At the center of the music scene in any city across America, there is a club that is the heart and soul of it all. A venue that is known, not only for great music, but also for its character -- the oddball pictures on the wall, the names carved into bathroom stalls and the bartender who remains the same year after year.
Over the past 30 years, that place in the Valley has been Nita's Hideaway.
From the time it was a ramshackle building on Rio Salado Drive until its latest incarnation in a huge new building in south Tempe, Nita's was a beacon for live music.
Local favorites turned national celebrities such as Jimmy Eat World and The Format graced the Nita's stage long before they were household names. It was the kind of place people went to see their favorite bands right before the bands hit the big-time.
But on Jan. 13, Nita's Hideaway closed its doors to the public, bringing to an end 30 years of local history.
The rumor mill has been turning viciously regarding the closure. Mark and Abby Covert, who have owned and managed the club for the past six years, say they want to stop all gossip as quickly as possible.
The Coverts say the problems started with the heavy opposition they faced when moving into the current building on Southern Avenue and Price Road and continued over disputes with their landlord ever since.
In April, what Mark calls "the first catastrophic problem" occurred. The air conditioner broke inside the building, something that could spell disaster for business, especially with the stifling Arizona summer approaching. The Coverts swallowed the cost and paid for the repairs, only to have it explode again during the first week of June. At that point the Coverts say they went to their landlord and asked for his help in paying for the repairs.
Their problems with the landlord started there. The Coverts say they wanted a guarantee that they could operate without having to foot such enormous bills for repairs to the building.
Some business owners might see such malfunctions as red flags, but the Coverts hoped the problems with the landlord would prove to be only a minor snag in what they were trying to accomplish with the new venue.
"We believed in it," Abby says. "We were developing the building and people seemed to really like it."
Unfortunately, believing in the club was not enough. After the air conditioner debacle, problems with the landlord began to snowball.
They began to have problems with the threat of their lease ending any day. The landlord and his attorneys terminated the original lease and put the building on what the Coverts described as an "unworkable" lease. According to Mark the lease kept them in a state of uncertainty from month-to-month making it difficult to book bands far in advance.
"There were problems with the landlord over who owed what, and it just got very, very ugly," Mark says.
Soon the Coverts found themselves spending more time in court working things out with attorneys rather than booking bands. The landlord could not be contacted for comment.
"That's not why we got into the music business -- to sit in court every week," Abby says.
"It became far too much of a battle," Mark says. "It's not that we're afraid of hard work, but there was no joy in the work anymore and we just had to close."
Although the couple is sad about having to close, they insist they do not want to point fingers.
"Looking back at all the struggles with the building, any one of those things would have been enough to get through by themselves, but put together, it was too much," Abby says.
The Coverts and their employees are now doing their best to cope with the loss of a place they loved dearly.
Erika Miller, the former marketing director for the club, likens the closure to the loss of a loved one.
"I feel like I'm grieving for a person right now," she says. "It's just a definite sense of loss. Everybody was there for the music; I mean nobody ever made a million bucks by working there. They were there for the music and for the people, and it is just so sad to see that go."
Reach the reporter at:megan.irwin@asu.edu.
