Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Leftstar Podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is John Cher. John, what's the status of
Speaker 1: the independent concert promotion business today?
Speaker 2: Post a pitiful Live Nation overwhelmingly dominates the entire concert business.
Speaker 2: I believe they are monopoly. So far, the Justice Department
Speaker 2: has not said that AGE is a much much smaller competitor.
Speaker 2: And then there are you know, literally a handful of
Speaker 2: of independent promoters. Really only a handful of ones that
Speaker 2: were once major promoters as we were. I mean we
Speaker 2: were for many many years OP ten promoters. One or
Speaker 2: two years, we were the biggest promoters in the country.
Speaker 2: But what's happened is, you know, Live Nation. Look, their
Speaker 2: model works for them. There's there's no question I did.
Speaker 2: I didn't. I wasn't a believer. They tried to buy
Speaker 2: me a couple of times, and I was not a believer.
Speaker 2: I see now how they've been successful, and uh, you know,
Speaker 2: you got to take your hat off to Michael Rippino,
Speaker 2: who you know, is running a public company that, despite
Speaker 2: the fact that many people, including myself, think it's a monopoly,
Speaker 2: is is doing pretty well. So you know, it's very hard.
Speaker 2: I don't think somebody young in the business could repeat
Speaker 2: what I've done or what any number of other major
Speaker 2: promoters Jerry Michaelson, Greg Proolf and Jerry Wasserman the few
Speaker 2: of us that are left, but do it.
Speaker 1: Okay, what is the status of your promotion business at
Speaker 1: this point?
Speaker 2: You know, it's pretty good. We've become a small hale
Speaker 2: theater company. For the most part, We've got only an
Speaker 2: occasional arena show. We've got two sold out Tool shows
Speaker 2: at Madison Square Garden next month. But arena shows, where
Speaker 2: I used to do fifty sixty a year are down
Speaker 2: to a handful. So you can't make the profit and
Speaker 2: nor therefore be able to support the infrastructure that you need.
Speaker 2: So you know, over the last ten years or so,
Speaker 2: we've gotten smaller. We're still doing about one hundred shows
Speaker 2: a year, but almost exclusively anywhere from five hundred seaters
Speaker 2: to six thousand seaters.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you say you have Tool at Madison Square Garden.
Speaker 1: How did you get that? As opposed to Live Nation
Speaker 1: or aging.
Speaker 2: Pure loyalty by the band in their agent. You know,
Speaker 2: something that something that existed for most of my career.
Speaker 2: If you play the act when they're small and you
Speaker 2: keep doing a good job. They stay with you, especially
Speaker 2: over the since the Ticketmaster merger with Live Nation, that
Speaker 2: just isn't the case. I mean, I'll give you a
Speaker 2: good example. I played Iron Maiden from the very very
Speaker 2: beginning up through and including selling a mat at Madison
Speaker 2: Square Garden and in the Meadowlands in a Nasau Coliseum
Speaker 2: three tours ago. I got my Madison Square Garden date,
Speaker 2: but I came to discover that I was one of
Speaker 2: only two promoters in the country that got an arena.
Speaker 2: Live Nation got all the rest of the dates. So
Speaker 2: we did the show. It sold out. A couple of
Speaker 2: years later, my phone rings and it's Rod Smallwood, who's
Speaker 2: the manager of Iron Maiden, longtime manager, all right, and
Speaker 2: he calls me a note the agent didn't call me.
Speaker 2: The manager called me and said, I'm really sorry, but
Speaker 2: I can't give you a date on this tour. And
Speaker 2: I said, did we do anything wrong? Said no, You've
Speaker 2: always been great. But Live Nation made a point of
Speaker 2: saying that if they don't get New York, they're going
Speaker 2: to change the offer they made and it will cost
Speaker 2: me millions of dollars. So I'm sorry, John, You're a
Speaker 2: good guy, but we can't play for you anymore. So,
Speaker 2: right there, on a given Iron Maiden tour, which would happen,
Speaker 2: say every two or three years, I'd usually get four
Speaker 2: or five such shows New York, New Jersey, Long Island, Buffalo, Rochester, Albany,
Speaker 2: those kinds of places. Now I've got none.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's do the math here. You're saying. Rod Smallwood
Speaker 1: said if he didn't go with Live Nation, he would
Speaker 1: lose millions of dollars. Now, if you look at all
Speaker 1: the markets you were in, why couldn't he make those
Speaker 1: millions and add them in to Live Nation? Where would
Speaker 1: Rob have lost the millions?
Speaker 2: Live Nation would have changed. I don't know what ultimately
Speaker 2: they paid him her show or per tour, all right,
Speaker 2: but he indicated to me that the offer that he
Speaker 2: had if if they if they gave us New York,
Speaker 2: and there's a promoter since passed away in Florida, he
Speaker 2: got Florida John Stall, that they would change the deal
Speaker 2: to to lesser terms.
Speaker 1: Wow, so Rod called you. If you have this conversation
Speaker 1: with other managers or agents, well.
Speaker 2: In this case, the agent did never even called me.
Speaker 2: Maybe Rod told him he called and and and that's
Speaker 2: why I've had similar conversations, uh, with with the managers
Speaker 2: and agents, you know, absolutely, you know, if it's an
Speaker 2: act that we've had a long history with. For example,
Speaker 2: I played Peter Gabriel a lot of times early in
Speaker 2: his career and actually promoted the first Genesis tour ever
Speaker 2: in America. You know, I when when I saw he
Speaker 2: was putting a record out, I called his agent, John
Speaker 2: Marks and at w A and I said, I see
Speaker 2: Peter's putting an album out. You know he usually tours
Speaker 2: behind albums. I said, can we talk about some dates?
Speaker 2: And he said nope. I said, uh, why not? He said,
Speaker 2: We're going with Live Nation. I said, what if I
Speaker 2: could put together a consortium? Nope, we did the last
Speaker 2: tour with Live Nation. We're gonna we're gonna do it
Speaker 2: again with them.
Speaker 1: Just to stay on your point, how difficult would it
Speaker 1: be for you to put together a consortium?
Speaker 2: Modestly difficult? You know. Uh, there's four or five independent
Speaker 2: still that you know. I know we'd join together another planet,
Speaker 2: jam Niederlander, Danny's Alasco. Uh, so yes, we could put
Speaker 2: it together. We couldn't snap our fingers like Live Nation
Speaker 2: and aeg can you know they can just snap their fingers,
Speaker 2: you know, and in an hour put together a tour.
Speaker 2: But you know, given a little bit of time, we
Speaker 2: absolutely could do it.
Speaker 1: So let's say you put together the consortium, you put
Speaker 1: together twenty five dates. Do you believe your offer can
Speaker 1: be as good as Live Nations in raw dollars?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: And why is that?
Speaker 2: Because? First of all, they try very hard to lobby
Speaker 2: acts the only tour in America between like late April
Speaker 2: or early May to maybe October, early October. Because they
Speaker 2: own or control ninety maybe ninety five percent of all
Speaker 2: of the amphitheaters. So when you get an act to
Speaker 2: play their amphitheaters, besides the ticket sales, which famously some
Speaker 2: acts have gotten one hundred percent of the ticket sales
Speaker 2: and amphitheaters, they have all the ancillaries. They have sponsorship,
Speaker 2: they have food and beverage, they have merching, and they
Speaker 2: have ticketmaster fees. And so at the end of the
Speaker 2: day they can break even at the door, even maybe
Speaker 2: lose some money all rightum, and still make a lot
Speaker 2: of money. I'm told from my deep throat in a
Speaker 2: Live Nation that they average about thirty five dollars ahead
Speaker 2: in ancillaries. So you know, let's say the average amphitheater
Speaker 2: show does ten thousand people. Due to multiplication, they don't
Speaker 2: need to make any money at the door.
Speaker 1: What if the act wants to play inside?
Speaker 2: They buy tours that all the time that do inside. Now,
Speaker 2: they don't have as many ancillaries, but they certainly have
Speaker 2: Ticketmaster and when they put a tour together intoor or
Speaker 2: they do everything they possibly can to only play buildings
Speaker 2: that use Ticketmaster. And probably I don't know this, but
Speaker 2: probably they have deals with certain arenas that they go
Speaker 2: to with a lot of shows, so they you know,
Speaker 2: they probably have a rebate situation.
Speaker 1: Okay, if you could snap your fingers, what would you
Speaker 1: like the live music business to look like?
Speaker 2: Well, I think there's a couple of things wrong. I mean,
Speaker 2: the monopoly, the live nation monopoly is the first thing
Speaker 2: that's wrong. You'd like to believe that the promoter in
Speaker 2: a given market that can do the best job and
Speaker 2: or has a relationship with the act and has played them,
Speaker 2: would have an opportunity to promote them and at least
Speaker 2: match it. But the other issue that's very important is
Speaker 2: that ticket prices have completely guns you know.
Speaker 3: Walkers, you know, the average arena or stadium P one
Speaker 3: ticket prices.
Speaker 2: Top ticket prices are pretty normally close to one thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: So what's happened to our concert industry is two things. Obviously,
Speaker 2: there's a lot of rich people in North America, so
Speaker 2: you know, it's it's a trophy. They can tell their neighbors,
Speaker 2: the neighbors that you know, they're sitting in the fifth row.
Speaker 2: And then of course the average fan all right, who
Speaker 2: probably can't buy the P one tickets, but you know,
Speaker 2: when the when the P two, P three tickets are
Speaker 2: down at you know, a couple of one hundred dollars,
Speaker 2: they can buy them, but they probably can't go to
Speaker 2: a couple of other shows that they would during the year.
Speaker 2: So I think that this monopoly is endangering artists development terribly.
Speaker 2: I think there are a lot of good young promoters
Speaker 2: who promote in clubs in small halls, but they have
Speaker 2: little chance of being able to expand their businesses beyond that.
Speaker 2: They basically have two choices. Stay modest, can make a
Speaker 2: decent living in clubs and small halls, or try to
Speaker 2: get Live nation or ag.
Speaker 1: To buy what do you say to Live Nations claim
Speaker 1: that their market share is somewhere in the neighborhood of
Speaker 1: sixty I'd have to look. I think they say fifty something.
Speaker 1: What would you say to that, Well, the question.
Speaker 2: That's most relevant is what percentage of arena and stadium
Speaker 2: and amphitheater headliners did they control? All Right, I've got
Speaker 2: to then believe that that number is seventy and that
Speaker 2: AEG's got another twenty or twenty five percent. It is
Speaker 2: very rare these days that arena sized headliners, amphitheater sized headliners,
Speaker 2: stadium headliners don't play for one of the two of them.
Speaker 2: Tool is Is is a great example. They've stayed oyled
Speaker 2: to me and they've stayed oil to you know, a lot,
Speaker 2: a lot of independence. Diana Ross has stayed very loyal
Speaker 2: and last time ran in New York, they made a
Speaker 2: real run at Diana Ross, who I've been promoting for
Speaker 2: forty years, and it forced me to have to, you know,
Speaker 2: pay a larger guarantee. But it's all out, so you know,
Speaker 2: it was fine, all came out in the wash. So
Speaker 2: but at the end of the day, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: when when the when when the Justice Department first investigated
Speaker 2: Live Nation, they claim that yes they are and then
Speaker 2: they owned a lot of the amphitheaters. Now they own
Speaker 2: almost all of them. Uh. And they they claimed that
Speaker 2: the acts could always choose to play indoors. But as
Speaker 2: I've explained a minute ago, it's not there. Because if
Speaker 2: I do a show at the Prudential Center in New York,
Speaker 2: Madison Square Garden, uh, you know, Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, any
Speaker 2: any any of the venues that we were going, I
Speaker 2: don't get any of the ancillaries. The buildings keep the ancillaries.
