Some exciting news from Cudahy: The venue formerly home to Vnuk’s and The Metal Grill will hold concerts once again. Today the Milwaukee punk band Direct Hit announced that they’ve purchased the tavern at 5036 S. Packard Ave. along with a network of investors and partners, and they plan to open a new event space there later this year.
“I’d been looking to open a club for a while, and I had been doing shows at The Metal Grill for a couple years before the place closed down,” frontman Nick Woods tells the Shepherd. “So I got word the place was up for sale right when they closed it, and the opportunity came together pretty perfectly. We just felt like this was the perfect place given how large it is. And I’ll be honest, the purchase price was really low, which was part of it. It just seemed like a perfect fit.”
According to a press release, the still unnamed-new venue plans to “offer a selection of video games and a cocktail menu featuring both non-alcoholic and adult beverages, domestic and craft beer, and bar food modeled after well-known frozen party snacks.” The band has already started renovating the space, and has adopted the building as its practice space and band headquarters.
Asked what kind of bookings people can expect to see at the venue, Woods says a little bit of everything. “We want it to be more of an all-purpose event space for DIY-minded people, not just a punk club or a metal club,” he says. “We’re trying to make it not just a place for live music, but a place that people who want to premiere their films can show them on a big stage with really good sound. We want to do comedy. We want to host classes.”
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Woods says he expects almost all of the events at the venue to be all-ages. “We don’t want to make an enormous deal that it’s an all-ages place,” he says. “It’s still a bar, and we’re still serving alcohol, so we’re probably not going to be stamping ‘ALL AGES’ on every flyer, but people will know that it’s a place where all ages are welcome.
“When I was doing all-ages shows at The Metal Grill we always planned the shows so they were over by 11 p.m. or ended at a more reasonable hour so we wouldn’t end up with teens skipping out of their parents, so we have experience with all-ages shows," he continues. "We’ll be wrist-banding people at the door, and everybody who is working here will be well-versed in how to responsibly manage all-ages crowds.”
Woods is optimistic about the club’s chances for success. He describes the other investors in the venue as responsible adults with modest savings who wanted to spend that money on something that matters to them. “I like the fact that we aren’t entirely motivated by profit,” Woods says. “We want to be able to keep the doors open, but that’s not the big motivating factor. Nobody expects to make thousands of dollars off this place. We just want it to be the kind of venue that would foster the kind of talent we always enjoyed seeing.”
As if that wasn't news enough from the Direct Hit camp, the band also announced yesterday that they have a new album coming out on Fat Wreck Chords this fall. It's called Crown of Nothing and you can stream its first single, "Welcome to Heaven," below.
