White River Junction
If you’re looking for performers of folk, rock, Americana and other secular forms of live music at the 4,000-square-foot venue formerly known as Tupelo Music Hall, you’ll have to wait for building owner Mike Davidson to find a tenant willing to run the hall as a multi-purpose gathering spot.
“It’s small-market entertainment, so you have to have a little more than a music hall in there,” Davidson said recently. “We would like to keep it open in some form. Over the next two months, we’re rolling up our sleeves to look at whether we can have a venue with food, with entertainment, with the facilities to hold a function like a wedding or a sports-team banquet.”
After parting ways with the Londonderry, N.H.-based management of Tupelo Music Hall during the summer of 2014, over what he described at the time as “creative differences,” Davidson changed the name of the space to Freight House Hall.
Over the ensuing year, he collaborated with concert promoters such as Norwich’s Buddy Kirschner to book performers ranging from former J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf and Americana guru Peter Rowan to the psychedelic-country New Riders of the Purple Sage and veteran roots-rocker Richard Thompson, and hosted such events as the farewell concert by Dr. Burma on New Year’s Eve 2014, and Enfield native Brooks Hubbard’s final show before his move to Nashville last summer.
By the fall of 2015, Davidson said, the logistics of not only booking performers but overseeing the day-to-day operations of the space were cutting into his schedule as a redeveloper of other Upper Valley properties, such as the ExecuSuites apartment complex in the former Lebanon Junior High School.
Davidson seems open to a wide range of proposals for bringing Freight House Hall back into the Valley’s performing arts scene.
“I’m looking for a kitchen cabinet of folks who can book music and otherwise help out, as a proprietor or proprietors who can handle a food concession, a liquor license, and work the arts piece around it,” Davidson said. “We just need vendors, if you will.”
If Davidson can establish such an arrangement, Kirschner would welcome the chance to resume booking, on a more regular basis, acts that might not fill a Lebanon Opera House but would attract an audience of 200 or so.
“Agents are continuously calling me, asking if we can do shows in that space,” Kirschner said. “I really like being able to do stuff in my own backyard.”
Davidson added that anyone with ideas for multiple uses of Freight House can reach him by email at mike@ledgeworks.com.
“There’s a great business opportunity to keep it going if the right person or persons come along with a plan,” he said. “My ears are open.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.