Speaker 2: Did they give you? You know, the buildings try to
Speaker 2: give you a little taste usually they do, but not
Speaker 2: a big taste versus Live Nation can say wait until May,
Speaker 2: all right before you go out, or maybe end of
Speaker 2: April and start down south and and you know, we'll
Speaker 2: give you one hundred percent of the box office. Given
Speaker 2: ninety percent of the box office, whatever it is, that's
Speaker 2: nothing that you can do indoors.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just nail indoors, because certainly there are a
Speaker 1: lot of tours that go out during the winter or
Speaker 1: even play arenas during the summer. So you compare the
Speaker 1: economics of an arena date that you promote as opposed
Speaker 1: to Live Nation promoting well.
Speaker 2: An arena date that an independent like us does. There,
Speaker 2: you know, are basic expenses, the guarantee to the act
Speaker 2: first and foremost, the expenses of doing of doing the show, rent, advertising, staffing,
Speaker 2: et cetera. All right, so you've got to pay to
Speaker 2: guarantee put tickets on ill. You got to pay the
Speaker 2: guarantee first, and you got to pay all the other
Speaker 2: expenses and after. At that point you start to potentially
Speaker 2: make a profit. And often the artist makes percentage money
Speaker 2: at the amphitheaters. They don't have to do any of that.
Speaker 2: They don't pay rent to themselves.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, I got that. I got there.
Speaker 1: But Live Nation also plays dates in arenas, yes, like you, Yes,
Speaker 1: So tell me where the economics differ there.
Speaker 2: They own ticketmaster.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's let's stop for a second. If you could
Speaker 1: snap your fingers. You claim that Live Nation is a monopoly.
Speaker 1: If you were to break up a monopoly, what would.
Speaker 2: It look like? Well, you know, only the only one
Speaker 2: who can really break up a monopoly is the government.
Speaker 2: What would it look like? You know, they would perhaps
Speaker 2: be forced to sell off a certain number of amphitheaters
Speaker 2: that people like me could could pick up. Actually, there's
Speaker 2: two amphitheaters that we built that they that they have
Speaker 2: now one outside of Buffalo, one in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Uh
Speaker 2: so that that you know, that's that's number one, uh
Speaker 2: number number number two. Uh the whole uh guarantee idea
Speaker 2: of what percentage of the growth they can they can
Speaker 2: uh they can give the act, all right, you can't,
Speaker 2: as I just explained, you can't do it indoors, all right.
Speaker 2: So uh if they got broken up selling off say
Speaker 2: half of the amphitheaters to other people. Number one number two,
Speaker 2: I don't want them to. You know, they don't have
Speaker 2: to uh divet from Ticketmaster. They simply have to uh
Speaker 2: let in in you know, the with buildings that they
Speaker 2: have exclusively Ticketmaster, which are a huge majority of the
Speaker 2: arenas in his country. They and they are exclusive. So
Speaker 2: if I go to Madison Square Garden with two sold
Speaker 2: out tools shows, the Ticketmaster fees are enormous. They scalped
Speaker 2: their own tickets. They have this thing called t M plus,
Speaker 2: but they've also been caught scalping their tickets. So uh,
Speaker 2: you know, if if I had the freedom, I would
Speaker 2: go into Madison Square Garden or the Prudential Center or
Speaker 2: or any other venue, and I would use a different
Speaker 2: ticketing company. There are a lot of them right there,
Speaker 2: all right, but none of them have anything close to
Speaker 2: the volume that that ticketmaster has. So those are the
Speaker 2: two main things. If we can be entrepreneurial with with
Speaker 2: with the ticket providers, and if uh we can break
Speaker 2: the the sort of uh gatekeeping of the amphitheaters, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, that would make a business such as mine
Speaker 2: much much healthier.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's say you do a date a building that
Speaker 1: has an exclusive ticket master contract? Don't you share in
Speaker 1: the fees?
Speaker 2: Very rare?
Speaker 1: If you do share in the fees, Why would that happen?
Speaker 2: Well, it hasn't happened in a long time. I mean
Speaker 2: you know there there. You know, there was a lot
Speaker 2: of years that we would do and in the main
Speaker 2: AMP in the main arenas that that we worked at,
Speaker 2: you know, fifteen twenty shows a year. We essentially were
Speaker 2: a franchise. And so if you guarantee a lot of
Speaker 2: shows like I did at the old Meadowlands Arena for example,
Speaker 2: all right, you had a leverage so that you could say, hey,
Speaker 2: I need a piece of you know, I need to
Speaker 2: bring my own ticketing in or I need a piece
Speaker 2: of what you're getting kicked back, all right, So you know,
Speaker 2: but I can't do that volume anymore. And so the
Speaker 2: arena is that I, you know, used to do that
Speaker 2: with I. You know, if I'm doing two, three four
Speaker 2: shows a year versus twenty or twenty five, I've got
Speaker 2: no leverage whatsoever. And then you know, the contract with
Speaker 2: almost all the buildings includes the use of TM plus,
Speaker 2: all right. Every single show that we do, we tell
Speaker 2: the buildings we don't want TM plus. But what I
Speaker 2: found out a number of years ago was even if
Speaker 2: we and he acts, as long as the agent or
Speaker 2: the manager will will confirm in writing that they don't
Speaker 2: want TM plus, all right, they take it down except
Speaker 2: for when the show becomes ninety five percent sold out
Speaker 2: or some number like that, and then without your permission,
Speaker 2: they put it on on Ticketmaster on TM plus. And
Speaker 2: suddenly where sometimes you look at a show that you
Speaker 2: know was almost sold out, and there was only saying
Speaker 2: a given arena with a capacity of let's call it
Speaker 2: fifteen thousand, and you only saw as a tool right
Speaker 2: now that there's a few hundred tickets left in each category.
Speaker 2: Once they turn on TM plus, all of a sudden
Speaker 2: miracle of miracles, there's two thousand tickets available. Now. They'll
Speaker 2: tell you that independent scalpers, and it may be, but
Speaker 2: it's also them. It's also them. And they, you know,
Speaker 2: they've got court scalping tickets. I mean they, you know,
Speaker 2: they got caught with Metallica, which you know, you could
Speaker 2: you could have knocked me over with a feather when
Speaker 2: I found out that that Metallica was complacent with Ticketmaster
Speaker 2: scalping tickets. You know, two best managers in the business
Speaker 2: as far as I'm concerned. You know, I don't think
Speaker 2: they had a lot of control over their clients in
Speaker 2: this regard. So you know, you simply can't compete with
Speaker 2: the money they make Ticketmaster. And look, when I first
Speaker 2: got into the business, actually when I first got into business,
Speaker 2: there was no computerized ticket in at all. But early
Speaker 2: on there was ticket tron and I you know, I
Speaker 2: done off the top of my head, but I think,
Speaker 2: you know, the ticket tron feed was probably a buck,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe it was two bucks all right. Now
Speaker 2: it can be twenty five dollars of which the promoter
Speaker 2: gets none up. But if your ticketmaster, sometimes they'll make
Speaker 2: more money on one of my shows than I will
Speaker 2: on the show at no risk.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's stay with your tool shows. Ay, do you
Speaker 1: have any idea with the off the top of your
Speaker 1: head what the fees are on the tool tickets?
Speaker 2: I do, but not off the top of my head.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's put it this way. Of the shows that
Speaker 1: you do in an arenas of the overall price, what
Speaker 1: would you say your fees percentage was.
Speaker 2: The ticketing fees? Yes, I'd say somewhere between ten and
Speaker 2: twenty dollars. And for bigger shows to hire the ticket
Speaker 2: prices to hire the service charges, which makes no sense
Speaker 2: from a business perspective except for them. But for a fan,
Speaker 2: Ticketmaster does nothing more to sell a fan a ticket
Speaker 2: if the ticket's twenty five dollars or whether it's one
Speaker 2: thousand dollars, same process, same computer use. But the industry
Speaker 2: has let them get away with it, and there's no
Speaker 2: looking back right now.
Speaker 1: Okay. Ticketmaster might say that the majority of the fees
Speaker 1: go to the building, that's something you agree with.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's reasonably close to the majority. I
Speaker 2: think the buildings get rebates, no question, the buildings get
Speaker 2: huge advances, and especially when they're you know, municipally owned
Speaker 2: buildings or state owned buildings, they often need the money,
Speaker 2: so they basically get bribed into making a Ticketmaster deal.
Speaker 2: And that advance is against a certain percentage of of
Speaker 2: the service charge. But I would not think it was
Speaker 2: a majority or even close.
Speaker 1: A live nation would say otherwise, But we don't have
Speaker 1: the facts in front of us, so let's move on
Speaker 1: from that. How do you feel about these exclusive deals
Speaker 1: with buildings with Ticketmaster? To begin with?
Speaker 2: I think it's terrible. I think it's it's it's it's
Speaker 2: you know, helping towards the ruination of of of the
Speaker 2: of the marketing of the concert business. You know, if
Speaker 2: we could, if if if a promoter could come into
Speaker 2: a building and use somebody other than Ticketmaster, all right,
Speaker 2: Number one, the service charges would be less much less,
Speaker 2: all right? And number two, I think the TM plus
Speaker 2: and the scalping would be reduced tremendously.
Speaker 1: Okay, you mentioned these municipal buildings that need the money,
Speaker 1: So if we get rid of the advances, what are
Speaker 1: these buildings going to say? If we got rid of exclusives,
Speaker 1: we're taking money directly out of the bottom line of
Speaker 1: these buildings.
Speaker 2: Yes, but you see, they still can. In other words, first,
Speaker 2: if they were opened, if the if the ticketing was
Speaker 2: open to the promoters, all right, certainly Live Nation would
Speaker 2: use Ticketmaster. Certainly AG would use their system, all right.
Speaker 2: But the independent promoters, all right, would probably go to
Speaker 2: other independent companies, all right, And the buildings could say, Okay, look,
Speaker 2: we get x amount of dollars from Ticketmaster, not from
Speaker 2: an advanced point of view, but from a per ticket
Speaker 2: point of view, and to let you use your own
Speaker 2: ticketing company, you've got to match that. Now, I'm not
Speaker 2: sure that would be legal, but at least it would
Speaker 2: be something.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back a step. Yes, like with Taylor Swift,
Speaker 1: they said they turned off TM plus. You know from
Speaker 1: personal experience that when you and the act have told
Speaker 1: them to turn off TM plus, they have turned it on.
Speaker 2: At the end. Yes, I don't know whether they did
Speaker 2: a Tails Swift because I didn't promote any I've thought.
Speaker 1: Always said, I know the only reason about Taylor swhich
Speaker 1: is I know that she said to turn it off.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you what happened there, but I'm using
Speaker 1: an example. You have done shows where the promoter in
Speaker 1: the act, usually the acts and control anyway, saying no
Speaker 1: TM plus. And there has been TM plus.
Speaker 2: Yes, not from the beginning, always towards the end, always
Speaker 2: towards the end.
Speaker 1: Now this is something theoretically you could document.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, oh absolutely. Look I'll go back. I'll go
Speaker 2: back to uh Diana Ross. About five or six years ago,
Speaker 2: we're playing Radio City. We say no TM plus. Diana's
Speaker 2: agent puts into writing no TM plus. Show sells very
Speaker 2: very quickly, and we're holding the next day for a
Speaker 2: second show. Right, we're now ninety five percent sold out.
Speaker 2: They turn on ticket man, the ticket TM plus. I
Speaker 2: you know, I jump up and down screaming, yel all right,
Speaker 2: they do it anyway.
Speaker 1: So I see that.
Speaker 2: Suddenly they're all a lot more tickets available. All right?
