shape of Charleston.
"They brought the building here and then jacked it up," Robinson said. "They built the lower level brick by brick."
The bottom portion became the bar. The top has been used for storage, for dressing rooms or even a place to live.
Kaysar eventually sold The Empty Glass to Gary Price. Jon Steele and "Mountain Stage" guitarist Michael Lipton bought it from Price in 1992.
At the time, Steele also owned and managed two other bars in the area, The Levee on Kanawha Boulevard, which he co-owned with Lipton, and Gumby's in Huntington.
"Jon handled the business side, mostly," Lipton said. "I just booked the acts."
When the pair took on The Empty Glass, Lipton said it was floundering, but they thought the bar was worth saving.
"I don't think there's still a better-sounding room in Charleston," he said.
Still, good sound or not, The Empty Glass remained basic.
"We had a very cobbled-together PA system," Lipton said. "It sounded fine, but it wasn't pretty."
Through "Mountain Stage," Lipton could sometimes book acts appearing on the radio show to also perform at The Empty Glass while they were in Charleston.
Lipton booked Daniel Lanois, a record producer who made acclaimed records for Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, as well as several records for U2, including their rock masterpiece, "The Joshua Tree."
Lanois, also a songwriter, singer and guitarist, is very picky about sound quality.
"So, I was apologizing about the PA when he came in," Lipton said. But Lanois shrugged, added a couple of speakers to help fill out his song and played his show without a fuss.
Robinson said The Empty Glass has come a long way from a couple of speakers perched on a pair of cinder blocks.
"We're constantly upgrading," he said. "We've got the best-kept PA in town."
The Empty Glass also records bands now, something Robinson wishes someone had done years ago. So many shows are lost forever.
"They're all just stories now," he said.
Chaber bought The Empty Glass from Steele around 2001. It wasn't his first bar. It wasn't even the first bar he bought from Jon Steele.
In the late 1980s, Chaber moved from Connecticut to Charleston, where he attended classes and worked part-time for his father, who owned several local bars.
Work snowballed.
He said, "By the time I turned 20, I had experience running four different bars."
Steele sold The Levee to Chaber in the early 1990s, who ran the club for a couple of years before deciding to return to Connecticut.
He returned a few years later and began managing the bar at the Hotel Charleston.
One morning, while reading the classified ads, Chaber saw listing for The Empty Glass.
"It said something about the bar costing as much as a Volkswagen Beetle," Chaber remembered.
Chaber called Steele and the two agreed to meet at The Empty Glass on Halloween night in 2000. Chaber had never been inside the bar.
"I remember thinking, 'This is sketchy as hell,' but the place was packed," he said.
It was the bar's annual Halloween Hootenanny and business was booming. Chaber didn't understand why Steele wanted out.
Lipton said, "Running a bar is kind of like owning a boat. It's something you do because you want to, not because you make a lot of money. I didn't make any money, anyway."
Not everybody was happy about the change in ownership. Rumors circulated that Chaber would turn the place into a sports bar.
"I was never going to do that," he said. "When it's not broken, you don't fix it."
He did replace the bar stools --and got complaints. "People liked those torn and duct-taped stools," he said.
Chaber said he loves his regulars.
"We see everybody in here, all walks of life, from legislators and lawyers to students, hippies and maybe a hooker," he laughed. "Everybody gets along. We don't get a lot of trouble."
Chaber's biggest change has been making live music every night a part of The Empty Glass.
He said that's not always easy or profitable, but it's become part of the bar's reputation and they get a lot of good bands who are passing through on their way to bigger shows.
Mid week days are often travel days for traveling bands, Robinson explained.
"But if they're not doing a show that day, they're losing money," he said.
Sometimes a band will play the bar to help offset their food or travel costs.
"And a lot of them are really good," Robinson said.
They're just not known as well in West Virginia or in the region.
Chaber and Robinson said things look pretty good for The Empty Glass. Some nice accolades have come their way. In 2008, they were named one of the top 100 clubs by Nightclub and Bar Magazine and have been a finalist in other categories in the magazine since.
Chaber would like to find some way to expand on the music shows they offer, and bring in bigger name acts for larger crowds.
"But honestly," he said, "it would be great just to see if we can still be here for 40 years."
Reach Bill Lynch at lynch@wvgazette.com, 304-348-5195 or follow @LostHwys on Twitter.