When I think of Rams Head Live!, I think of a They Might Be Giants concert I saw at the downtown Baltimore venue in 2007 — not because it was the best show I ever saw there, although “Birdhouse in Your Soul” sounded great that night. I remember that show because of singer/guitarist John Flansburgh’s surreal interpretation of the club’s name: “So is Rams Head Live like, you cut off a ram’s head, and the head is still alive?”

The Rams Head Tavern in Annapolis was founded by Bill Muehlhauser in 1989 and expanded to a concert venue, Rams Head On Stage, in 1997. Rams Head Live! opened in 2004 as part of the then-new Power Plant Live! complex. This was a time when it was becoming fashionable throughout the country to put the word “live” in the names of businesses that host live music, sometimes with an exclamation point to really drive home that rock concerts are exciting affairs. After that They Might Be Giants show, I could never see those three words without picturing the decapitated head of a ram, still alive and angrily bleating.

This week, a Power Plant Live! spokesperson confirmed that Rams Head is leaving Power Plant Live! later this year; the last show scheduled at the venue is British indie band Panchiko on Nov. 15. The spokesperson also implied that the building that houses Rams Head Live! will continue to host live music, presumably under a new name and new management. Even if the ram’s head is cut off, the club may still be alive, though we don’t know yet what we’ll be calling it, or what may change about the room and the kind of acts it books.

Rams Head Live! came along at a time when Baltimore nightlife needed it. Too many bands were routing the East Coast legs of their tours directly from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. If an act playing the storied 9:30 Club in Washington did have a Maryland date, it was often at The Recher in Towson, well outside the city. With a capacity of 1,500, Rams Head Live! was in the sweet spot to attract national acts that were too big for the Ottobar or Metro Baltimore, but not quite big enough for Pier Six Pavilion.

I have a lot of good memories of shows at Rams Head Live!, like seeing the Gaslight Anthem at the peak of their powers in 2010, or taking my wife to see one of her favorite bands, Chevelle, in 2012. I think of George Clinton throwing a refrain of Chuck Brown’s “Bustin’ Loose” into a set of Parliament-Funkadelic classics. I laugh at the memory of Fred Schneider of the B-52′s yelling “Surprise!” at the opening of “Party Out of Bounds” — and when a technical issue forced the band to start the song over, deadpanning, “Surprise again!”

I went with my brother-in-law to Rams Head Live! when he had an extra ticket to see the Lumineers in the summer of 2012, just as their breakthrough single “Ho Hey!” was starting to climb the charts. The sold-out show crackled with excitement as we watched a young band in the kind of small club they were very quickly becoming too popular to play. When the Washington, D.C., postpunk greats the Dismemberment Plan were recording a new album in Baltimore’s Magpie Cage Recording Studio in 2012, they previewed new material at Rams Head Live!, and I ran into my friend Andy, having no idea that he loved the band as much as I did.

I also saw some pretty lousy shows there. The trailblazing early hip-hop group Sugarhill Gang celebrated their landmark single “Rapper’s Delight” with a 30th anniversary tour in 2009. But I went to their Rams Head Live! show not realizing that only one member of the original group, Big Bank Hank, was performing with some ringers. The only time I’ve ever seen Smashing Pumpkins live was there in 2010, during one of the unfortunate periods when founding drummer Jimmy Chamberlin wasn’t in the band.

Of course, Rams Head Live! was never a perfect venue. If a band I wanted to see was playing both Rams Head and the 9:30 Club, I’d consider a longer drive to Washington for a show that would likely sound better, and where it’d be easier to get a good view of the stage whether I was on the ground floor or the balcony. It’s somewhat unfair to group them together — the 9:30 Club has been hailed as one of the best rock clubs in the country for decades. But bad sightlines and inconsistent sound quality contributed to my hit-and-miss experiences at Rams Head Live!, and the 9:30 was always there as an unflattering point of comparison.

When a smaller Baltimore venue, The Crown, closed last month, the reactions in the local music scene were more emotional, and understandably so. The Crown primarily hosted Baltimore artists and became a hub of the city’s fertile underground scene. Few Baltimore artists have had a big enough following to headline Rams Head Live!, though when ’80s hard rockers Kix and ’90s R&B stars Dru Hill reunited, they played the club, with the former’s annual “Kixmas” concerts becoming a holiday tradition.

Dan Deacon headlined in 2010 with the great female rap duo Get Em Mamis opening. The Baltimore progressive rock band Telesma played the club many times, though percussionist Ian Hesford unfortunately suffered a heart attack onstage during a 2012 show.

A place like Rams Head Live! is important to the local music ecosystem, though, giving Baltimore acts frequent opportunities to open for national headliners. Even that bad Sugarhill Gang show was worth it to see local rappers like Ogun and A-Class play on a stage of that size. When I spoke to the Baltimore indie band Super City for a Banner story earlier this year, they recalled how a 2023 show opening for Foxy Shazam and Head Automatica was something of a milestone for the band, one of the last places in town they hadn’t played that they could check off their list of accomplishments. “They actually requested us, that was cool,” said bassist Brian Brunsman.

If the Rams Head Live! building doesn’t resume hosting concerts under a different name soon — or ever — it would be a real loss for live music in Baltimore. Some bookings could go to Baltimore Soundstage, which is right across the street and has a smaller capacity of 1,000, but it’s possible that some acts that had visited Rams Head Live! will resume routing their tours straight from Philly to D.C. like they used to.

And if the club hadn’t been there the last two decades, I probably would’ve had to drive to Washington to see Tears for Fears or Built to Spill, or a dozen other great bands I’ve seen at Rams Head Live! over the years.