Speaker 2: Where did they come from? I can't tell you. I
Speaker 2: can't document, But suddenly there's more available, all right. So
Speaker 2: now I have to go to Diana Ross and her
Speaker 2: agent and her lawyer and say, look, here's the problem.
Speaker 2: We add the second show. All right, all the potential buyers,
Speaker 2: fans that we're going to buy off of TM plus
Speaker 2: for inflated prices, are going to first try to run
Speaker 2: to buy the best tickets for the second day, and
Speaker 2: we were only like three weeks before the shows. So
Speaker 2: I said, it's very possible that the first show we'll
Speaker 2: have a couple of one hundred empty seats right up front,
Speaker 2: and that's not a good look. And I don't, you know,
Speaker 2: I can't recommend to to Miss Ross that that that
Speaker 2: we do that She and her her advisors agreed we
Speaker 2: didn't add the second day. The Madison Madison Square Garden executives,
Speaker 2: who are pretty good people to work with, you know,
Speaker 2: tried everything they could to get us they add the
Speaker 2: second day, but it didn't make sense. Manna Ross is
Speaker 2: a legend, she's a superstar, and she shouldn't play a
Speaker 2: show that there's you know, two hundred and fifty or
Speaker 2: three hundred empty seats in the first ten rows. So yes,
Speaker 2: I gave up a second show that I could have made,
Speaker 2: you know, a good profit in. But you know, as
Speaker 2: I've always tried, and I try to protect the act.
Speaker 2: The act gives you the ability to promote them. You
Speaker 2: do everything you can to help that act. I mean, Bob,
Speaker 2: I've been doing this for nearly fifty years. I've never
Speaker 2: scalped the ticket for one of my own shows ever.
Speaker 2: And if you think about my representation of the grateful dead,
Speaker 2: how many millions of dollars I could have made scalping
Speaker 2: those tickets? All Right, all you can say is I'm
Speaker 2: a schmuck.
Speaker 1: Okay, all the shows you've put on, have you ever
Speaker 1: found that you're the managers or the ask themselves have
Speaker 1: scalped some of the tickets that they'd been allotted?
Speaker 2: Very rarely. There are two instances in the eighties when
Speaker 2: the Meadowlands Arena first was built. You know, I was
Speaker 2: in business probably for about ten years before that arena opened,
Speaker 2: and you know, we owned a Capitol Theater in Passaic,
Speaker 2: and you know, did hundreds and hundreds of shows there,
Speaker 2: but there was no arena in New Jersey. I used
Speaker 2: to do some summer shows at an old Triple A
Speaker 2: baseball park in Jersey City, some very famous shows, but
Speaker 2: you know, I'm waiting for an arena so it gets built.
Speaker 2: It was an industry that was still, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: very personally involved. That loyalty was pretty much there all
Speaker 2: the time. So as acts that I've played before and
Speaker 2: even acts that I that that I didn't. I was
Speaker 2: the logical promoter. Our company was the logical company uh
Speaker 2: to get to get those shows. Now there's there's a
Speaker 2: there's a whole long story about uh my, my relationship
Speaker 2: with Royan Dell's no over that. But it's neither here
Speaker 2: nor there.
Speaker 1: Wa whoa, whoa what? Just give us a little taste
Speaker 1: of that.
Speaker 2: When when I had a good relationship with ron all right,
Speaker 2: I stayed in Jersey, he stayed in New York. You know.
Speaker 2: I did hundreds and hundred shows in Pasake and Hasbury
Speaker 2: Park and Jersey City and stuff like that. When the
Speaker 2: Middle Ends Arena was starting to be built, Ronie asked
Speaker 2: me out to lunch, and uh like, I said. We
Speaker 2: were pretty family in those days, and I said sure.
Speaker 2: So we went to lunch and at lunch he says
Speaker 2: to me, John said, they're building this new arena, right,
Speaker 2: And I said, oh yeah, I'm you know, I'm real involved.
Speaker 2: I've been been involved in the you know, in the
Speaker 2: ployment and all the pulminary stuff with the sports authority.
Speaker 2: You know, I can't wait. He said, well, you know what, John,
Speaker 2: I'm going to lose some shows. I said, uh, you know,
Speaker 2: because the most acts were playing two shows at the Garden.
Speaker 2: There was no New Jersey show all right. So I said,
Speaker 2: you're not going to lose them all, you know. So
Speaker 2: he says to me, well, we and I we should
Speaker 2: be partners on those shows, all right. So I looked
Speaker 2: at him and I said, Ron, I, I'll tell you what.
Speaker 2: Let's go back to nineteen seventy one when I opened
Speaker 2: up the Capitol at age twenty, and let's go back
Speaker 2: to whatever that date was in the eighties. I'll show
Speaker 2: you my books. You show me your books, all the
Speaker 2: money that you made at Madison Square Guard, and you
Speaker 2: write me a check for half of it, all right,
Speaker 2: and we can be partners on everything. So he lost
Speaker 2: his temper a little bit and he said, listen, if
Speaker 2: you don't do this, I'm going to put you out
Speaker 2: of business, all right. And I said I don't think so.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty confident. So the meeting ended. One of the
Speaker 2: guys who worked for him at the time, guy named Jonathan.
Speaker 2: Sure really good guys, passed away, hung back and said
Speaker 2: to me, John, the acts and the agents love Ron.
Speaker 2: He's gonna put you out of business. He's not kidding.
Speaker 2: And I looked at him and I said, Jonathan, no offense,
Speaker 2: I'm not worried. So when Herina opens. For the first
Speaker 2: number of years, we basically do every single show, all right,
Speaker 2: except for two. One Rod Stewart, the other Madonna. Rod
Speaker 2: Stewart's manager and Madonna's manager at the time was Freddy Demand.
Speaker 2: In each case asked for something like five hundred tickets
Speaker 2: to be held for them. It was obvious what they
Speaker 2: were going to do. They didn't say, We're going to
Speaker 2: scalp them. They just said, and I turned them down. Uh,
Speaker 2: and then I didn't. I didn't get those shows. Delse
Speaker 2: New got those. That was the first shows that Delsne
Speaker 2: ever got there. So you know, you know what, I
Speaker 2: can look you in the eye and I can say
Speaker 2: I've been really pretty pretty straight across the board. And
Speaker 2: I'm more I'm a schmock. I've told you that before,
Speaker 2: all right, I said, I never scapped any tickets. I
Speaker 2: never did any funny business with the books. And it's
Speaker 2: it's what I thought, you know, A one can just say,
Speaker 2: it's the way my folks brought me up. But it's
Speaker 2: also early in my career. The most significant or one
Speaker 2: of the most significant relationships I developed early on was
Speaker 2: with Frank Barcelona, all right and Premier Talent, And you know,
Speaker 2: there's never been anything like Premier Talent, even as huge
Speaker 2: as CIA and WM and some of the other ones.
Speaker 2: Premier probably represented more than fifty percent of the headliners
Speaker 2: in the business for a long time. And I was
Speaker 2: sort of the youngest guy to get in on the
Speaker 2: you know, on the Barcelona gang, all right. You know,
Speaker 2: people like Don Wung, Larry Maggott. You know, we're at
Speaker 2: least ten years older than me. Graham was twenty years
Speaker 2: older than me. And it changed my life, obviously. And
Speaker 2: you know, Frank didn't want to hear about people scalping
Speaker 2: tickets now, so you know, between my upbringing and Frank's
Speaker 2: guidance and Barber's guidance, I never scalped tickets. And I
Speaker 2: and I you know, I stayed away from the managers
Speaker 2: who did.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's just go back to uh dellsoner, how come
Speaker 1: you got all the dates?
Speaker 2: I got all the dates because for ten or twelve
Speaker 2: years before that, I would be doing probably fifty or
Speaker 2: sixty shows a year at the Capitol and Convention Hall
Speaker 2: in Asbury Park, all right. Doesn't ever tried to do
Speaker 2: shows in New Jersey, all right. And I worked really
Speaker 2: hard from the day I started to establish Jersey as
Speaker 2: a separate market from New York. All right. Now it's
Speaker 2: even more separate because of financial reasons. But uh, you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's you know, I've said this a thousand times.
Speaker 2: There's six million people that live in the what was
Speaker 2: the old two to oh one area code, so the
Speaker 2: northern part of New Jersey. It's the second most densely
Speaker 2: populated state in the country, and I think it's the
Speaker 2: second highest per capita income. It was a market just
Speaker 2: in need of a city, all right. And when I
Speaker 2: was little, Newark was a big city, right, and a
Speaker 2: lot of act played Nework. There was no arena, but
Speaker 2: you know, every played, from everybody from Lawrence Welk to
Speaker 2: the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan played Symphony Hall in
Speaker 2: New York. Then there were these nineteen sixty seven riots,
Speaker 2: and it wiped Nork off the face of the earth,
Speaker 2: and still to this day hasn't completely recovered. It's come
Speaker 2: a long ways. You know. There's two great facilities there
Speaker 2: in a Prudential Center and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Uh,
Speaker 2: and still symphony holes there. But for a long long time,
Speaker 2: York was wiped off the face of the earth. But
Speaker 2: the Metropolitan Nirk was a huge, wealthy market, and I
Speaker 2: grew up there and I understood it. Uh, And that's why,
Speaker 2: you know, no one was trying to book the Capitol Theater.
Speaker 2: You know, nobody was trying to book Asbury Parker ventional
Speaker 2: I shouldn't say that. There was a guy named most
Speaker 2: SEPTI very nice man who in the fifties into the well,
Speaker 2: I don't know about the fifties, but the sixties into
Speaker 2: the early seventies book shows at Convention Hall. He knew
Speaker 2: nothing about rock and roll. He was a classical music
Speaker 2: promoter and he just believed whatever the agent's told him.
Speaker 2: But then when we came on board and started to
Speaker 2: look to do shows. At the time, we knew what
Speaker 2: we were doing. You know, we knew that the band
Speaker 2: who he never heard of, could sell three thousand tickets. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, So we competed for about a year, year
Speaker 2: and a half, and then finally he was a very
Speaker 2: nice man. He called me up, said let's let's have lunch,
Speaker 2: and he said, I'm going to give you my contract,
Speaker 2: all right. I can't compete with you, all right, And
Speaker 2: he admitted, you know, he knew classical music inside out,
Speaker 2: but you know what was happening is we were we
Speaker 2: were booking the shows down the other end of the
Speaker 2: borderwalk at a place called the Casine Arena, all right,
Speaker 2: and we were you know, we we we knew what
Speaker 2: we were doing. You know, it was of our age.
Speaker 2: I mean, we were kids. You know. One of the things,
Speaker 2: you know that was so much fun for me was,
Speaker 2: you know, while my friends were in graduate school, you know,
Speaker 2: I was out there promoting concerts with acts that we
Speaker 2: all loved. So he saw the handwrite in the wall,
Speaker 2: like I said, he was a very nice man, and
Speaker 2: he said, stop down the other end of the board walk.
Speaker 2: I'm going to give you my contract, set you up
Speaker 2: with the town in the city. And so for probably
Speaker 2: close to twenty years we did all the shows in
Speaker 2: the summer in Asbray Park.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to Frank Barcelona. You and me know
Speaker 1: a lot about it. A lot of people don't. So
Speaker 1: tell me how you got included Frank and how he
Speaker 1: kept everybody in their own area.
Speaker 2: Well, let's start with the second part. Frank envisioned the
Speaker 2: concert business almost like pro sports, almost like the major leagues.
