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On Dec. 31, 2017, local funk outfit Galactic played their annual sold-out New Year’s Eve bash at New Orleans’ famed Tipitina’s. The event was a long-standing tradition, but this time the beloved venue failed to pay the band. As one of the stage’s most frequent acts, the band and their management knew something wasn’t quite right.
According to Galactic bassist Robert Mercurio, the band was informed by Tipitina’s owner Roland Von Kurnatowski that he was sorry, but there was no money. The band started hearing that other acts who played the then 40-year-old venue weren’t getting paid either. Von Kurnatowski, who reportedly purchased the venue without having stepped foot in it in 1996, “was mismanaging the money,” Mercurio explains.
The venue’s financial struggles led to conversations between Von Kurnatowski and Galactic’s manager Alex Brahl of 7S Management, who threw out the crazy idea that the band should purchase Tipitina’s. The band members assumed Von Kurnatowski wasn’t interested in selling, but after a few months of conversations with their manager circumstances changed.
Von Kurnatowski “thought it was a good idea,” Mercurio says. “Truthfully, he had been approached by the Live Nations and the AEGs over the years and one of the coolest things he did was that he didn’t go to the highest bidder. He really wanted it to land in what he thought were proper hands, to keep it local and keep it focused on what it was intended to be.”
The Tipitina’s building was first constructed in 1912 and over the past 100 plus years, it was utilized as a gambling house, gymnasium and brothel before becoming a music venue in 1977. A group of 14 local music enthusiasts, who wanted a fair club where musicians wouldn’t be taken advantage of, each put $1,000 in and opened The 501 Club on Jan. 14, 1977, but eventually renamed it Tipitina’s after the song “Tipitina” by New Orleans legend Professor Longhair. Professor Longhair (real name Henry Roeland Byrd) created a unique style by fusing rhumba rhythms with boogie-woogie, blues and southern R&B and was a frequent performer at the club before his passing in 1980.
For years the venue housed a restaurant, bar and a juice bar (allegedly the origin of the banana in the Tipitina’s logo). A two-story building at the time, there were also apartments above the club where Cyril Neville of the Neville Brothers once lived, as well as countless other musicians, and, in the 1980s, one of the apartments housed the studios of radio station WWOZ. The radio station would occasionally broadcast a live Tipitina’s show by dropping a microphone through a hole in the floor.
The venue was remodeled in the 1980s to become the venue it is today – getting rid of the apartments above and creating a venue with high ceilings and a balcony, creating backstage areas and enhancing sightlines. The juice bar is gone, but a mural of Professor Longhair hangs above the stage of the 800-capacity venue audiences see today.
Despite its deep local history and legendary status among independent spaces, owning and running a single small club is a difficult feat for anyone, let alone a touring band like Galactic. On top of the typical complications of running a club – increasingly thin margins, constantly looming recession and the attention economy – Tipitina’s was also saddled with a bad reputation in years prior to the band’s interest in purchasing it.
According to Mercurio, once the band was able to convince the local Small Business Association that they were qualified to purchase the venue, they soon found out Tiptina’s had been blacklisted by pretty much every booking agent due to lack of payment from the previous owner.
“It was a shock and sad to hear that,” Mercurio says. “It made sense. We were like, ‘God, why don’t any of these national acts play here anymore? What happened?’ So, we have been digging ourselves out of that.”
Their efforts have paid off with acts like The Killers playing a warmup show at the venue prior to their appearance at Jazz Fest two years ago. Additional national acts like Lyle Lovett, David Cross, Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine have also recently played the venue.
In addition to not paying acts that performed at the venue, the previous owner Von Kurnatowski was reportedly under investigation by the FBI for an alleged Ponzi scheme. Von Kurnatowski died in 2019 after he shot himself during a hunting trip on his farm in Mississippi.
To sweeten the deal for national touring acts – who could have their choice of endless venues in New Orleans, including the Live Nation-owned House of Blues – upon purchasing the venue in 2018, Galactic immediately got to sprucing up the backstage.
“If you make the musicians feel honored or at least give them a decent place to sit, it’s gonna make the show better and the experience for the audience is going to be happier,” Mercurio says. “So, one of the first things we did was upgrade the backstage with not a lot of money, but gave it a fresh coat of paint and bought some better used furniture.”
Tipitina’s has since upgraded the backstage more significantly. “We’re not going to beat Live Nation and AEG on money. They’re always going to have deeper pockets, but we can beat them at being the cool place to play in town,” Mercurio adds.
Less than two years after getting the keys to the building, Galactic faced another unforeseen hurdle – a worldwide pandemic that shut down live music.
“We’re not only a band who’s out of work, but now we own this club and it was super stressful,” says Mercurio, who adds that they got creative and held high-end streaming events. They brought in multi-cameras and cranes and began selling a series of shows that would stream every Friday night to give friends and families some quality entertainment when they could not leave the house. The series went on for two seasons, while they and other venues affiliated with the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) fought for and eventually received funds from the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant in 2021.
The band also started the vinyl subscription, the Tipitina’s Record Club. Started in December of 2020, the club’s selection is curated by Mercurio and Galactic saxophonist Ben Ellman and delivered to members every other month. The monthly selections range from reissues that can’t be found elsewhere, exclusive recordings of live Tipitina’s performances or newly produced New Orleans records. Everything is pressed at a local plant in New Orleans and shipped to people across the globe for 3,000 members.
The vinyl club “was something we wanted to do just to make ends meet during the pandemic, but we’re on our 28th release, which is kind of crazy,” says Mercurio. “I mean, 28 times 3,000 – it’s really amazing how many records we put out there.”
Seven years later and several hurdles overcome, Mercurio says Galactic has no regrets about buying the building and the business.
“When I moved here as a 17-year-old, I was [at Tipitina’s] within the first couple of weeks and had some of the best nights of my life seeing music,” says Mercurio. “It sounds great. The staff’s really chill. The outside area around the club is bustling. On the sidewalk, you can hang out and have a smoke and still hear the band. It checks a lot of the boxes of what I think a live music experience should be.”
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