J. P.
Yelp
I've been going to The Back Room for over 5 years as it's generally a nice place to see music, but I've become increasingly concerned about the cleanliness and condition, as well as the owner's behavior.
The main space is acoustically great and the venue is certainly intimate as others have noted. The sound system, run by Sam, is hit or miss, often having buzzing or other issues that he doesn't seem to care about. Cables are almost always a mess and there's usually a pile of drums in the corner of the stage, which is rather unprofessional. It never looks great.
The furniture (couches) are certainly cozy but I doubt they get cleaned at all, let alone regularly. So, if you want to sit on a public couch, knock yourself out.
Enter the kitchen or either of the two bathrooms and you'll immediately get the sense that someone lives at the venue. The first bathroom has a shower and usually has pill bottles, personal hygiene products, and other materials out in the open. It's never very clean and feels more like a dormitory bathroom than anything that belongs in a public music venue.
It's not unusual for the office space to reek of a certain kind of smoke.
Sam, as hard as he tries, has a a sort of unsettling presence and on several occasions I've seen him insist on sitting in with artists who don't seem to want him there - sometimes playing bongos, sometimes playing piano, and rarely fitting into the music very well (overplaying, playing too loudly, etc).
I'd be really thrilled if Sam could clean up this space, including the back areas, and be a little bit more conscious of the way he addresses the crowd and how much figurative "space" he takes up.