Speaker 2: All Right, everybody had a franchise if they did their job. Well,
Speaker 2: they were professional, innovative, all right. They got all his acts,
Speaker 2: all his acts, all right. And I, you know, I,
Speaker 2: like I said, I was a generation or a half
Speaker 2: a generation behind when that first got set up. But
Speaker 2: when I started and I started doing shows in Jersey
Speaker 2: while I was in college and then you know, so
Speaker 2: it was hard in those days when the Fillmore East
Speaker 2: was still open. Graham had an exclusivity that was like
Speaker 2: one hundred miles or seventy five miles around New York.
Speaker 2: So you couldn't get very many acts to play Jersey
Speaker 2: except for mostly the American acts, all right. I used
Speaker 2: to play Mountain a lot because you know, you know,
Speaker 2: uh and and so uh. In the case of Mountain,
Speaker 2: Frank was their age, all right. So when I found
Speaker 2: the Capital, and I had a partner in those days
Speaker 2: when when when we found the Capital, I you know,
Speaker 2: I went to Premiere and went to you know, my
Speaker 2: agent there and got in to see Frank and Barber, uh,
Speaker 2: and I told them what I wanted to do. They
Speaker 2: gave me the blessing. We opened the Capital with Humble
Speaker 2: Pie in the Jay Giles band instant sell out. You know,
Speaker 2: Frank was there, uh and uh you know, from that
Speaker 2: point on, the Capitol was a massive success for its
Speaker 2: size in the day it opened. Uh And so you
Speaker 2: know what that proved more than anything else was. You know,
Speaker 2: it proved me right about the market, all right. Pasacica,
Speaker 2: Jersey was a little run down on industrial town, all right,
Speaker 2: no place people were going to hang out. But you know,
Speaker 2: we did a lot of set out shows. We did
Speaker 2: a lot of enormous shows. I mean the Rolling Stones
Speaker 2: played there, The Who played there, Springsteen played there, Billy
Speaker 2: Joel played there, and in many of those cases way
Speaker 2: after they became a renax. So uh, you know. And
Speaker 2: and Frank, Frank was really once he got past meeting him,
Speaker 2: he's an incredibly nice, friendly guy, as his wife June
Speaker 2: is uh. And so I got close with him, and
Speaker 2: then I started to to to manage some acts. And
Speaker 2: the first considerable act that I that that that that
Speaker 2: I managed was Renaissance, all right, and uh I signed
Speaker 2: him the premiere and they were, you know, that had
Speaker 2: about a ten year run where they were really successful.
Speaker 2: They were selling out three thousand seaters, a couple of
Speaker 2: gold and platinum records, and the relationship just grew and
Speaker 2: grew and grew from there.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's say you wanted to do something in
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania fifty miles from Philadelphia. What would Frank say, that's
Speaker 1: Maggot's territory end.
Speaker 2: If it was fifty miles, which is why eventually I
Speaker 2: built an amphitheater in scrant all right. Nobody was doing it,
Speaker 2: all right? If you could find a market that nobody
Speaker 2: else was putting shows into, and there was another market
Speaker 2: to be added to a tour, instead of thirty dates,
Speaker 2: there could be thirty one dates. Frank and the other agents,
Speaker 2: you know, we're fine if I wanted to go to
Speaker 2: Cherry Hill or Camden or something like that. Not a shot,
Speaker 2: you know, Larry Maggott and Allen speedback all the way.
Speaker 1: Okay. What about Jerry Weintraube when he wants to be
Speaker 1: the national promoter and also Bill Graham when he starts
Speaker 1: promoting the seventy four Crosby Stills, Nation and Young tour.
Speaker 1: What'd you feel about that?
Speaker 2: Well, early on, before my relationship with the Grateful Dead,
Speaker 2: Jelled Graham was my hero, all right, and you know
Speaker 2: I could fall follow along like a puppy dog, and
Speaker 2: so Chrisby, Stills, Nash and Young seventy four. We got
Speaker 2: the show at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, and actually
Speaker 2: it's a very famous show in that it happened the
Speaker 2: night that Richard Nixon resigned, all right, and it was
Speaker 2: you know your four Yeah, Jerry wan Troupp, I guess
Speaker 2: before I was in in the business, I think he
Speaker 2: you know, he did most of the Elvis states, if
Speaker 2: not all of them. He did led Zeppelin dates and
Speaker 2: oh and Sinatra dates. All right. So here's an interesting story.
Speaker 2: When Giants Stadium was first built and it opened a
Speaker 2: year before the arena opened, I was working with the
Speaker 2: Sports Authority and the shows, the Sports and Exposition Authority,
Speaker 2: and you know, I was going to promote the opening
Speaker 2: show at Giants Stadium, which was actually in year two.
Speaker 2: They didn't want that. They barely finished the stadium for
Speaker 2: the Giants to open in September. But in year two
Speaker 2: they were ready to do concerts, and there weren't a
Speaker 2: lot of stadium concerts in those days. So you know,
Speaker 2: I went out and tried to put a show together
Speaker 2: and did Beach Boys, Steve Miller Band, Pablo kuz all Right,
Speaker 2: so we're holding the date talking to the agent, Wan
Speaker 2: trap is the manager of the Beach Boys in those days,
Speaker 2: all right, and although they were big, he wasn't promoting
Speaker 2: all of the dates. So you know, I'm patiently waiting, waiting,
Speaker 2: waiting for the dates to get confirmed. And I get
Speaker 2: a phone call. I'm one of the guys who runs
Speaker 2: the Sports Authority, guy named Lauris Smith, who's passed but
Speaker 2: very important guy in my life. And he, you know,
Speaker 2: he ran the stadium in the Arena for a long time.
Speaker 2: So I get a call from Morris and he says
Speaker 2: to me, tomorrow morning, I want you to be in
Speaker 2: my office at nine o'clock. I said, what's up. He said,
Speaker 2: you'll see when you get here. And he was a
Speaker 2: bit of a wise guy. Great guy, but a wise
Speaker 2: guy all right. So you know, I picked my ass up.
Speaker 2: I went got to his office and he was sitting
Speaker 2: in his office with the chairman of the Sports Authority,
Speaker 2: so his boss operationally, not but his boss. And they said, uh, John, Uh,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna walk into another office, all right, and I
Speaker 2: want you to there's somebody in there and I want
Speaker 2: you to talk to him. So we got up, we
Speaker 2: walked into the other office and there was Dave Ferana,
Speaker 2: worked for Winehop in contract Twist at the time, and
Speaker 2: Lauris walked me in and then left and just left
Speaker 2: the two of us, all right. So I said, Dave,
Speaker 2: what are you doing here? And he, like, you know, stammered, said, well,
Speaker 2: you know, you know, Jerry's decided we're gonna Jerry and
Speaker 2: Tom Mulett decided that, you know, we're going to promote
Speaker 2: the show. And I said, do you see what just
Speaker 2: happened in the last five minutes? I said, I don't
Speaker 2: think so, all right, and you know, the light bulb
Speaker 2: went up in his head. You know, he saw the
Speaker 2: way they played it. I got the show, sold it out,
Speaker 2: and I got a phone call from Winetop. I can't
Speaker 2: remember if it was before the show or right after
Speaker 2: the show, but he was laughing. He got a huge
Speaker 2: kick that I stared him down, huge kick out of it.
Speaker 2: And from that point on and the same thing with
Speaker 2: with uh uh Tom Mulett and Terry Bassett, all right,
Speaker 2: they almost always found uh, you know, a show or
Speaker 2: a half a show for me with all the stuff
Speaker 2: that they that they would doing. So you know, uh
Speaker 2: it was you know, listen, I was I was a kid,
Speaker 2: I was maybe I was thirty. Uh so you know
Speaker 2: that was great. Now that led to another great story,
Speaker 2: which was you managed the Moody Blues, not just whole
Speaker 2: their whole career, but you know, in the latter part
Speaker 2: of their career for a long time. And he played
Speaker 2: for me in New York. It is after I went
Speaker 2: into New York and uh he he uh. I get
Speaker 2: the date from the agent and the phone rings and
Speaker 2: it's Tom Eulet and he's hysterically laughing so much, and
Speaker 2: I couldn't understand what the hell he was saying. He
Speaker 2: was just belly laughing out loud. So I finally said,
Speaker 2: come get a hold of yourself. You called me right,
Speaker 2: So he did, and he said, you know what I've
Speaker 2: been doing for the last twenty minutes. I said, I
Speaker 2: have no idea, he said, getting screamed at it. Bill
Speaker 2: Graham for giving you the Moody Blues. All right, I said,
Speaker 2: Did he want it? No, he didn't want He wanted
Speaker 2: me to give it to dells Ner. Now, now this
Speaker 2: is a whole other, huge part, you know, of my story.
Speaker 2: But Graham and I eventually became, you know, bitter enemies.
Speaker 2: More on his end in mind. But he hated me
Speaker 2: so much at that point because of the relationship I
Speaker 2: had with the grateful dead that he actually tried to
Speaker 2: hurt me, and and Tom thought it was so he
Speaker 2: thought it was the funniest thing he ever heard in
Speaker 2: his life. All right, So of course I got the
Speaker 2: date and you know later that day where that night
Speaker 2: is what Graham died in the helicopter crash. So the
Speaker 2: last thing to Build did that I know of, was
Speaker 2: try to fuck me. So and you know what I
Speaker 2: can say, truthfully, in many ways, he was my hero
Speaker 2: when he started, you know, this this sort of war
Speaker 2: with me. You know, I learned a lot about him.
Speaker 2: I learned a lot from him. He was a great showman,
Speaker 2: no question, but he wasn't quite as squeaky clean as
Speaker 2: as he would have had you believe that that he was.
Speaker 2: I didn't want to fight with him, you know, there
Speaker 2: was no reason to fight with him. He's more successful
Speaker 2: than I was. He was a lot older than me,
Speaker 2: but uh he you know there. You know, there's hours
Speaker 2: of stories I can tell you about our interactions over
Speaker 2: the years, but that was one of them.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back to something you said earlier that
Speaker 1: the tickets are so expressed that it's hurting artist development. Now,
Speaker 1: I would say the tickets are so expensive because of demand,
Speaker 1: that's what people want to pay for them.
Speaker 2: Well, look, we will see in a couple of years,
Speaker 2: all right. There's no question at post COVID the the
Speaker 2: you know, there was an enormous amount of pent up
Speaker 2: excitement about going to live shows again, all right, and
Speaker 2: I don't think we've seen the end of that. I
Speaker 2: think that there's no question that that ticket prices for many,
Speaker 2: many many years were undersolved. All right.
Speaker 3: Underpriced, yeah, underpriced, yeah.
Speaker 2: But should they have dreamt to six hundred, seven hundred,
Speaker 2: eight hundred, one thousand dollars twelve hundred dollars? No.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: A friend of mine the other day told me he
Speaker 2: found an old ticket stuff of an Eagles show that
Speaker 2: I did in Rochester, New York, and the ticket was
Speaker 2: seventy five dollars, and he remembers me going, and I did.
Speaker 2: I was at the time very friendly with Irving, and
Speaker 2: I said to you nuts, you know, because he averaged
Speaker 2: p one ticket price then was probably forty maybe fifty dollars,
Speaker 2: And he said there's a demand, and he's right, there
Speaker 2: was the demand. But now that seventy five dollars is
Speaker 2: probably five hundred dollars, and the ticket prices across the
Speaker 2: board for the major acts is way beyond five hundred dollars.
Speaker 2: So I think what happens is I think the superstars
Speaker 2: will still continue to get those prices and still do
Speaker 2: great business. But I think somebody who pays five hundred,
Speaker 2: seven hundred, one thousand dollars for a ticket, that's a
Speaker 2: middle class person, won't be able to go to a
Speaker 2: couple of other shows that they'd like to go see
Speaker 2: where the ticket price top ticket price might only be
Speaker 2: eighty or ninety dollars, right, But if you're spending seven hundred,
Speaker 2: you know, the next month or two you're not You're
Speaker 2: saving your money, you know. Now, Look, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of rich people in this world, and in America especially,
Speaker 2: so you know, rich people are gonna pay whatever they
Speaker 2: want because it's a certain trophy. You know, it's you
Speaker 2: know those some people are all driving Lamborghinis and porches.
