After owning Radio Bean for more than 25 years, Lee Anderson announced Sunday that he’s ready to hand off the downtown Burlington bar and music venue and let what he calls “the spirit of the Bean” live on with someone else.
The news comes only six months after Nectar’s, a fixture of the Queen City’s music scene, announced it would close in July. The business was floundering as a result of a drawn-out city construction project on its block and perceived public safety challenges downtown, the company said.
But only several blocks away, Anderson promises that the show will go on — whether in front of a glittery curtain or below a sky full of twinkling misfit lamps. Gigs are on the books for the coming months, he said.
When Anderson first opened the joint, he was 22 years old and lived in an apartment upstairs. He paid for it with several credit cards and managed it day and night, he said. But now the 47 year-old lives about an hour away in Lincoln, where he helps raise his two young children, he said.
“My relationship from me to the business is just different now,” he said.
It felt like the right time for him, the venue and the community to consider other ownership options, he said.
Anderson wrote in a social media post that he would ideally like to see a group of people co-own and operate the place, allowing him to stay involved. But he’s open to different possibilities, he said, and wants to reassure people that Radio Bean “isn’t going to vanish.”
Since his announcement, many people have reached out to Anderson with messages thanking him and proposing ideas about the future, he said. After running the place for so long, he’s seen the children of couples who met at the bar grow up, Anderson said.
And he’s seen the place itself evolve. For its first 10 years, the Bean often hosted theater performers and puppeteers, Anderson said. Now it gets mostly musical acts.
At the venue’s “25th Birthday Bash” in November, the setlist convened over 100 acts. That night, a man in his underwear wore a giant hat shaped like a nose while he played the accordion to a sea of laughing people. At the same time in the venue’s other room, local rap group A2VT moved a bumping crowd.
Over the years, he said he’s had supernatural experiences that moved him, including seeing unplugged lamps glow with light, which left him with a reassuring feeling.
“That’s telling me — whatever you’re doing right now is exactly what you should be doing right now,” he said.
Anderson has announced a “State of the Bean” meeting Wednesday, where he hopes to get people together and listen to their “hopes and dreams and fears” about the venue’s future, he said.
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