Downtown venue open for music

The corner building space at 412 W. Sprague Ave. has served as the home of one music venue or another for awhile. You may recall a time when the Casbah was there; later it was A Club and most recently (and briefly) Club 412. Since late February, though, that space has housed the Pin concert hall, the latest business endeavor of local venue owner Tom “T.C.” Chavez.

Chavez has been a sort of father figure in the Spokane music scene for several years. In 2008, he opened an all-ages venue called the Cretin Hop as a place for his sons’ bands to play; it was rechristened the Hop when it moved in 2011 to its current Monroe Street location. The Hop is still in operation, but it will be closed June 7 – the building will be going up for sale – and the Pin will be Chavez’s main focus now.

This will be the first venue Chavez has operated in downtown Spokane, and the location suggests new possibilities for him.

“I thought the opportunities would be greater, being able to participate in some of the things that happen downtown,” Chavez said. “That was the intriguing aspect of it. … I thought the location was better than what we’ve had outside of downtown.”

The Pin offers triple the legal capacity of the Hop, as well as an upstairs sports bar and a street level lounge (Chavez intends to turn this into a cantina). The business as a whole is registered to Pinnacle Northwest (“the Pin” designates the concert area alone), which is so named because Chavez said this undertaking represents the “pinnacle” of his career.

The Hop was known primarily for its heavy metal and hard rock shows, with bills often jam-packed with five or six different bands. Those kinds of shows will still happen at the Pin, but Chavez wants to add a little more variety to his schedules.

“I want to change the flavor a little bit,” he said. “As varied as we’ve been over the last seven years, from acoustic to death metal, there are still some things we haven’t done.”

The Pin will still cater to bands of all ages and genres, and Chavez said it’s important that young people not feel marginalized or restricted while visiting the venue.

“We don’t have to seclude them or put them in a corner,” he said. “They’ve got about 90 percent of the freedom you do assuming that you’re over 21. There are only a couple sections they can’t go in, and they’re small sections. That’s the way it’s been with all three of our venues.”

Having been an integral part of the local music scene for nearly a decade now, Chavez said he’s noticed a downturn in the number of younger bands playing regularly around town. But perhaps that will change with a new all-ages venue moving downtown and providing young people with a platform to perform their own music.

“Kids need something to do,” Chavez said. “Not everybody likes going to see Disney movies on Friday nights, spending $15 at the theater. There is that small minority that still enjoys and really loves live music. It’s important that those young people who really love music, and love going out, to have somewhere to go.”