Speaker 2: All right. But I think it's going to hurt going forward,
Speaker 2: and I think it's already hurt the rock business. As
Speaker 2: you have written. I'm sure there's not all lot of
Speaker 2: rock acts anymore, you know, all the old ones are
Speaker 2: still there all right, but it's very rare that you
Speaker 2: see a new rock act really really top off. There's
Speaker 2: probably more Americana acts that have grown into being arenact
Speaker 2: and straight ahead rock and roll bands.
Speaker 1: And you think that's because the prices for the so
Speaker 1: called heritage acts are so expensive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do, I do, And look, you know it's
Speaker 2: it's it's a with a lot of these acts, well,
Speaker 2: the heritage acts. Psychologically, even if they don't say it's
Speaker 2: the last tour, everybody thinks it's the last tour, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean this was on a what eight year final tour,
Speaker 2: and I still don't believe they won't get back together.
Speaker 3: I agree, yeah, you know, uh, the Eagles, you know,
Speaker 3: this is the last tour.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe I think if gunn Fry was alive, it
Speaker 2: wouldn't be. But I think that that Henley knows he
Speaker 2: can go out on his own and still draw pretty
Speaker 2: big crowds. Not as big as Evils, but pretty big crowds.
Speaker 2: And the pop and hip hop acts that have exploded,
Speaker 2: you know, with few exceptions, I don't think they have
Speaker 2: a long career. There are some exceptions, no question. I
Speaker 2: mean Beyonce and Taylor Swift. I think forever. But and
Speaker 2: there are a couple of hip hop acts that that
Speaker 2: will probably have a long, long career. But if you
Speaker 2: look back at hip hop twenty thirty years ago, the
Speaker 2: acts that were really big, Toy Hell, Cool Jay, they
Speaker 2: can't sell any tickets anymore, all right. Snoop Dogg, you know,
Speaker 2: I did you know. I think there's a resurgence for Snoop.
Speaker 2: But I did Snoop a bunch of years ago and
Speaker 2: couldn't sell out the Apollo. So it seems to me
Speaker 2: that while hip hop is enormous, it doesn't seem to
Speaker 2: be creating long term careers. I could be wrong, you know,
Speaker 2: I could be wrong.
Speaker 1: But let's go back to what you said. We have
Speaker 1: the COVID build up. Some might say that the concert
Speaker 1: business will rage forever because it's unique experience in the
Speaker 1: world where we all have the same items, we have
Speaker 1: the same phone, we have this and that, and it's
Speaker 1: a once in a lifetime maybe experience. Do you think
Speaker 1: that the business will fall off in a few years.
Speaker 2: I think the prices will fall off in a few years,
Speaker 2: all right. And I think if the price is fall off,
Speaker 2: then the business will still stay very healthy. It is
Speaker 2: a unique experience, all right, and even to me, and
Speaker 2: I'm sure you at the right show, they are in
Speaker 2: the back of your next still stands up, you know.
Speaker 2: And I've seen thousands of shows, you know, so there's
Speaker 2: nothing like that except for maybe, you know, championship sports.
Speaker 2: So no, I don't. I'm not predicting the demise of
Speaker 2: the conceptist by any way, shape or form. You know.
Speaker 2: What I'm predicting is that I don't think it can
Speaker 2: sustain these crazy ticket prices over the long haul. Some
Speaker 2: of them will be there as long as there's a
Speaker 2: super superstar, they'll be there, all right. But I think
Speaker 2: the crazy ticket prices will will will have to come down, right,
Speaker 2: and we'll have to give the audience a more reasonable
Speaker 2: reason to go to shows, to go to acts that
Speaker 2: you know, that that that they're not quite sure they
Speaker 2: love what they like. And like I said, in the
Speaker 2: Americana World, look, you know, Mumford and Sons, Luminears. I mean,
Speaker 2: you can go on and on and on. You know,
Speaker 2: some of those actually become a renact. You know, ten
Speaker 2: years ago there was no such thing as an American
Speaker 2: act becoming an a renact, you know, So you know,
Speaker 2: I think that's you know that that that is uniquely
Speaker 2: American to the American upper middle class, well educated person.
Speaker 2: All right, I think they're you know, they're they're, they're
Speaker 2: they're listening to these acts, whether it be on their
Speaker 2: computer or whether on what little radio is left, and
Speaker 2: and the acts are getting big.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's say you're talking about these tickets five hundred
Speaker 1: to twelve hundred dollars. How can you control prices today
Speaker 1: when the demand far out rips capacity and people are
Speaker 1: willing to pay much more than the face value.
Speaker 2: Well platinum tickets. You know, it's one of the things
Speaker 2: that that ticketmaster was good at creating platinum tickets, taking
Speaker 2: a certain amount of good seats and basically put them
Speaker 2: up for auction so that the heavy hitters, you know,
Speaker 2: will be able to pay, you know, higher prices than
Speaker 2: the average punter.
Speaker 1: What about the secondary market.
Speaker 2: Well, I've been fighting this bob for forty five years
Speaker 2: and beating my head against the wall. You know, I
Speaker 2: was successful at one point in getting New Jersey to
Speaker 2: put together an anti scalping law. It was a good law,
Speaker 2: all right, except for law enforcement wouldn't enforce it, all right,
Speaker 2: And you know. I remember sitting down once with like
Speaker 2: a colonel from the New Yorsey State Police and saying,
Speaker 2: why aren't you It's the law. It got passed, the
Speaker 2: governor signed it, and he was pretty simple. He said,
Speaker 2: I'm worried about killings and rapes and grand grand last larceny.
Speaker 2: I get no time chasing after a ticket scout, so
Speaker 2: you know it eventually, you know it went away. So
Speaker 2: you know, I think that if you take complete greed
Speaker 2: out of it, there's a way that the industry can
Speaker 2: modify scalping all right, with something like platinum all right
Speaker 2: and come back down to earth. You know. I speak,
Speaker 2: you know, reasonably often at colleges, and I even for
Speaker 2: one year toward a course at Syracuse. A lot of
Speaker 2: kids these days, college aged kids, which should be the
Speaker 2: heart of the music business, don't go to shows. They
Speaker 2: go to clubs. They don't go to shows. I've lectured
Speaker 2: at NYU a year or two ago. Probably there were
Speaker 2: forty kids in the class. Maybe twenty five percent of
Speaker 2: them went to shows. They all went to clubs, all right.
Speaker 1: Just to be clear, you're talking about a club where
Speaker 1: there's a DJ and bottle service and all that.
Speaker 2: Stuff, or or even a band, but the ticket price,
Speaker 2: the admission is ten dollars, you know, or they passed
Speaker 2: a hat. So it's not a lack of interest by
Speaker 2: young America in music, you know, it's that they can't
Speaker 2: afford to go to the big shows, and certainly can't
Speaker 2: afford to go to many of them. You know, we're
Speaker 2: going to see We're going to see next year an
Speaker 2: annoy or miss rolling Stone tour, biggest ever, all right,
Speaker 2: probably as big as it possibly can be, because now
Speaker 2: they don't have to say it's going to be the
Speaker 2: last tour. The average person's gonna say, they're eighty years old.
Speaker 2: How many more times can they do this? I better
Speaker 2: go see it, you know. And who aren't far behind that? Yeah,
Speaker 2: and look at you Look at the Genesis tour. You
Speaker 2: know Collins couldn't couldn't stand up, he he you know,
Speaker 2: he performed and sang reasonably well, sitting down. All right,
Speaker 2: these acts are going to fade away, you know, and
Speaker 2: and and uh, you know, some of them are retiring.
Speaker 2: You know, some acts that you know that I did
Speaker 2: a lot of business with over the years that we're
Speaker 2: still doing great business. Retired Joan Baez retired, You know,
Speaker 2: last time she played in New York, I sold that
Speaker 2: three shows at the Beacon with her. She retired, all right,
Speaker 2: Paul Simon Bass retired, all right. He might do a
Speaker 2: date now and again, but he's not gonna tour again.
Speaker 2: So you know, some of these acts, you know, are
Speaker 2: gonna drag their asses out on stage until they drop.
Speaker 2: So you know, we still got, you know, probably a
Speaker 2: few more years of the Warhorses, but then what happens now?
Speaker 2: Of course? Also I think that you know well, is
Speaker 2: country's mainstream. Country was never mainstream in most of my career, never, never, never, right,
Speaker 2: And as a matter of fact, very few big country acts,
Speaker 2: big country acts ever played New York. All right, will
Speaker 2: he always played New York. Will He even played stadiums
Speaker 2: for me in in in New York and in upstate
Speaker 2: New York. But you know, the mainstream big country acts
Speaker 2: didn't play New York. Johnny Cash played. I played Johnny
Speaker 2: Cash a couple of once at Carnegie Hall, an amazing shop,
Speaker 2: all right, but they just didn't come. And I used
Speaker 2: to argue with some of the agents I knew in Nashville.
Speaker 2: Is okay, let's say you can sell out an arena
Speaker 2: in forty of the fifty states. You can't in the Northeast,
Speaker 2: but come and play at theater and I'll do something
Speaker 2: to try to build your business. But of course, in
Speaker 2: most of the Northeast there was not and still isn't,
Speaker 2: any country radio. But the big country acts have basically
Speaker 2: become mainstream rock bands, all right, And with all you know,
Speaker 2: with all the things that go would be in a
Speaker 2: big time mainstream rock band.
Speaker 1: Well, how'd you beat the Grateful Dead?
Speaker 2: I met the Grateful Dead by booking a show in
Speaker 2: the early seventies. He's at this Triple A baseball park,
Speaker 2: Roosevelt Stadium, and I booked it just from they had
Speaker 2: an agent for one tour. Other than that, they never
Speaker 2: had an agent. And a friend of mine named Ron
Speaker 2: Rainey was the agent, and he sold me a show.
Speaker 2: I don't remember what guarantee I played, but I knew
Speaker 2: they were big enough to sell a lot of tickets,
Speaker 2: and so I played that first show. I got along
Speaker 2: with him. Well, it was a craft to be able
Speaker 2: to get along with them, because of the zoo that
Speaker 2: surrounded them roadies at all, all right. But you know,
Speaker 2: I was a tough little kid, and you know I
Speaker 2: took those ship and gave it back home.
Speaker 1: So can you give me an example of taking their
Speaker 1: ship and give a get back to him? Oh?
Speaker 2: One time, one time when they're doing the sound check,
Speaker 2: I'm on stage, I think it was up in Rochester
Speaker 2: and Kid Candelario of one of their roadies. All right,
Speaker 2: I'm standing on the side of the stage, and all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, he throws a full can of soda
Speaker 2: all right at me, whizzes by my head. It hit me.
Speaker 2: It would have killed me probably or damaged me badly.
Speaker 2: I didn't say a word. I turned around, I picked
Speaker 2: it up and heaved it right back at it. They
Speaker 2: respected me for that, you know. And the other thing is,
Speaker 2: you know, they were very wary when I first met him. Now,
Speaker 2: I wasn't around in the sixties, so all I know
Speaker 2: about the sixties, which is a very cold period for them,
Speaker 2: is what they told me. All right. But by the
Speaker 2: seventies they didn't trust agents, they didn't trust most promoters.
Speaker 2: And you know, I developed a nice relationship with you know,
Speaker 2: doing a few dates, and then one day, I think
Speaker 2: it was probably seventy four seventy five, I get a
Speaker 2: phone call like two o'clock in the morning, from Rock Scully,
Speaker 2: who was, you know, one of the characters in their
Speaker 2: lives and was their road manager at the time. And
Speaker 2: he called me and I woke me up at night.
