Daniel, Luke, and Jonathan Brindley are sitting on the balcony of Pearl Street Warehouse, showing me the best spot to watch a concert. The owners of Union Stage added the Wharf music venue to their portfolio a few weeks earlier and are in the process of Brindley-fying it—they’ve painted the interior, made arrangements for a stage curtain, and ordered a three-season canopy for the patio out front. “We overuse the word vibes,” Daniel says. “We say it all the time. What’s the vibe, vibe, vibe, vibe?” He points out the tray installed on the railing at just the right height to set down your beer glass while you watch a band.
The vibes are the fun part. The brothers’ professional lives are roughly divided into a few buckets. There’s presenting live music, there’s getting the vibe just right—they’re extremely particular about sound systems and choosing the right music to play before the concerts begin—and then there’s what they call “owner crap”: calling someone to fix the lights in a fridge behind a bar, or driving to Virginia to sign documents, or maintaining HVAC systems. The tradeoff, says Daniel Brindley, the youngest of the three brothers and the CEO of their organization, is “the fact that you’re basically throwing parties every night.”
The owner crap doesn’t faze them. The Brindleys bought the Vienna club Jammin Java when they were in their early 20s, and they’ve slowly increased their footprint in the area in the 23 years since. Next was Union Stage, a couple dozen steps away from Pearl Street Warehouse, and they’re the exclusive promoters for the Howard Theatre, the Theatre at Capital Turnaround, and the Miracle Theatre. This week, they announced that they had rebranded their umbrella company as Union Stage Presents, with a new website, logo, and graphic identity that includes color coding for each venue. “It’s a coming-out kind of thing,” Daniel says. “It’s a little bit strutting our stuff, but it’s also connecting the dots for the public and the industry to say we’re doing all this stuff.” They plan to turn Pearl Street Warehouse’s box office into a fee-free, one-stop shop for all their venues, and they run their own online ticketing system, with fees that Daniel notes are lower than Ticketmaster’s.
More than 200 people now work for Union Stage Presents, across all six venues and in their office in the Howard Theatre. Jonathan lives in Rockville, Daniel lives in Reston, and Luke moved to New York from DC a few years ago to be closer to two of his children. Luke and Daniel, who both studied music at Rutgers University, were initially interested in playing live music rather than presenting it. They lived in northern New Jersey and had a band called—what else?—the Brindley Brothers, but when their dad heard about a troubled venue in Northern Virginia, he suggested his sons take over. All three did. Historically, Daniel handled booking, Luke was in charge of finances and marketing, and Jonathan oversaw operations. “I was there every day, mopping the floors, cleaning up the bathrooms, making sure the bands got paid,” Jonathan says. While those responsibilities are fluid, they’re still the basic roadmap for how the brothers operate the company today.
“We developed an unexpected love and passion for small venues and venues in general and live concerts,” Daniel says. “Luke and I would tour, and we would go to good gigs and bad gigs. We knew what it’s like to sit in traffic and get to a gig and be exhausted and stressed out.” They made sure artists felt comfortable. There’s a space inside for music lessons. They’re particularly psyched that kids who take lessons can walk through the club and see a possible future for themselves.
Union Stage came 16 years later with the opening of the Wharf. The brothers had booked some shows outside of Jammin Java, but they were eager to start embracing what Daniel calls “the ladder mindset,” the ability to match artists with venues that suit the size of their audience. (Bon Iver and Paramore played Jammin Java earlier in their careers, for instance.) Pearl Street Warehouse has about the same capacity as Jammin Java, but it’s in the District, not in a strip mall in Vienna, so that’s appealing to many artists. It’s booked a lot of Americana and roots rock in the past, but the brothers are sure it could work for indie bands, hip-hop artists, and more. The ladder goes upward from there: Miracle Theatre accommodates around 350 people, Union Stage can hold 500 if they’re standing, Capital Turnaround offers seating for 850, and the Howard has a capacity of 1,200 standing and 600 seated.
And then there’s the food and beer. The taps at each venue are overwhelmingly local. The brothers’ Union Pie, which serves Jersey-style “bar pie” pizza, has developed a signature pizza for each venue, and it’s proved so popular (Washingtonian‘s food team are fans) that they added a standalone kiosk at the Wharf. (The new website changes a visitor’s cursor to a pizza slice.)
Tuesday’s rebranding is a signal to local concertgoers that one company is behind any number of shows (a strategy that’s worked very well for I.M.P., the local firm that owns or manages venues such as the 9:30 Club, the Atlantis, the Anthem, the Lincoln Theatre, and Merriweather Post Pavilion), but it’s also aimed at out-of-town artists and agents. The company is on track to present around 800 shows in the area this year, and next year it expects to put on about 1,200. Ideally, Daniel says, the vibes will be immaculate at all of them—a show with a quiet singer/songwriter whose fans tend to be middle-aged should probably be seated, he notes, while the Belfast rap group Kneecap recently filled Union Stage with hundreds of rabidly partying Irish people. “We know how to do all that and be a chameleon,” he says.
For the next six weeks, anyone who buys tickets in person to any Union Stage Presents show at Pearl Street Warehouse’s box office (33 Pearl St., Southwest) will be entered to win one of six yearlong passes to every show the company promotes. There will also be a weeklong happy hour at the company’s venues.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
