The Red and Black

Issue date: 9/21/09 Section: Variety

Media Credit: JAKE DANIELS Tasty World on Broad Street closed its doors to minors on weekend nights in a desire to save money and have more peaceful crowds. [Click to enlarge]

As some underage students may have already learned the hard way, one less music venue in Athens is open to them on the weekends.

Beginning in mid-August with the start of the school year, Tasty World became a 21-and-older venue on Fridays and Saturdays.

The change may disappoint some of Athens' younger music fans, but Murphy Wolford, the owner of Tasty World, said he had his reasons.

"Volume and management of people on the weekends," Wolford said. "We discovered that it was a lot more peaceful for us to control the crowd if we limit it to 21 and over."

The change in policy was made for practical reasons, he said, and will hopefully make it easier for staff to prevent underage drinking.

"We were trying to reduce the number of people we need to staff. Staff is already up, and to go 18 and up, we have to have two or three more people here to watch the crowd," Wolford said. "And on the weekends, that just became unmanageable, money-wise…[We're] not trying to lower attendance, just trying to not have to watch over the crowd and see who might be cheating."

The new policy applies only to shows on Friday and Saturday nights. Audiences between the ages of 18 and 20 can still attend shows on Monday through Thursday nights. The downstairs bar is limited to ages 21 and over at all times.

Still, the move has disappointed some, Wolford said.

"Some people have e-mailed and they've been a little bit disappointed, because most of our best shows are on the weekends," he said. "We've been 18 and up for a long time."

But he said there were usually very few people under 21 at the shows.

"We were looking at numbers all summer long, and the amount of under-21 people who were coming to shows - you'd be very surprised. It was only 10 to 15 percent of the audience," he said. "For years I didn't pay attention to it very strictly, and then we started looking at it, and we were like, 'What are we doing?' We've got 200 people up here and we're having to stamp everybody's hands, yes or no. It just became something we didn't want to do for the 10 or 20 people that were coming."

Continued...

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