35 Years After the First Indoor Smoking Ban, Club Owners & Artists on How Live Music Changed: ‘Who Wants to Kill His Customers?’

When Bruce Finkelman opened the Empty Bottle in 1993, he smoked cigarettes, like many of his customers. It was part of his vision for the Chicago rock club: “The small, dark, smoky jazz room or rock ‘n’ roll club. Dingy. That really romantic view of the door opening up and smoke billowing out.” But like every other venue in Chicago and just about everywhere else, Empty Bottle has been smoke-free for decades — and Finkelman, now a non-smoking marathon runner, can’t imagine it any other way. “Even if I smell smoke,” the club’s owner says today, “I’m like, ‘Ugh.’”

The first U.S. indoor smoking ban went into effect almost exactly 35 years ago, in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Since then, just about every municipality followed, from New York City in 2003 to Chicago in 2006 to the entire state of North Dakota in 2012. During that same 35-year period, the concert business has boomed: The top 100 tours grossed $674.5 million in 1990, according to Billboard Boxscore, compared to $10 billion last year, an increase of 1,383%. Promoters, club owners and public-health experts say fans not having to breathe deadly secondhand smoke is almost certainly a reason for that growth.

“It’s part of the equation,” says Dr. Stephen Hansen, who, as the former director of the Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center’s cardiopulmonary department in San Luis Obispo, crusaded for the citywide indoor-smoking ban. “Most places in California, it’s hard to find a smoker these days, and they sure as hell don’t want to be packed in with a crowd where people are smoking.”

Adds Joe Shanahan, owner and founder of Metro, the 43-year-old Chicago rock club: “It really did help business. I believe there is a direct correlation.” He adds that parents were more willing to buy tickets for their 12-to-14-year-old kids to all-ages shows without worrying about the risk of secondhand-smoke exposure.

Given how ecologically serene concerts have been for years — with the exceptions of occasional joints and vapes — the early fights to achieve smoking bans seem like a black and white movie. When Hansen took on Big Tobacco and the entire nightlife scene in San Luis Obispo, a downtown bar owner complained to the Los Angeles Times that he feared his smoking customers would “just find a bar in another city”; a retired truck driver interviewed from a local barstool likened the ban proponents to “Communists,” and added, “That’s the kind of thing they have in Russia.” Just before the city council voted to approve the ban, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. distributed fliers imploring residents to phone council members and oppose an “outrageous attack on your rights!”

The U.S. surgeon general famously laid the groundwork for smoking bans in 1964, when an advisory committee reported a connection between smoking and lung cancer, declaring the habit a “health hazard” in the days of widespread, fashionable, Mad Men-style lighting up. Nine years later, Arizona banned smoking in some areas, and several states followed by enacting limited bans in the ’80s. But Hansen and his San Luis Obispo public-health allies were the first to defeat the formidable opposition to indoor smoking bans. “I did get some calls,” the retired physician recalls. “I got some death threats.”

The country of Ireland studied the example of San Luis Obispo, population 42,000, before enacting its own countrywide ban in 2004 — although Irish public health officials found New York City to be a better case study. “The attitude was, ‘It may be OK to be in California to go outside, but try to tell that to an old man in the west of Ireland with the pouring rain,” says Luke Clancy, a former professor who is director general of the Tobacco Free Research Institute of Ireland. 

Back then, after speaking to Irish pub workers — including The Dubliners, a well-known folk band — Clancy and his team realized the smoking ban concept was more popular than it seemed. “I got a lot of feedback from them saying, ‘Thank God for this, my voice is ruined,’” he recalls. “It was not only the audience but the actual artists as well.”

Several studies report that smoking bans have reduced poisonous secondhand smoke, and therefore lung cancer, over the last two or three decades. Jessica Cance, a public-health researcher for independent scientific-research institute RTI International, concluded in a 2015 study that bans have been effective in “decreasing the rates of smoking on college campuses” — and researchers found that alcohol consumption stayed the same at the venues they studied, suggesting young bar patrons didn’t respond to smoking bans by simply leaving to smoke at home. “The data are very clear that smoking bans have been effective for public health,” Cance says. “We can clearly see there is public benefit.”

Numerous club owners and promoters say the bans had an immediate positive impact on their customers and employees, and that fears they had about decreasing attendance never materialized. “If you had 30 or 40 or 50 smokers, the whole room would be an ashtray. My staff were getting sick for no apparent reason,” Metro’s Shanahan says. “When they instituted the smoking ban, and no cigarettes were allowed on a permanent basis, the health of the company turned around in a year. I began to realize business was better.” 

The Gothic Theatre near Denver was, in the early ’90s, so smoky that it was difficult to clearly see the stage from the balcony. “It gives me the willies, man,” says Doug Kauffman, who promoted Gothic shows back then. “A lot of business owners complained when it happened: It would hurt their business if you could smoke inside. But it didn’t. What business owner in his right mind wants to kill his customers?”

In the ’90s, smoking at rock clubs gave off an odor so grungy it seemed cool — notably at Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club, where one regular described the smell as “Aerosmith and my a——.” But Donna Westmoreland, chief operating officer of I.M.P., the club’s promoter for decades, is a former smoker whose life improved after D.C. officials banned cigarettes at indoor venues in 2006. “I don’t think anybody said, ‘Should we go to a show or not? Well, you can’t smoke now, so we should go’ — but [it’s] probably a contributing factor,” she says. “People aren’t putting out cigarettes on the floor. It might have just felt a little nicer as a result.”