A downtown entertainment survival story

PHOTO CASEY LEONARD SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY Raimon Aulen at practice above the Indigo Room. The Indigo Room, a bar and music hall, opened in 1995 and has survived and thrived through several permutations of the Fort Myers downtown scene. Often serious and sometimes somber, Raimond Aulen, owner and originator of the Indigo Room, shared his and the club's history as well as his point of view as an insider in downtown's recent development.

Aulen is known for providing a venue for musicians as well as recently sharing his talents as a singer and guitarist playing in the band Memphis '56 at the Wednesday open mike nights. Before he sings, his bassist women are sometimes prompted to keep napkins ready by the band's bassist, Todd Fadely, for accidental spills that might result due to the distracting, irresistible charm of his voice.

"He sounds like a young Elvis slash Carl Perkins," Joe Virga, local songwriter, commented during one of Aulen's recent performances.

"Where was I born? That's a good question," Aulen said. "I was born in the United States but in a place where you never hear people being born in. I was born in Montana… Well, that's where the hospital is."

Soon after that, his parents whisked him to Fort Myers.

"They put me in a baby carriage and drove me down here," Aulen said with no further explanation.

The club was originally going to be rented but, as destiny would have it, Aulen decided to purchase the site.

"This area was going to be a city complex of some kind," Aulen said. "…Attorneys bought up everything anticipating this deal…they bought it up as an investor group but the deal fell through. They split the properties and they had to deal with it."

No one was willing to rent space to him back then in the mid 90's.

"A lot of people got run out of town for different reasons," Aulen said. "So it was kind of hard to get down here if you were doing anything that was entertainmentbased. Anything that would attract young people or anything to do with rock and roll or live entertainment."

The former owner of the building that would become the Indigo Room was Bill Stewart.

"He was a decent guy to deal with," Aulen said. "At the time, the city was pushing this as an entertainment district. They had hired Don Paight as the guy in charge of making downtown an entertainment district."

Stewart offered to sell the property to Aulen.

"Nobody had considered buying it at the time," Aulen said. "That was a whole different ball of wax…I didn't really have the money…but I did some creative financing stuff and borrowed some money from people at an investment rate and I ended up securing the building…Back in the day, everybody thought I was crazy."

Aulen's vision was to provide liquor and live music.

"I procured a liquor license from a guy who thought I would default on it," Aulen said. "Because nobody believed I would survive."

If Aulen hadn't managed to stay in business he would have had to give up the liquor license.

"You can't get it from the state," Aulen said. "They have these lotteries. They only allow so many liquor licenses out at a time based on demographics and things like that...You have to use it, too. You have to use it so many days out of the year."

Aulen managed to keep his in use and says he never doubted the success of the Indigo Room.

"We opened in 95," Aulen said. "It took me a while to get it changed and open. There was a bookstore here. There were tenants and all that…I couldn't survive with the bookstore guy here…his name was Russell Croft…He was a good guy and he understood my position as the building owner. We kind of worked around him for a while…I didn't want to buy the building and say, 'Hey, you're outta here.'…eventually, he made other plans."

Soon enough, the space was free for Aulen to work out other details he knew as an acoustic engineer.

"The bar is built around the sound system," Aulen said. "The way the stage is oriented and the speakers are laid out, I didn't want standing waves or bass traps."

Aulen's survival might suggest strategies to others.

"They've had a lot of plans for downtown," Aulen said. "Now, they've moved on to the River District thing. You know, and that's just a bunch of stuff for the sale of condos. You've got investors and they're pushing the city to do this River District thing…People come down here and invest their time and money in something and all of a sudden the rug gets pulled out from under them and now something else comes on the table. It's just a bad way to do business, I think. That's why I think downtown has such a hard time with it's identity because there's a concept, an idea and a plan and it's changed. It's like any plan is better than a plan you don't follow. If we took any of these plans and stuck with it, it'd be better than constantly changing it."

However, Aulen takes exception with sticking to the River District Plan.

"I think they ought to cater to the people already down here," Aulen said.