NEW VENUE: Sound Stage Music Hall in Spartanburg

Some of you may remember a story we did many months ago with Upstate Recording and Management. Since then Josh and Kyle have been constantly busy recording and doing what they can from their studio, and their newest endeavor may be the biggest of them all. Recently the duo has taken over booking for Club Stoked in Boiling Springs, christening it Sound Stage Music Hall Sunday – Friday. The goal of the venue is to host all ages shows similar to what The Channel does in Greenville. We were recently able to catch up with Kyle Cheleotis and get the skinny on what exactly the boys have gotten themselves into! The club is located at 3555 Boiling Springs Rd. (Hwy. 9) in Boiling Springs SC, right near the Clock restaurant.

Wes Gilliam: How did you guys come into working with Sound Stage? It seemed kind of random and out of the blue in some regards.
Kyle Cheleotis: They already were being successful with the teen club “Club Stoked and wanted to branch out into doing shows. Josh heard about this and got in touch with Diane (Club Stoked/Sound Stage owner) and they needed help managing booking and running sound and getting it off the ground. We met and it snowballed into a partnership. We are going to be working together to support the music scene is Spartanburg/Greenville. We will be handling all their booking. Booking should be directed to Booking@upstaterecordings.com Show info and calendar www.upstaterecordings.com and we have a facebook. Facebook.com/soundstagemusichall.

WG: Spearheading an all-ages venue is very commendable, why did you guys decide to go this route?
KC: There are tons of places to have shows but most of them are serve alcohol. This limits the willingness for parents to letting their kids to attend shows. I remember having those arguments with my parents and wanted to give kids a place that they can go and their parents will be okay with. Furthermore, there are not a lot of things to do for the teenage crowd in this area and we wanted to support the community by giving them an outlet.

WG: What do you look for in acts playing the venue ?
KC: We are booking all types of music. Any genre, any style and demographic. If its music we want you to play. We require some type of media to be booked, either online music/youtube ect.
We would like locals to draw at least 15 people.

WG: It’s really cool that right off the bat you got Spoken to play a brand new venue, how did that come about ?
KC:Josh has done a lot of photo work for them and has a good relationship with them. He reached out to them about playing and they happened to need a date in our area. We happily obliged them. It was funny because we were actually supposed to open the following Sunday with a free open house and ended up opening 3 days earlier. (We are still having the open house.)

WG: Tell us a little bit about how the venue is set up? (Capacity, concessions, parking, misc etc.)
KC: We have ample parking. We have one of the biggest parking lots in Boiling Springs. For concessions we serve soda, milkshakes, energy drinks, cheese sticks, pizza, nochos and a lot more. We have 4 pool tables and 1 air hockey table. We have a max capacity around 300.

WG: Now to get a little techy, what kind of sound equipment does the venue have? That’s one thing I would want to know if I was in a band playing there for the first time!
KC: We have two flown 15 inch mains, 2 18 inch subs, 4 12 inch monitors with independent mixes. We have a 16 channel board with 6 channels of compression/gate/limiting. We have a full lighting terrace. The stage is 25 x 25.