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Bill Reid will be helping book bands for The Classic. He’s the former co-owner of The National, which AEG Live bought in 2014. He stayed on with the company and is now the senior vice president of AEG Live Mid-Atlantic. He’s been booking bands in Richmond for years. When he worked with Cellar Door Productions, he helped organizers develop the Innsbrook After Hours concert series in its early stages and got involved in the tail end of the original Classic construction.

He describes coming back to The Classic not as a homecoming, but as rediscovering a hidden gem.

“It’s like you’re looking for a coat to put on. You open your closet and realize you’ve got one of the best made coats you’ve ever had. You put it aside because you had this trendier coat, but you realize the coat you had there is one of the best coats ever made. It never goes out of style,” he said.

Reid said Richmond isn’t as much of a “classic rock” town as it was 25 years ago.

It’s more of a “cool, hip, cutting-edge musical taste kind of place.”