Speaker 2: I said, you know what's up? He said, Garcia Hunter
Speaker 2: got busted. I said, okay, what do you want me
Speaker 2: to do about it? He said, they need to get
Speaker 2: bailed out. They're in I think was Mount Holly, New Jersey.
Speaker 2: I said, okay, how much is the baill I think
Speaker 2: they said two thousand or three thousand dollars. The capital
Speaker 2: in those days had a safe with a fair amount
Speaker 2: of cashing it always, so said, okay, give me the
Speaker 2: address where it is, and you know, I'll go to
Speaker 2: the capitol. I'll get the money, and I'll go bail
Speaker 2: them out. What he didn't realize was this town was
Speaker 2: about half an hour outside of Philadelphia, and I was
Speaker 2: way up in Northern Jersey, all right. He didn't bother
Speaker 2: to look at a map, because the coolie should have
Speaker 2: made with Larry Maggott, all right, but he didn't. So
Speaker 2: I jumped in my car, I had a friend with me,
Speaker 2: drove for two hours down there, bailed them out of jail,
Speaker 2: drove him back to New York and hung out with
Speaker 2: with Garcia Hunter till you know daylight, and uh, you know, Garcia,
Speaker 2: I can tell you it was one of the smartest
Speaker 2: people I ever met in my life. He's up there
Speaker 2: with three or four other people, none of whom were musicians.
Speaker 2: And we were friends, you know, I can say that,
Speaker 2: not the brag, but we were friends. See that picture
Speaker 2: right there that I'm portant.
Speaker 1: To, well, we're audio only.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, you show you cancer me. Okay. So he
Speaker 2: painted me a picture, all right, and it's sitting on
Speaker 2: my wall. Nobody in the Grateful Dead ever got a
Speaker 2: picture from him, all right. So I you know, I
Speaker 2: had a very quiet, very interesting relationship with him. And
Speaker 2: one day they toured and I played him at Rosloe
Speaker 2: Stadium again their Wall of Sound tour, and technically it
Speaker 2: was a complete disaster. Sold a lot of tickets, but
Speaker 2: complete disaster, and they decided to get off the road
Speaker 2: for a while, all right, try to figure out that
Speaker 2: the whole sound thing, et cetera, et cetera. So they
Speaker 2: filmed the last dates of those tours, which were at Winterland, right.
Speaker 2: So you know, I'm sort of staying in touch, you know,
Speaker 2: but they're not on the road, not much to do.
Speaker 2: Phone rings. One day it's Jerry, and you know, I
Speaker 2: basically said, what's up. He said, I want you to
Speaker 2: fly out to LA to meet me. I said, okay,
Speaker 2: you know what's it about. He said, you'll see when
Speaker 2: you get here. So you know you're not going to
Speaker 2: say no to Terry Garcia again. In uplone, I fly out.
Speaker 2: He picks me up at the airport and I always remember,
Speaker 2: this is the first one I ever saw, the two
Speaker 2: thousand and two BMW, which was like the starter BMW
Speaker 2: in those days. And we went to a studio where
Speaker 2: they were cutting the film and they had a rough
Speaker 2: cut of the film. He said, I want you to
Speaker 2: see the film. So I sat there for whatever it
Speaker 2: was close to two hours, I guess, and it was great.
Speaker 2: It's still great. It's still one of the great rock
Speaker 2: and roll movies of all time. And he said, you
Speaker 2: like it. I said, yeah, I think it's fabulous. He said, okay,
Speaker 2: let's go. We're gonna have dinner at hal Kant's house,
Speaker 2: which is their lawyer, the Dead's lawyer. He's passed away,
Speaker 2: but very interesting guy. He was the Dead's lawyer and
Speaker 2: he was also a world poker Champion champion, and so
Speaker 2: we had dinner, and at the end of dinner we
Speaker 2: went and sat down in the living room and he said.
Speaker 2: I said to him, Jerry, the movie was great. I
Speaker 2: really enjoyed it. Could you tell me why you wanted
Speaker 2: me to see it so badly? All right? He said, oh, yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: you're going to distribute it. I said, Jerry, the only
Speaker 2: thing I know about movies is that I go to
Speaker 2: them once in a while. I don't distribute a movie,
Speaker 2: all right. He said, that might be true, John, but
Speaker 2: you know more about how to promote Grateful Dead than
Speaker 2: anybody else alive. So the vote of confidence that you
Speaker 2: can't beat. So I learned, and my staff learned very
Speaker 2: quickly how to distribute a movie and it was unique.
Speaker 2: We forwalled the best sounding theaters, and I think we
Speaker 2: ended up playing thirty maybe forty cities one at a time,
Speaker 2: a week or two at a time, and brought in
Speaker 2: sound systems so that because in those days movie theaters
Speaker 2: the only sound was behind the screen one giant speaker.
Speaker 2: So we did that, and you know, it was successful.
Speaker 2: And then I helped him make a deal with a
Speaker 2: distributor to do all the secondary markets and stuff, and
Speaker 2: you know, I talked to him nearly every day, and
Speaker 2: he had actually, Jerry had a manager, guy named Richard
Speaker 2: Loran at the time, who's a very good guy, still
Speaker 2: a friend of mine, and he was very instrumental in
Speaker 2: all of that. So you know, that's happening. And then
Speaker 2: when that's over with, I don't know how long, but
Speaker 2: you know, not long after that, I get a call
Speaker 2: from both Jerry and another one from Whir and said,
Speaker 2: we're thinking of going back out of the road. I
Speaker 2: want you to come out and meet with us. So
Speaker 2: you know, sure, I jumped at it.
Speaker 1: Just before you meet, it's The Grateful Dead. Did you
Speaker 1: make or lose money on the movie?
Speaker 2: The movie made money. Didn't make a lot of money,
Speaker 2: but it made money.
Speaker 1: So your flo They say where, and Jerry say come out?
Speaker 2: Yep. So I come out and we go to Weir's house,
Speaker 2: which is the ultimate bachelo pad at the time, all
Speaker 2: right on top of one mountain, and Marin and yeah,
Speaker 2: and we sit around for a long time, you know,
Speaker 2: probably six seven hours, and basically what they all say
Speaker 2: is we want to go on the road. They haven't
Speaker 2: figured out how to really play arenas yet all right
Speaker 2: where it would sound good see to them. The reason
Speaker 2: I think that their career is second only to the Beatles,
Speaker 2: that they were the most significant sociological act of the
Speaker 2: rock era was because they really gave a shit about
Speaker 2: the fans right, and they didn't want up having failed
Speaker 2: with this wall of sound, they wanted to figure out
Speaker 2: a way to be able, and then they weren't going
Speaker 2: to go to bigger places, especially indoors, until they could
Speaker 2: get the sound right. So he said, we're not playing arenas,
Speaker 2: so you know, what do you think? John? So it
Speaker 2: sort of just sort of fell out of my mouth.
Speaker 2: It wasn't really any stroke of genius. I said, let's
Speaker 2: pick ten cities. Let's play three days in each city,
Speaker 2: and you know, the theaters that you would normally play
Speaker 2: because at that point they were only playing like single
Speaker 2: nights in places. I said, and and you know, let's
Speaker 2: you know, let's get get get the buzz back. Uh
Speaker 2: and uh they said, uh, okay, but you know, won't
Speaker 2: they were very self aware of how big they were.
Speaker 2: Uh they said, uh, how are we gonna how are
Speaker 2: we going to distribute the tickets? You know, because there'll
Speaker 2: be more people than tickets available, and they they didn't
Speaker 2: want to do it. I don't remember if there was
Speaker 2: Ticketmaster yet or there was ticket tron still, but they
Speaker 2: didn't want to do that. So I said to him,
Speaker 2: we'll do lottery. How do you what do you mean
Speaker 2: we'll do the lottery. I said, We'll put the word out,
Speaker 2: give them a post office box, let them, you know,
Speaker 2: write a ticket request with money order, and we'll film
Speaker 2: until we're sold out. And I like that idea. So
Speaker 2: they said, who's going to do that? I said, I'll
Speaker 2: do it all right. So I had a little office
Speaker 2: in Jersey that was the second floor of a building
Speaker 2: that was an insurance broker on the first floor. Anyway,
Speaker 2: So we put the word out and it was a
Speaker 2: dead head hotline, and two dead head hotlines, one in
Speaker 2: San Francisco, one in at the Capitol got the word
Speaker 2: out and it was an amazing response. We got hundreds
Speaker 2: of thousands of requests for tickets, you know, and the
Speaker 2: average seat was probably seventy five hundred and eight thousand
Speaker 2: tickets three days in the theater. And the first amazing
Speaker 2: thing is they started to come in is the envelopes
Speaker 2: almost all of them had really intricate artwork on them.
Speaker 2: So you immediately said, Okay, I know they're a great band,
Speaker 2: but this is something really special, you know, for the
Speaker 2: fans to you know, draw other stuff. So we did.
Speaker 2: We did the whole country, twenty four hours a day,
Speaker 2: three shifts of people. I lost my lease, I got
Speaker 2: thrown out of the office, but we pulled it off.
Speaker 2: It did well, had a good time. And over those
Speaker 2: few years, uh, they you know, the sound companies were
Speaker 2: getting more and more sophisticated. Uh, and you know they're
Speaker 2: there sound people always were, you know, really on top
Speaker 2: of things. So first I introduced them to Claire Brothers
Speaker 2: one or two tours. They were the real state of
Speaker 2: the art at the time. And then slowly but surely
Speaker 2: they're techies took over it and built their own system
Speaker 2: all right. So we started to play arenas, and they
Speaker 2: put speakers not only on the stage, but they put
Speaker 2: sound like speakers in the back of the arenas all right.
Speaker 2: And they put small clusters of speakers in the hallways
Speaker 2: all right. So wherever you were, if you were, if
Speaker 2: you were a dancer, you were out in the hallways
Speaker 2: spinning away, all right. And the music was right there
Speaker 2: for so, like I said, they cared about their fans
Speaker 2: more than any act I've ever even imagined. All right,
Speaker 2: So you know at that point they said to me,
Speaker 2: you know, you booked the tour, and I said, uh,
Speaker 2: I can introduce you to some pretty good agents. No,
Speaker 2: we don't want an agent. You booked a tour. So
Speaker 2: we made a deal. How can't attorney was was involved,
Speaker 2: and sort of standard deals in those days were guarantees
Speaker 2: in eighty five fifteens, all right, So we made a
Speaker 2: deal that i'd co promote with local promoters because I
Speaker 2: always believe that was best for them, and I always
Speaker 2: did that with all my management acts. All right, you
Speaker 2: know you don't want you know, you want somebody on
Speaker 2: the ground, you know. And so they made those dates
Speaker 2: eighty twenties, and I split them with the local promoters
Speaker 2: except for the dates in the northeast that I would
Speaker 2: normally have promoted anyway. And they became eighty five to fifteen.
Speaker 2: And the only thing they didn't want me involved in
Speaker 2: was the West coast. They still wanted Graham to do it.
Speaker 4: They loved Graham, but they didn't trust Graham. Why did
Speaker 4: they trust Well, I think they suspected that he wasn't
Speaker 4: giving them suspected that he wasn't giving him a fair count.
Speaker 4: And then I found out more this. This went on
Speaker 4: for a number of years, and you know, once I
Speaker 4: was really established as their guy, Graham got angrier and
Speaker 4: angrier with me, all right, till finally one day they
Speaker 4: called and they said, we're playing Spartan Stadium.
