The earliest avant-garde audiences were small, all-black, and uninterested in drugs or drink.

Evidence

A year later, the poet-critic Stefan Brecht made a study of Sun Ra’s Solar Myth Science Arkestra for the Evergreen Review. “The audience does not really come in until midnight,” he noted. The patrons were “almost entirely Negro and almost entirely male,” and Slugs’ itself “seems Negro-run.” There was not much drinking. (Perhaps because the bar was out of beer.) “No pot or drugs as far as I could tell. The band plays continuously.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 903