When Stable Hall launched in January 2024, the 1,000-capacity venue located inside historic structure at the Pearl promised to raise the bar for live music in San Antonio.
However, it didn’t take long for cracks to appear. Stable Hall parted ways with original general manager Libby Day, a longtime music-scene veteran, in early 2025. A few months later, Dallas-based Wood Hall LLC — originally hired to run day-to-day operations — sued the venue for breach of contract, and the owners countersued.
Late last year, Stable Hall took steps to right the ship, first hiring music-venue vet Garrett Zimmerman as GM, then retaining Dayglo Presents — owned by longtime concert promoter Peter Shapiro — to oversee booking and other operations.
An operator of storied venues include the Capitol Theatre in New York, Dayglo brought in high-profile talent buyer Hannah Gold, whose resume includes Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion festival and the Newport Festivals, to oversee its San Antonio partnership.
The Current caught up with Gold by phone to discuss Dayglo’s plans to rejuvenate Stable Hall and get a better understanding of how it fits into the Alamo City music ecosystem. Although she took a pass on discussing the Wood Hall legal fight and the venue’s past failures, she spoke openly about her ambition to raise its profile.
The following conversation is edited for space and clarity.
As impressive as Stable Hall is, it launched in an already crowded and competitive music market in San Antonio, which some people attributed to its problems gaining traction. How do you make it stand out?
One of the most important things in the music industry is your relationships with people, and what else you’re working on that people you can use to leverage and get things done. I talked to a couple of people who’d worked in the room before. Nobody really had super-negative things to say. It just seemed like they didn’t have the right person in the room. …
But when I found the room, actually walked in and started looking at their calendar — what was upcoming — I saw there’s a lot of challenges in that market. There’s a lot of bigger promoters that already work in [similar-sized venues]. It’s a beautiful room. The size is flexible, but it can also be limiting, depending on what you’re going after.
I specifically came from a room in New York, City Winery, where I grew into a buyer and where I booked 350 shows a year. So, I’m used to volume booking. It’s a very different beast when you’re in a city like San Antonio, just because what does this market support?
I think the question for me when I walked in was like, “What’s the marketing team in place?” Which now, of course, Dayglo is helping supplement marketing, and Surefire’s our PR team, and these are both really good, strong teams.
It just seems like having a couple of people — Pete [Shapiro] and myself — behind the venue, who have a lot of relationships with agents and managers [is vital]. We can go to people and say, “Hey, we really need to get this venue off the ground. We really want to provide it with some world-class entertainment. Guys, we need you to help us get some shows in here.”
And that’s how starting a venue works, because there’s always competition in every market. I’ve worked in markets all over the country at this point.
So, you’re saying that you’re tasked with hitting “Restart.” You’re not just coming in to do a slightly better version of business-as-usual.
One-hundred percent. … When you’re a music booker, you’re looking for agents to be hitting you up about shows, in addition to the proactive outreach you do. There needs to be that flow. And whether I’ve worked in Rochester or Buffalo, or California or wherever, you hope that there’s more of that kind of natural flow.
And I think that the room was in more of its infancy stage than I realized when I came on board, but that’s OK. That just means that you take the first six months to a year to really hammer on it, give it attention. … Artists are on the road so much these days, that if it’s a good room and you take care of people when they come through, and it sounds good and the green rooms are nice, they’re going to want to come back.
How soon are people going to see changes at Stable Hall?
I think it’s going to take six months to really get things up and running. … When you book a show, you’re booking it like four or five, six, maybe seven months out most of the time. …
When it comes to establishing a venue, City Winery, the first year it opened, they had, I think, 60 or 70 shows, which is pretty good, but also, it’s New York City — everybody plays here on every tour. By the time I left in 2021, it was closer to 400 [shows a year] between the upstairs room and the downstairs room.
Is that the volume you’d like to be doing here?
I’m still learning the market. San Antonio is a much larger city than I think most people expect, but it depends on the appetite for music in the city. And obviously, we don’t want to book shows that aren’t going to sell. So, I have to figure out, over the course of the next few months, which nights do people want to go out in San Antonio? Will people go out on a Tuesday if it’s the right show? Hopefully. …
So, ideally, I’d love to have three to five shows a week. That would be awesome. If the market can support it, we’re going to do it. And if not, we’re just going to put the best shows in possible and keep the volume as high as we can.
I have heard some music fans complain they never fully grasped Stable Hall’s identity. Is that something you think is important to address?
Before I take on any job, I call people in my network and I say, “Hey, man, do you know about this? What are your thoughts on the room? Have any of your artists played it?” … And every piece of feedback I got about the space was that it was really a nice place to play. Agents that have been there have really enjoyed it. Managers, they’ve just said, “We’d love to continue bringing business to the room.” Which to me means it’s got all the right bones and it just needs the right people running the ship, and hopefully we are those people.
We’re definitely going to give it our best shot. And I think Pete and I don’t do anything half-assed. … Pete and I take everything we do seriously, and we want to bring our best game face to the table and see what we can bring to the venue. So, I think it’s a great space. And again, I just think San Antonio is such an interesting city with a lot of culture. I feel like we’ve just got so much to work with there.
And I looked at the room originally and I thought, “Oh, the programming they’ve already gotten here makes a lot of sense, the Dave and Gillians and the Shakey Graves and that kind of thing, but I think they could probably do a lot more.
So, in addition to doing a lot of Americana, country, alt-rock, whatever, I want to see what else works in the space — through experimentation of booking shows and seeing how they do … . And hopefully also, the added element of Dayglo’s marketing team helping with the in-house marketing. Dayglo are complete pros, and they’ve been in the business for a long time.
When the venue opened, the original team promised local acts would be part of this mix, but as you know, that’s not always easy for venues of this size to pull off. Can you make local musicians part of the mix in a way that makes sense?
There’s a lot of different ways to do it. And again, that’s something you face in every market. …
One thing [we] talked about was figuring out if we wanted to do some residencies or showcases and book multi-artist events — especially if there are any other events we can build around … . And maybe it’s a really low ticket price, maybe there are some organizations we can work with that can help underwrite some shows for us to support local artists, any kind of cultural boards or things like that.
I used to go to the Canadian consulate in New York and see if they would help partner on a show with me to bring in a musician from Montreal or Toronto. …
You also have opportunities when you book national touring act and they’re not touring with a support act … . So, I have a whole list of local artists in any market I’ve booked that we can call and say, “Hey man, would you be willing to come in and do a 30-to-40 minute opening set for Alejandro Escovedo or something?” And that’s a really great way to help developing artists have exposure, or people who have been around for a long time who just want to play. …
When you work for a small promoter, one of the good things is there’s not a lot of red tape or bureaucracy to work through. You sort of have an idea, and if it’s so smart or it will work, then you give it a shot and see what happens.
Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