Speaker 2: I think it was San Jose all right for Graham. Well,
Speaker 2: we want you to negotiate the deal. I said, are
Speaker 2: you fucking mind all of you guys? I said, this
Speaker 2: guy will put a hit out on me. They said, no, no,
Speaker 2: we're going to talk to him about it. He's going
Speaker 2: to be okay with it, all right. Said you know
Speaker 2: you're not. You're not getting any piece of it. You're
Speaker 2: not promoting it. You just you you cut the deal
Speaker 2: because you know we've exammed over the years, we've examined
Speaker 2: your deals. They're right, very righteous deals, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2: So a day or two goes by and trying to
Speaker 2: remember who called me, it's either Bobby or Mickey called
Speaker 2: me and said, okay, the deed's done. We've told Graham
Speaker 2: he's accepted it. I said, you sure, said yep. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: So I called Graham and I said, Bill, you know,
Speaker 2: the dead telled me that that you're fine with me
Speaker 2: doing the deal with you. He said that's right. I said, okay, great,
Speaker 2: So I said, do me a favorite, you know, send
Speaker 2: me your proposed deal, the you know, the expenses, et cetera,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Let me look at him eighty five fifteen.
Speaker 2: No problem, you know, I'm not I'm not involved financially.
Speaker 2: So he says, uh, okay. A week goes by, Two
Speaker 2: weeks go by, no paperwork from Graham. Another week goes by.
Speaker 2: I called Greg Perloff, who I was friends with and
Speaker 2: still in transfer. All right, I said, Greg, do you
Speaker 2: have any idea what the fuck's going on? He said,
Speaker 2: Bill is not happy that he's having to deal with you.
Speaker 2: I said, then, why the fuck did he tell Did
Speaker 2: he tell the dead that he would? He said, I
Speaker 2: don't know, but he's not happy. I said, Greg, so
Speaker 2: I don't wrap him out to the vand get the
Speaker 2: fucking expenses and send them to me. Said okay, let
Speaker 2: me see what I can do. A couple of hours later,
Speaker 2: the phone rings and it's Graham and he is fucking berserk.
Speaker 2: The only way I can describe it is he was
Speaker 2: like a beached where just screaming at the top of
Speaker 2: his lungs, just doing anything to get back in the water,
Speaker 2: all right. And this tirade went on for half an hour.
Speaker 2: I couldn't get two words, and he's screaming at me.
Speaker 2: I've got to deal with Jersey for my band. So
Speaker 2: eventually the coal ended. I don't know if you hung
Speaker 2: up or just whatever. I picked up the phone. I
Speaker 2: think I spoke the Lash and Jerry and I said
Speaker 2: I'm fucking out, all right, I'm you know, I'm out.
Speaker 2: I said, you know, this guy will put a fucking
Speaker 2: hit out on me, you know. And and so they said, okay,
Speaker 2: we'll get the expenses. We just want you to look
Speaker 2: at them, all right, you know, and bless the expenses.
Speaker 2: So I said, okay. So they got the expenses, they
Speaker 2: sent them to me, all right. I look that. Everything
Speaker 2: looked pretty much in order, all right, except for one
Speaker 2: thing that I didn't understand. There was a fee I
Speaker 2: want to call ten thousand dollars, but I don't remember
Speaker 2: exactly how much was for the set that he built.
Speaker 2: Because outdoor shows he always built, you know, pretty elaborate
Speaker 2: scenery sets right, and he wrote it off. You know
Speaker 2: that they cost ten thousand dollars. Nobody ever questioned them.
Speaker 2: So when I asked the guys in the band, you know,
Speaker 2: was this kosher? They said, We've paid for this set
Speaker 2: three times already. He's got he's got a few of them.
Speaker 2: He rotates them around because he does it for everyone,
Speaker 2: not just a grateful day, all right. He paints him,
Speaker 2: he does a little little different color here or there,
Speaker 2: and then cycles him back around. We ain't paying for it, right,
Speaker 2: So I said, okay, who's going to tell him? I said,
Speaker 2: he won't take my call. Trust me, he will not
Speaker 2: answer my phone call. So they said, okay, why don't
Speaker 2: you call your friends? Would pearl off? Why don't you
Speaker 2: pull him and tell him? So I did to this day.
Speaker 2: I don't know whether they paid for it or I
Speaker 2: didn't do the settlement. I didn't know. But this made
Speaker 2: Bill fucking crazy, and I understand why it made him crazy,
Speaker 2: which I said to him at first, you're nuts. You know,
Speaker 2: the guy doesn't like me to start with. And the
Speaker 2: relationship continued till the day Jerry died. I made the
Speaker 2: arrest record deal for him, together with Hal can't their attorney.
Speaker 2: At the very end of my relationship with him, with
Speaker 2: Cameron Sears, who became their their tour manager, good friend
Speaker 2: of mine still and John Frankenheimer, the attorney, we made
Speaker 2: the deal at Warner Brothers, which brought the two catalogs together.
Speaker 2: It's a monumental deal. And that was the last thing
Speaker 2: I did for them and Jerry passed away. And the
Speaker 2: only way I can describe it, I don't really I
Speaker 2: managed Weir Cameron and I managed Weir for about ten
Speaker 2: years after that, no longer. And the only way I
Speaker 2: can describe it is that, you know, they weren't difficult.
Speaker 2: I didn't manage them. Lots of people want to say,
Speaker 2: I man, I didn't manage them, but I represented them,
Speaker 2: you know, in a number of ways. And it's very interesting.
Speaker 2: You'd go to board meetings and I didn't have a vote,
Speaker 2: but I sat in on them, and they'd bring up
Speaker 2: various different things, both unimportant and important. And I saw
Speaker 2: the pattern when you Gerry was okay with whatever was
Speaker 2: being proposed. He just sort of sat back and voted
Speaker 2: last year next to last when it was something that
Speaker 2: Jerry really wanted to do or really didn't want to do.
Speaker 2: He voted first, so there was never an argument that
Speaker 2: I saw until at one point Phil lesh we had
Speaker 2: formed the REX. I was a founding member of REX,
Speaker 2: and we formed REX and it was great and to
Speaker 2: this day it's still a great charity. And Danny Griffkin,
Speaker 2: who was, you know, one of the half a dozen
Speaker 2: of management kind of people from earlier days, was made
Speaker 2: the head of REX. And I had my problems with
Speaker 2: Danny early on, but we were fine. We were great friends.
Speaker 2: We still are. Phil marches into a board meeting with
Speaker 2: his wife Jill and says, right in front of them,
Speaker 2: in the whole band, I want to fire Danny from REX,
Speaker 2: and I want to put Jill in charge. Now, Danny
Speaker 2: did a great job, was as mellow as could be,
Speaker 2: and they all looked to Phil like he was joking,
Speaker 2: you know, and finally he said no, he was dead serious.
Speaker 2: And I can't remember, but more than one of the
Speaker 2: members said, we're not firing Danny. So that was the
Speaker 2: beginning of the real hard feelings would Phil. He founded
Speaker 2: his own charitable organization, his wife managed him, and it
Speaker 2: just it got and to this day is still really ugly.
Speaker 2: Phil in my view, decided with Jerry Kahn. He was
Speaker 2: the leader of the band. Jerry never even acknowledged he
Speaker 2: was the leader of the band. Just by osmosis, he
Speaker 2: was the leader of the band. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: it deteriorated. And then Jerry died and I met with
Speaker 2: the band the day after the funeral. There's a funny
Speaker 2: thing on at the funeral. I go to the funeral,
Speaker 2: I speak at the funeral, and when we're walking out
Speaker 2: of the funeral, I walk I'm walking out with Dylan,
Speaker 2: and a San Francisco Chronicle photographer took a picture of
Speaker 2: the two of us walking out. Next day. On the
Speaker 2: front page of the San francis are Chronicle is Bob
Speaker 2: Dylan with an unknown person leaving Jerry Garcia is perfect,
Speaker 2: right right. And what I really remember about it is
Speaker 2: while we were walking out, Dylan leaned over to me
Speaker 2: and said, you know what, John, I said, what Bobby
Speaker 2: said the guyline there, He's the only one in the
Speaker 2: world and knows what it's like to be me, which
Speaker 2: was pretty profound.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I met with the band the next day
Speaker 2: or maybe two days later, and and uh, you know,
Speaker 2: I I you know, I said to him, guys, Jerry
Speaker 2: would not want you to break up, you know, you
Speaker 2: know you guys, are you an extraordinary group? Sure you
Speaker 2: won't be the same. But so Phil announces absolutely not,
Speaker 2: and they vote to never call themselves the Grateful Dead again.
Speaker 2: And Phil says, I don't want to tour anymore. I'm
Speaker 2: going to write the Great American Symphony. And I think
Speaker 2: for two years he probably tried to do that, all right,
Speaker 2: But in the meantime we put together the Further Festival, right,
Speaker 2: and the Further Festival was just sort of traveling festival
Speaker 2: that was anchored by by Bob Weir and Mickey Hart
Speaker 2: and Bruce Hornsby and a rotating set of other people,
Speaker 2: sometimes Hart Tuna, sometimes Los Lobos, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Everybody did their own set, and at the end of
Speaker 2: the show, everybody on stage jam. Phil decided in the
Speaker 2: third year that he would go out with it, but
Speaker 2: his conditions were, I only want one opening act, all right,
Speaker 2: and you know, I only want to play X amount
Speaker 2: of dates. So I booked the tour with Phil as
Speaker 2: part of it blows up, you know, enormously. We do
Speaker 2: the whole tour. The last two days are at Shoreline,
Speaker 2: uh in San Francisco. So, uh, you know, I'm out
Speaker 2: there early with the band for soundcheck, and uh, we're
Speaker 2: hanging out backstage and one of the runners comes over
Speaker 2: and says, uh, Phil and Jill want to see you.
Speaker 2: So we were all the rest of us were all
Speaker 2: in one trailer. They had their own trailer, and uh,
Speaker 2: so you know I had I had very little relationship
Speaker 2: with Phil, but I didn't have a bad relationship Phil,
Speaker 2: or did I think I did? All right? You know,
Speaker 2: most of my tenure with the Dead Phil was drunk,
Speaker 2: all right. He was a loner and and and and
Speaker 2: he was drunk. The one and only nice thing I
Speaker 2: can say about Jill is she sobered him up and
Speaker 2: and and saved his life. All right. So I go
Speaker 2: into this trailer and I say, what's up, guys? And
Speaker 2: they said, now now that the financials were all the
Speaker 2: members had an equal share, and I had a share,
Speaker 2: all right, and Cameron had like a half a share
Speaker 2: something like that because he was still on the payroll
Speaker 2: of the Great Gravel Dead productions. So I said, what's up?
Speaker 2: They said, we we we see no reason why anybody
Speaker 2: but Weird Heart and me should get you know, a share.
Speaker 2: Everybody else should be, you know, on salary, I said,
Speaker 2: this is the last two dates of the tour, all right,
Speaker 2: you knew what the deal was going in. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to these guys and tell them they're not going
Speaker 2: to get their money now. Thankfully at the time, I
Speaker 2: control the money. So they said, well, if they don't
Speaker 2: agree to this, we'll never play with them ever again.
Speaker 2: So you know, I tried my best to talk them
Speaker 2: out of that with good reason. Hornsby had been a
Speaker 2: member of the Dead all right, and added a lot
Speaker 2: to it. Cameron, you know, was my partner really and
Speaker 2: I put up all the money. I put up all
Speaker 2: the money, and did all the booking work all right
Speaker 2: in advance and all of that. So they said, well,
Speaker 2: that's not acceptable to us, and go tell them that
Speaker 2: if they don't do it the way we want it,
Speaker 2: we'll never play with them again. So I can I remember,
Speaker 2: just like I can see it right in front of me.
