Rich Howells

NEPA SCENE PODCAST: Episode 4 – The V-Spot and Thirst T’s on the bar business in NEPA

NEPA SCENE PODCAST: Episode 4 – The V-Spot and Thirst T’s on the bar business in NEPA
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Professionally recorded every Monday at The Stude in TwentyFiveEight Studios in Scranton and released exclusively on nepascene.com every Tuesday, the NEPA Scene Podcast is a free supplement to the website, expanding on the arts and entertainment stories covered on the site and going beyond them to discuss other news and entertainment topics.

Each week, the unedited and uncensored podcast features Rich Howells, NEPA Scene founder and editor; Mark Dennebaum, president and owner of TwentyFiveEight Studios; Lauren Quirolgico, commercial and content strategist at Lavelle Strategy Group and editor at TwentyFiveEight; and in the control room, Jimmy Reynolds, a musician, teacher, and lead audio engineer at TwentyFiveEight. Every episode streams on SoundCloud and nepascene.com.

Local entertainment media often covers events from the perspective of artists, but what about the venues that host and support these artists every week? In this week’s episode, we wanted to give the owners of these businesses a chance to tell their side of the story, so we talked to Tom “T” Tell of Thirst T’s Bar & Grill in Olyphant and Vinnie Archer of The V-Spot in Scranton about what it takes to run a successful bar in NEPA while still contributing to the local music scene. Known for their humor and candor, “The Sidewinder” and “The Dragon” openly discussed the costs and economic challenges of running a business in NEPA, how they choose what bands play at their venues and what they get paid, and the constant hard work and marketing it takes to stay afloat, among other topics.

The conversation was so good that it ran much longer than expected, so we had to break it up into two parts this time. Be sure to listen to both Parts A and B for the entire show.

Part A:

Part B:

Photo by Tom Bonomo/Eyedesignstudios