Exclusive: Bottom of the Hill Sold, Will Continue as Live Music Venue

Call off the funeral procession, Bottom of the Hill fans. Reports of the club’s death have been greatly exaggerated. 

The San Francisco music venue will live on under new ownership in 2027, longtime owners Kathleen Owen, Ramona Downey, and Lynn Schwarz told COYOTE in an exclusive interview at the venue on Tuesday, Oct. 20, alongside incoming proprietor Michele Bronson. 

Ten months after Bottom of the Hill’s owners announced the club would shutter at the end of 2026, plans have changed. Come January 2027, Owen and Downey will retain ownership of the 115-year-old Edwardian building in Potrero Hill, including the two second-floor apartments, while Bronson has purchased the club as a business, name intact. A veteran of the biotech industry, Bronson is also a passionate live music fan who’s been a regular at BotH since the early ’90s; this is her first venture in the music business.

The club’s just-announced New Year’s Eve show with Shannon Shaw will be its longtime owners’ last hurrah before Bronson’s lease — which is structured as three five-year terms — goes into effect. The trio declined to disclose any further financial details. 

Aside from the three owners, Bronson aims to keep the club’s entire staff. About half of the 19 current employees have confirmed they will stay on. 

Of course, a few changes are afoot: Bronson plans to close the club for at least a month, mostly for city code-related upgrades to the kitchen and bar, before reopening. There will be some updates to the website and ticketing system as well. Most notably, she expects to lead booking at Bottom of the Hill 2.0 herself, at least for now, with support from her family and current staff. 

But overall, Bronson says her goal is to preserve the homey feel and independent character that have made the 247-capacity club sacred ground for up-and-coming artists since it opened in 1991. 

“One of the amazing things that Bottom of the Hill has always done is make sure local bands are on the bills,” says Bronson. “They truly support the local music scene.” Maintaining Bottom of the Hill’s independence is “essential,” she adds, in a landscape of “big venues … owned by evil, vertically integrated companies.”

Small venues like Bottom of the Hill, she says, “keep the music ecosystem going.” 

A tidal wave of reactions

In a group interview on the venue’s cozy back patio, the trio of owners emphasized several times that they never intended to mislead anyone with their announcement about the impending closure. 

“We were very much leaning toward not selling the business. Like, this dies with us,” says Schwarz. 

But hearing what Bottom of the Hill meant to people helped change their minds. They got notes from musicians who were devastated to lose one of the last venues in San Francisco not booked exclusively by a corporate promoter. One agent told them that, if Bottom closed, they might skip the city entirely when developing indie rock bands. At shows, the trio says they felt a mix of gratitude and anger from patrons. 

“In the beginning … we were these bad guys. You know, ‘You’re closing our beloved Bottom of the Hill,’” says Downey, who booked the club from its opening in 1991 until 2017 and still works the bar two nights a week. Owen describes the days following the announcement as “stressful,” receiving 50 texts in an hour, while Schwarz recalls an outpouring of love, alongside some enthusiastic yet misguided early inquiries. 

“A friend asked me ‘How much for your IPO?’” she says. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck is an IPO?’”

Still, the “tidal wave” of reactions made them reconsider closing. “We started to think, hmm, maybe we’re not that special,” says Schwarz. “Maybe we can let someone else take on this legacy.”

While the owners fielded nearly 40 inquiries, including several from friends and music scene comrades, Bronson’s enthusiasm stood out from the jump. Her initial email was a love letter to live music — with photos to prove it.

Bronson describes something of a double life, with her days consumed by science and nights by shows. Growing up in San Antonio, she worked at an independent record store, Hogwild Records. After completing her education in Texas (she has a PhD in molecular biology from UT Southwestern Medical Center), she moved to San Francisco in the early ’90s and helped launch or lead five different biotech startups over the following three decades, overseeing the development of new drugs, including cancer treatments. 

She also fell in love with the city’s music scene. Bronson became a regular at the Sunday barbecues that were a staple at Bottom of the Hill in the ’90s, a tradition she might want to revive. Asked about other memorable shows at the club, she names the White Stripes (2000) and Fleet Foxes (2008, opening for Blitzen Trapper, according to Bottom of the Hill’s archives). The new LLC she’s formed for the club is named “I Saw Them When.” 

Bronson estimates that she sees 60 shows a year, not counting festivals and her annual pilgrimage to South by Southwest. 

Her daughter Thia, who accompanied her mom to the interview and plans to help out with club operations, says live music has shaped her life since before she was born.

Two decades ago, “My mom had tickets to see Yo La Tengo at the Fillmore on June 10th, so she scheduled my C-section [delivery] for June 11th,” explains the younger Bronson. 

