Rolling Stone recently recognized eight indie venue owners for their determination to support burgeoning artists and help “secure the future of live independent music.” One of the owners featured is Tobi Parks.
Parks opened xBk Live, a 250-capacity venue in Des Moines’ Drake neighborhood, in 2019, and serves as the vice president of the board for the National Independent Venue Association Foundation. She is also the co-creator of D Tour, a collective of independent venues (that is, not owned by big companies or shareholders) and promoters across the country that are either in secondary or tertiary markets, or “drive-through cities.” D Tour will provide one point of contact with an artist to expedite the tour booking process, but the whole collective will offer their insight into which spots would best suit the artist, and assist with local promotion. Parks’ fellow founding partners include operators of music halls, clubs and breweries in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Wichita, Tampa, Louisville, San Antonio and Taos, New Mexico.
Local artists can have a really tough time finding that big break into regional or national markets, Parks said. D Tour wants to help bridge that gap by creating tour routes through a network of independent, community-based venues that can help artists develop and reach a new audience.
“This network, ideally, we can work together to help build some of these artists and help them find a platform to make some money as an artist,” Parks said.
“So, that’s one of the things D Tour wants to do is really try to lay a platform for some of the artists that we all appreciate in our communities and try and help them build careers as touring musicians through this network of venues.”
The venues in D Tour’s network have an interest in building a healthy local-music ecosystem for owners, artists and audiences alike.
“Being that most of the venues and promoters that are involved in D Tour are very community oriented, we are the mom-and-pop local businesses,” Parks said. “My venue [xBk Live] is also in a community where my kids go to school and where I buy my groceries, and I am very tied to the Des Moines community, and that’s a very different look than other venues that might be owned by multinational corporations.”
Big venues often look to book big, lucrative names, regardless of geography. “With us,” Parks said, “we’re working with artists and helping book them into different markets. We are working with the people who are on the ground in that market and know the best place for that artist to be able to go.”
The first artist to give D Tour a try is Elise Trouw, a pop singer from California.
Trouw is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. In 2015, she was signed to Pacific Records in San Diego for a one-album deal. In 2017 she released her debut album, Unraveling, and has been the opening act for California rock band Incubus since 2018. During the pandemic, she started gaining a following, catching the eye of D Tour founders.
“It feels like there will be much more attention to detail for the tour,” Trouw told Rolling Stone, adding that the process of booking venues has been extremely efficient compared to her past experiences. “The network of venues are already holding regular calls to discuss planning and marketing. These calls will continue through the tour and if there’s anything we learn from shows I’ve played, those ideas will be communicated to the remaining venues so that we are all on the same page and improving as we go.”
Parks didn’t always want to be behind the scenes — she wanted to be an artist herself. As a 12-year-old, she played with her cousins in a band doing song covers in bars around her hometown in rural southeast Missouri. She wanted to continue her musical career while going to college at Webster University near St. Louis, studying media communications and audio production. Afterwards, she moved to New York to work at Sony, focusing on copywriting and licensing.
In 2015, Parks moved to Des Moines and established an artist development nonprofit label that she is currently no longer a part of. The purpose of the label, Station One Records, was to build up the local live music ecosystem in Des Moines and provide music industry-based education to prevent artists from being taking advantage of.
Throughout her work, Parks is focused on offering the kind of artist development opportunities she wishes she’d had while pursuing a career onstage — artists into markets where they can make a lucrative career in music.
One year ago — before D Tour was created, with “a year without concerts” weighing upon artists and venue owners — Rolling Stone first featured Parks.
“She sometimes heads to her club by herself, blasts recordings by one of her old bands over the sound system, and sips a beer while pondering her situation,” Jon Blistein reported in March 2021. “She took a job as an attorney for Sony Music during the pandemic, and funnels her salary to the venue to keep it alive.”
“There are not a lot of queer black female venue owners,” Parks told Blistein. “So it’s important for me to figure out how to survive this.”
In March 2022, that same grit came through in a much more hopeful interview with Rolling Stone.
“Our indie venues have always been the breeding ground for the next generation of professional artists. By working together, we have the ability to break artists through our network of indie rooms and help artists in our own communities build a nationwide platform and launch careers as touring artists,” Parks said about the goals of D Tour. “We are able to break down the traditional power structures and build a network of support to nurture rising talent. I think we’ll see artists that may have only been locally successful find larger regional and national success through the efforts of D Tour.”
