Perfume Genius, Foo Fighters, and Benjamin Gibbard are set to appear on Viva Vera 20!, a livestream special celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first show at Seattle’s Vera Project. The show will be broadcast on VeraTV.org on Wednesday, January 27, at 7 p.m. Pacific and feature additional performances and birthday wishes from TV on the Radio, Jeff Rosenstock, No Age, Tacocat, Mike Park, and more.
Activists Shannon Stewart, James Keblas, and Kate Becker founded VERA in Seattle in 2001 in response to the city’s Teen Dance Ordinance, a piece of legislation from 1985 that made all-ages concerts prohibitively expensive and difficult to produce. (The City Council repealed the ordinance a year later under community pressure.) The venue hosted early shows from independent acts that would go on to achieve international success, including Perfume Genius, TV on the Radio, and Macklemore.
TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe said of the Vera Project: “I remember getting [to VERA] and the sense of community and love for the space and the people who were in it was immediate and palpable. It makes me so happy that it’s still around to provide that inspiration and that community to anyone who shows up, because that’s a life-changing quality.”
Read Pitchfork’s feature “The Year Live Music Stopped,” including comments from Jonathan Zwickel, board chair at the Vera Project.