While Michele has been set on buying the club since January, the owners were still wrestling with agonizing decisions. After enlisting local nightlife veteran turned realtor Guy Carson as their broker, the trio decided to retain the real estate. Someone could purchase the building while promising to keep it a music venue, they realized, and a year later raze it for condos. 

“We owe a debt to this neighborhood, and we don’t want to do that to our neighbors,” says Schwarz. 

By early summer, they had three serious offers. Bronson was the only suitor they didn’t already know and love, and turning down the others involved some tearful conversations. But the owners were unanimous: They liked Bronson’s business acumen, “something we didn’t have when we became owners here,” says Schwarz.

Bronson’s promise to keep original staff helped earn the trio’s trust. (“They’re our family,” says Downey.) They also liked that Bronson is used to getting up at 5:30am to work as the chief development officer of a biotech company after being at a show until 1am. 

“To me, startups are very similar to [running a venue],” says Bronson. “You wear 20 different hats and you have to understand all the aspects of the business, and it's a margins game.”

‘Very big shoes’

Booking, however — an art, a science, and a fulltime job itself — will be a new experience for Bronson. She is aware that she has “very big shoes” to fill, especially given the club’s reputation as a place to catch a rising star and a proving ground for indie bands that go on to play much larger rooms.  

Under Downey, bands including Arcade Fire, Oasis, Beastie Boys, Alanis Morissette, Lizzo, Green Day, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs all played Bottom of the Hill’s tiny stage. Schwarz took the reins in 2017, after learning from Downey for years, and has maintained its reputation as a thoughtfully booked room. She’s responsible for bands like Bratmobile, Deerhoof, Heavens to Betsy, and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists all returning to play during the venue’s 2026 victory lap.  

But reflecting on the club’s early days, Owen recalls that she and Downey barely had any idea what they were doing. “Back then … [booking] happened through word of mouth,” says Owen. “It was mainly local bands that had played at the Blue Lamp, where we worked before, and they loved how they were treated there… so they would call and want to come back.”

She still remembers when the pair received their first actual contract from a booking agent, for a Sebadoh show. “We were like ‘What is this?’”

Some 35 years later, Bronson has begun attending “booking school” with Schwarz and has already confirmed a couple shows, to be announced next year. “A big part of the attraction was getting to transition with you guys,” she tells her predecessors. And she’s grateful that she’s not starting from scratch: Agents and artists already know and love the club. 

As for her approach, Bronson says she’s energized by the chance to support indie artists at a time when the live music landscape is increasingly dominated by conglomerates. (She referred to one well-known ticketing agent as “Ticketfucker.”) She also plans to maintain artist-friendly hallmarks of the club’s operations, such as not taking a cut of bands’ merch sales. 

“I’m a music lover … and it’s very hard to make a living as a band,” says Bronson, noting that the pandemic, in particular, laid bare the fragility of the profession. “I don’t get to enjoy music unless bands can make a living, right?”

The last hurrah

Bottom of the Hill’s owners bristle at the word “retirement.”

Downey, a textile artist, plans to focus on her loom work, take classes at the Richmond Art Center, and do more gardening. Owen deadpans that she has no plans beyond cleaning her room. Schwarz, the youngest of the trio by a decade, says she’s taking “a gap year.”

For now, Bottom of the Hill’s original owners are enjoying their final run of shows. Especially since they began hinting that the place might live on as a music venue — rumors have swirled for months now — the vibe at the club has been impeccable.

“I can’t tell you how much love I feel across that bar,” says Downey. “People want to tell you stories about the shows they went to here, or ‘When I was 17, I came here, and now my kid who’s 17 comes here, and this is what it means to me.’” (They’ve also heard a handful of confessions from old-timers about ways they used to sneak in without paying.)

Schwarz is keeping a Word document titled “Nice Things People Said,” where she pastes especially kind emails and social media comments. She estimates it’s currently 500 pages, and plans to print a book for her partners by the year’s end. 

“It is beyond overwhelming, the amount of tributes and testimonials and lovely things people have sent us over the past 10 months,” says Schwarz, adding that this has been “the best year of my life.”

As for the owners’ initial concern about protecting the venue’s legacy, Bronson says she’s “honored” that they selected her. “I hope I honor them,” she says.

But Downey, Owen, and Schwarz no longer seem to feel burdened by the club’s history. Its future, they say, is up to fans. 

“Our final year proved how much this community cares, but running an independent venue takes constant support,” says Schwarz. “If you keep coming to shows and showing Michele that same love, this place will thrive.

“The people that have supported us and made this place get to decide our legacy now.”

Bottom of the Hill has a full calendar of shows now through Dec. 31.