Tavan Anderson singing with the band CV at the Outer Space before COVID-19.
Sometime in the first three months of 2020, nearly every musician in Humboldt County played their last live gig. It's difficult to pin down the exact date of the general venue closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic but St. Patrick's Day is a good hinge, a pivot point where venue owners and employees had to calculate the safety of staying open during a very busy and boozy holiday. There's a superstitious temptation to place the date at the preceding Friday the 13th, or perhaps two days later, the Ides of March, whose ancient association with the murder of Julius Caesar has given it an augury of evil. In truth though, there isn't one set date when the live music went away, just a series of closures that fully metastasized by April of 2020. I spoke with a number of people who were directly affected by the closures in an effort to understand what a year of living without the live stage has been like for the people who make that stage matter.