For many Utah locals, discovering Kilby Court is a rite of passage into the underground music scene. Kilby has become the all-ages venue in Salt Lake City to discover local, independent, and underground music. For the past 10 years8212;July being its official birth month8212;Kilby has hosted such big-name acts as The Shins, Brother Ali and Death Cab for Cutie, all before they reached a mainstream audience.
To catch up with Kilby and the past 10 years, I sat down to coffee with its founder, Phil Sherburne. Having been a teen who defaulted school nights at Kilby Court for $8 a show, I felt it was an honor to speak with him.
Julie Abubo: How did you come across Kilby Court back in 1999?
Phil Sherburne: I took the building as a staging place for our guerilla art group. It was just a group of us, young 20s, single…trying to put some spark in the city. Many friends moved away from Salt Lake when it’s a really great city. I thought, “We should do something about it.” You see cities where there’s so much going on and we could make something like that here…Kilby was that spark.
JA: What was the vision that you had for Kilby?
PS: I grew up during the ’80s in the suburbs. I’d come downtown…go to punk shows. Looking back, it was really negative: often violent, lots of drugs, everybody smoked, everybody drank, just really self-destructive.
When I accidentally fell into Kilby, I realized I had a responsibility, or at least I had the capability, to make it different. I turned away a lot of music that I could have made money on, but decided not to because of what it was. If it was angry, if it was violent, we didn’t want anything like that. There was so much good music out there. I didn’t just want to try and keep it all rosy, but I definitely steered it; that was intentional.
JA: What bands were you most grateful to have met?
PS: Some of the ones that I still listen to so much are The Shins, Rilo Kiley, and Death Cab. (We’d) have a few beers before they played and just talked. Those were the nights when I’d think, “I never want to do anything else but run this venue.”
JA: What stuck out to you the most about Kilby?
PS: When it was just right, where you just knew everybody was having a good time, and the band was having a good time, and you knew you had put on something so incredible, you know that people would remember it forever. I would look around and think, “This is amazing, and it’s all happening right here.” The band would walk off stage, and they would be all sweaty, and give me a hug and say, “This was the best show ever.”
JA: Would you have been able to achieve that atmosphere in another venue?
PS: I think the location is a pretty big part in what it is; it’s a pretty magical place. In fact, (my wife and I) have a gallery (Signed & Numbered on 300 South) and we’re going to move it back to Kilby because…you can’t duplicate it. It really is a feel that we can’t get anywhere. I’d be really arrogant to say that I could’ve made a venue feel like Kilby and do what it did if it were on Main Street. It wouldn’t happen. We’ll work to have the gallery hours reflect for when the shows are open. It’d just be nice to be grown up and still have an involvement down there.
JA: What role did Leia Bell posters make on Kilby’s evolution?
PS: That was another part of the evolution of that venue: My wife started doing posters for Kilby…while we were dating. And then she started screen printing the flyers for us…people started collecting those all over the world. The reputation and name of Kilby started to get broadcast, so if you were to do a Google search on Kilby, a lot of it is Leia Bell posters.
JA: Are you happy where Kilby has come these past 10 years?
PS: I’m happy with what I created. I’m happy that I sold it and moved on. I sold it to people who used to work for me there, Will (Sartain) and Lance (Saunders). I hand-picked them. They were the guys that I wanted to have it. I think there are people who definitely want to see it as long as it’s run by people who have the right intentions.
JA: Where do you see the Salt Lake City music scene in the next decade?
PS: I think when I started, there were a lot of bands, tons of bands that were skipping Salt Lake. I don’t think that’s going to happen (anymore). The city geographically is eight hours away from everything. Everyone has to stop here whether they’re playing or not. We have a huge youth population. Salt Lake is in a good position for music, for the music scene, for art, period.