Robert Linton: It's wild to think it's been 15 years. And I remember I was performing a little house concert, and my business partner -- he and his wife had just moved to Logan. And I remember after the show was over, we started talking music. And he said to me, "You know, I've got this place that I've been looking at on Federal Avenue that I'm considering turning into a recording studio, it was an old consignment shop." And I was like, "Wow, that's great. You know, I'd love to come in and see what your ideas are." And as we were browsing the building, I remember seeing downstairs and I said to him, "You know, this would be a great spot down here for the performers to be playing and upstairs, where you're already envisioning the studio, it'd be a perfect combination studio-venue that would meet the needs of local artists." That was the beginning of something great. And it's amazing to think how there was so many other people that were so crucial in how it came to be as it is today,
Dayne Teigeler: Which is where I'm glad you got me involved.
Robert Linton: Yeah!
Dayne Teigeler: Helped a little bit with the construction. And I became the street team manager for the venue. That's where the bands would send in their posters. And I knew all the places up on campus and all the places around town, I could usually within an hour have 10 to 20 posters up. And the beauty of the venue was that it was fairly intimate, it was only a 50 person venue. But you were able to get in some big bands to play there.
Robert Linton: It was a really interesting time. There were some bands that were right on the brink of making it big. And that's actually how I started to get our name out there; by just looking at other venues' schedules and seeing lists of bands, looking at their particular tour schedules, and reaching out being like, "Hey, do you want to do a stop through?"
Dayne Teigeler: Well, and we're such junkies for that stuff. We always looked on tour lists and try to convince bands to play -- even if they didn't have a Salt Lake date -- bands that we are fans of saying, "Hey, who can I try to hook you up with? You guys have a day off in between these two cities that usually bands play Salt Lake."
Robert Linton: Yeah. And being able to connect with the bands, it was a very different time, because a lot of them still were working with MySpace,
Dayne Teigeler: Correct.
Robert Linton: It was always fun to have a band show their enthusiasm when you reached out to them, saying, "Hey, I've got this little venue that we just opened up. Do you want to come and play one of those in- between shows?" And would they get excited? "Yeah, sure. Let's stop through, see what we can do." And going back to all the people who contributed to the venue, there was so many great local bands that not only were very talented musicians, but they did so much to help out for those touring bands.
Dayne Teigeler: The kind of fun thing about the venue was that you guys often switched it up where sometimes whoever the biggest draw was wasn't necessarily the band that was touring. It was a local band.
Robert Linton: Yeah.
Dayne Teigeler: And so you would have them play last, so that everybody was there to see all the bands as much as possible and really get the biggest exposure, because you want to promote this music so much. And we wanted this to succeed, that whatever we can do to have bands be appreciated and really further the scene because we wanted to take part in the scene.
Robert Linton: The beautiful thing about music and how it can reach so many different people and they can feel excited to be able to share that. The many different ways that we've been able to express ourselves through music and to give other people an opportunity. I mean, it's a pretty incredible thing.
Dayne Teigeler: That's been the beauty of our friendship, and I thank my lucky stars every day to have had you as my friend.
Robert Linton: Oh, yeah. I feel like definitely a brother for sure.
