Crumbs From the Crowd to Pay the Bills

Though it has been in operation only since 2005, Cake Shop, at 152 Ludlow Street, has earned a reputation for helping local bands develop, and though it is a small, unpretentious club, it has become an important tour stop on the national circuit for alternative groups. It is also one of the last clubs of its kind in Lower Manhattan, as rising rents have pushed the scruffy bars that nurtured underground rock across the East River into Brooklyn.

“It really catered to independent underground pop music, stuff that wasn’t too concerned with how many tickets it was going to sell,” said Kip Berman, the guitarist and lead vocalist for the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, one of the success stories to emerge from the club. “That scene moved to Brooklyn, and Cake Shop is the last vestige left in Manhattan.”

But in recent months the founders of the club — the brothers Nick and Andy Bodor — have run into financial difficulties and face eviction, they said. They are under a court order to pay the landlord $58,000 by July 26, to cover the club’s share of taxes under the lease for two calendar years. They are also facing a $20,000 fine from the New York State Liquor Authority for noise violations and for several incidents in which under-age patrons were sold drinks last year.

Nick Bodor said the tax bill, which kicked in after a five-year abatement, was much higher than the owners had calculated. He said the liquor authority violations came after a crackdown by the police and a change in rules governing what identifications could be accepted. The club has since hired full-time bouncers, another expense.

“We just never had huge profits or deep pockets or a lot of money in the bank as a cushion,” Nick. Bodor said. “A hit like this — we don’t have any kind of reserve fund we can magically tap into.”

To raise the money the Bodors and the third partner, Greg Curley, have turned to an Internet crowdfunding Web site called Pledge Music. Normally the site is used by musicians to raise money for recording an album. People can buy copies of the album in advance or pay for premiums offered by the artist, like an autographed guitar, a song about the donor or a performance in the donor’s home. A portion of the money for each project goes to charity.

The owners of Cake Shop are giving away a range of creative rewards for donations. For $12 a donor can get a compilation album featuring bands that have played at the club. A $75 donation buys entrance to any show and eight drinks. A $200 donation puts a person on the guest list for six months of shows. For $20,000 a donor gets “free drinks for life.”

Benji Rogers, a former frontman in the band Marwood who founded Pledge Music three years ago, said Cake Shop is the first music space to try raising cash through the site. He approached the Bodors after hearing that the club was in trouble and offered to help. In a sense, he said, he was repaying a debt. He recalled that several years ago, when he was still a working musician, the Bodors had helped him to sell his record collection to raise money for a tour.

“They have got an incredible amount of love from the music community,” Mr. Rogers said. “Every band in New York has gone through there. It’s like a rite of passage.”

Nick Bodor said he hopes to raise enough money not just to pay off the taxes and fines but to expand the business. The club needs at least $50,000 over the next two months to stay in business, but the owners hope to collect three to four times that amount and to plow the extra funds into expansion. So far they have collected about 18 percent of the $50,000 goal.

Mr. Bodor envisions starting a record label with the Cake Shop logo. He would like to turn the club’s Web site into a moneymaking operation with original content: articles, videos of performances, releases of new music. He acknowledged that to stay open beyond this year the club will have to increase its revenue to cover about $25,000 a year in property taxes going forward. “We want to look at this as an opportunity to recalibrate our business,” he said.

For some indie musicians the prospect that the club might close signals the end of a certain kind of underground music in Manhattan. David Longstreth, the frontman for Dirty Projectors, said Cake Shop gave a vital forum to his band and other groups who made “music that was maybe a little bit improbable.” He added, “It’s just a great place to try something out.”

If Cake Shop closes, it would also mean the loss of a performance space for new and developing groups. Andy Bodor, who handles booking, arranges gigs at the club for more than 25 bands every week, regularly showcasing three or four a night. The basement performance space, which holds only 120 people, is a long sloping room — a windowless, tunnel-like structure — with red walls that ends in a scarred, six-inch-high plywood stage. The wall behind the musicians is covered with cheap tinsel, and Christmas lights have been woven into a mass above the stage.

Tuesday was a typical night. The early evening was devoted to undiscovered stand-up comics with bizarre material. Then Good Sports, a local female trio, played their first gig in the early slot, nervously delivering a series of short three-chord songs with a punkish edge to a small crowd. Next came Ghost Heart, a quartet from Grand Rapids, Mich., whose drum kit included a bicycle wheel and timpani. It was the group’s first gig in Manhattan, and it performed long, howling songs with falsetto vocals that floated above tribal drums and swirling guitar arpeggios. Their set, haunting and resonant, was decidedly noncommercial.

Nick Bodor, who has a tattoo on his left arm depicting man’s descent from the apes, was behind the bar, pouring drinks and listening intently. “We take a few more chances,” he said. “We are not going to book something unless we believe it’s at least interesting.”