Speaker 2: I went into the trailer where everybody else was was sitting,
Speaker 2: told him what fit what Phil said. Mickey went fucking nuts,
Speaker 2: absolutely nuts. Hornsby just looked and said, not fair. That's
Speaker 2: not the deal I made, you know. And oh and
Speaker 2: then Mickey said, Cameron's house. There was a terrible storm,
Speaker 2: like a couple of weeks before the tour, and a big, huge,
Speaker 2: old tree fell down on Cameron's house, broke through the roof.
Speaker 2: So Mickey screaming, who the fuck did they think they are?
Speaker 2: Cameron's house just burnt down. His house didn't burn down.
Speaker 2: But that was the sentiment, and the sentiment was all
Speaker 2: of them except for Phil, really felt like they were
Speaker 2: a family. Right. I always describe it as Peter Pan
Speaker 2: and lost boys. Right, Peter Pan died, the Lost Boys
Speaker 2: were lost, you know, and by putting together further, it
Speaker 2: gave him an opportunity, you know, to be together and
Speaker 2: to work, you know, worked together. So at that point, Phil,
Speaker 2: that's when Phil started to go out on his own,
Speaker 2: despite the fact that he never wrote the Great American Symphony,
Speaker 2: and there were years and years of terrorable animosity, all right,
Speaker 2: and you know, he he he hired an agent, a
Speaker 2: guy named Jonathan Levine, who you know, did really sneaky
Speaker 2: things about, you know, around the further touring and and Bob,
Speaker 2: we're touring and uh, you know it was ugly. It
Speaker 2: was it was ugly and and and uh, I mean
Speaker 2: Phil empowered Jill. First time I've ever said this out loud.
Speaker 2: And Jill was nice enough. She wasn't, but it's just
Speaker 2: she wasn't an expert in the music business. And she
Speaker 2: got very vicious. They both got very vicious towards we
Speaker 2: Air and towards me. And I remember distinctly telling Bob
Speaker 2: what was going on, because Cameron and I were managing
Speaker 2: Bob at the time, and Bob, Bob looked at me
Speaker 2: one day and he said, she must be a to
Speaker 2: suck the paint off of a battleship that he's listening
Speaker 2: there that way. It's funny I've ever said that out loud.
Speaker 2: And it got uglier and uglier. There were a couple
Speaker 2: of moments that I met with them and and they
Speaker 2: sort of begrudgingly acknowledged that I was an important part
Speaker 2: of the history, but that never lasted more than a
Speaker 2: week or two, all right. And then Bobby, who has
Speaker 2: always had a bit of an addiction problem, all right,
Speaker 2: was straight. He was doing great, and he was playing great,
Speaker 2: and rat the band were playing great. And he calls
Speaker 2: me one day and he says, John, I got to
Speaker 2: tell you something that you're not gonna want to hear.
Speaker 2: I said, uh, what's that? And he said Phil called
Speaker 2: me and he asked me and my wife had to dinner.
Speaker 2: I said, okay, what did you say? And I said, uh,
Speaker 2: he said, well, yeah, we've got unfinished business together. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna go. And I said, Bobby. Now, for most of
Speaker 2: the post Jerry time, Bobby, when he had to play
Speaker 2: with Phil, got physically ill and got drunk all right,
Speaker 2: and you know, we sent him to rehab a couple
Speaker 2: of times. He always recovered. He also every year for
Speaker 2: the month of February he got completely sober. Why the
Speaker 2: month of February shortest month of the year. He admitted
Speaker 2: it all right. And when Bobby was just a casual
Speaker 2: drinker or plot or whatever, he was fine, you know,
Speaker 2: he was fine, but he spun out a couple of times.
Speaker 2: So I said, okay, go to philp just you know,
Speaker 2: be careful. So they go to dinner with their wives.
Speaker 2: And the next day Bobby calls me and says, John,
Speaker 2: I did something that you're going to be mad at me.
Speaker 2: I said, what's that, Bob? He said, I agreed to
Speaker 2: go out with Phil. And I said, Bobby, every time
Speaker 2: you've done that, we've had to send you to rehab,
Speaker 2: all right, So he says, well, they quandered me, and
Speaker 2: I didn't really have any way out. Bobby is not
Speaker 2: someone who does good confrontation. He's very smart, don't get
Speaker 2: me wrong. So I said, what happened? Now? If you remember,
Speaker 2: Phil had relatively recently gotten a new liver because he
Speaker 2: was a terrible alcohol I think, actually I don't know
Speaker 2: it's sure, but I think he might have gotten two livers.
Speaker 2: But he was clear, completely sober. So we thought, all right,
Speaker 2: and Bobby said, they went to this restaurant and Phil
Speaker 2: ordered a bottle of wine, ordered for everybody, said Phil drank?
Speaker 2: He said, absolutely, And four or five bottles later, we're
Speaker 2: all shit face drunk. He said. That's when I agreed
Speaker 2: i'd go out with I said, you're nuts. I want
Speaker 2: no part of this. So he said, well, one of
Speaker 2: the conditions is that you and Cameron aren't involved in
Speaker 2: the tour. I said, Bobby, you know you can meet
Speaker 2: that condition. You know I'm quitting all right. I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna see you go to your grave, all right for
Speaker 2: this motherfucker who you know? Bobby told me stories, you know,
Speaker 2: from when he first joined the band. Remember Bobby's like
Speaker 2: five years younger than everybody, so he was like seventeen
Speaker 2: or eighteen years and they were like, you know, in
Speaker 2: our early twenties. He said, Phil used to beat the
Speaker 2: shit out of him. You know. There were two incidents. Once,
Speaker 2: he said, Phil threw him down a set of stairs,
Speaker 2: could have broken every bone in his body, all right.
Speaker 2: And and once Phil was in the back seat of
Speaker 2: a car that he was in the front seat and
Speaker 2: Phil was smacking the shit out of him while they
Speaker 2: were while they were driving. I said, you remember telling
Speaker 2: me these things? He said, yeah, but I've got unfinished
Speaker 2: business with him. I said, well, you're going to have
Speaker 2: to do it without me, And then Cameron said, separately
Speaker 2: the same thing. And of course they put the show
Speaker 2: was on sale and it did great business, but Bobby
Speaker 2: got shitfaced at every single shot, all right. And there's
Speaker 2: one very famous show that was at the Capitol Theater
Speaker 2: in Portchester, all right, where the film Bob Show played,
Speaker 2: and Bob was so fucked up that on stage he
Speaker 2: fell down. And this is all on videotape. You can
Speaker 2: see this, all right. Bob falls down and Phil doesn't
Speaker 2: even look at him, doesn't even look at him. Just
Speaker 2: keeps playing. Roadies went on to the stage, pick up
Speaker 2: Bob put him in a chair. All right, Phil still
Speaker 2: hasn't looked at him, right, And the only reason I
Speaker 2: say that I wasn't there, but I've seen the video.
Speaker 2: It exists a little while longer, maybe half a song later.
Speaker 2: Bobby falls off the chair, right, So this is really
Speaker 2: fucking sad. Phil never looked at him when the roadies
Speaker 2: came out to take them off the stage, help them
Speaker 2: off the stage, Phil never looked at him, all right,
Speaker 2: So deep down inside you gotta believe that he really
Speaker 2: really resented the shit out of Bobby. Why. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Bobby was better looking at him. He went out with
Speaker 2: prettier girls than he did. He wrote hit songs, which
Speaker 2: Phil never did. He sang lead on half the songs,
Speaker 2: you know, But those were all facts. And when Jerry
Speaker 2: was alive, you know, you couldn't tell that there was
Speaker 2: a problem, all right. The first I knew that Bobby
Speaker 2: had a problem with Phil was over the years he
Speaker 2: told me about these couple of incidents. When the band
Speaker 2: first formed, Oh Bobby did that, and then one more
Speaker 2: time they played together. I think on this fairly well
Speaker 2: show that was up in Wisconsin, and to the best
Speaker 2: of my knowledge, they've never played together again. But you
Speaker 2: know what, I wouldn't surprise if they did. Bobby is
Speaker 2: the most non confrontational person I've ever met. I love
Speaker 2: him to death, and it's just sad. It's just sad.
Speaker 2: You know, he's never gotten over Jerry's death. Look at
Speaker 2: the beard. Bobby never had a beard. He grew the
Speaker 2: beard after Jerry died. You know, he wanted to look
Speaker 2: like Jerry. You know. So he's a brilliant guy. He's
Speaker 2: a sweetheart, but he's non confrontational and he's you know,
Speaker 2: let people take advantage of specifically, Phil, Do.
Speaker 1: These guys have any money and do they have money
Speaker 1: during the time that you worked with him, Yeah, they
Speaker 1: had money. They didn't nearly have what they could have
Speaker 1: had because they had like fifty people on the payroll
Speaker 1: at real salaries, at the equivalent of you know, six
Speaker 1: figure salaries, all right, So in that way it was
Speaker 1: almost a commune, all right. But they made a lot
Speaker 1: of money. Like I said, the Warner Brothers deal deal
Speaker 1: at the end was multi multi million dollars. And I
Speaker 1: think they were you know, at that point, I think
Speaker 1: they were wealthy, not crazy wealth, all right, but they
Speaker 1: owned all their own publishing, and you know, Jerry's is
Speaker 1: obviously worth a fortune, and Bob's is worth a fortune,
Speaker 1: all right. So you know, I always drove into Bob's
Speaker 1: head that, you know, you know, that's your retirement, you know,
Speaker 1: don't fuck around with it, and he never did.
Speaker 2: He never did. And actually Robert Hunter ran a publishing company. Now.
Speaker 2: I think they're all much wealthier because I think that
Speaker 2: Phil did very good business when he went out with
Speaker 2: his Phil and friends for a number of years, and
Speaker 2: Dead and Company the huge business. So you know, Dead
Speaker 2: and Company, Bobby and Mickey and for a while Billy,
Speaker 2: although Billy left at some point, had to be making
Speaker 2: a lot a lot of money, you know. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I think they were all fine financially.
Speaker 1: What's the best Grateful Dead show you ever saw?
Speaker 2: Very hard, you know, very hard. I mean I've seen
Speaker 2: so many, so many. I think Roosevelt Stadium when they
Speaker 2: played with the band a couple of days before Watkins Glenn.
Speaker 2: I think the second night they played the Capitol and
Speaker 2: that original run one the Bedheads very often sighted is
Speaker 2: the greatest show was at Cornell. I was there. I
Speaker 2: didn't spend a lot of time watching the show because
Speaker 2: you've a been up to Thika. I have, Yeah, so
Speaker 2: you know, there's all these deep ravines and stuff. So
Speaker 2: you know, the kids were all fucking stoned out of
Speaker 2: their minds. So you know, I spent much of that
Speaker 2: show outside trying to keep kids from jumping into the ravines.
Speaker 2: So uh, hey, you know it's funny, but it's true.
Speaker 2: And and you know I've heard the show over and over,
Speaker 2: so it was it was a great show, you know,
Speaker 2: and and and it's interesting. You know, every show they've
Speaker 2: virtually ever played is you know, is on tape, and
Speaker 2: you know, uh yeah, everybody can hear it. I would
Speaker 2: say that maybe two out of every ten were stinkers,
Speaker 2: all right. You could tell when they were stinkers more
Speaker 2: than you could tell whether they great or were they
Speaker 2: very great? Right, because like any band, although you know,
Speaker 2: they never really had any hit singles, they had one
Speaker 2: hit single, Touch of Gray, which you know, almost killed everybody.
Speaker 1: But what do you mean it almost killed everybody?
Speaker 2: Well, what happened was they were huge at that point.
Speaker 2: Jerry comes out of out of this coma all right, right,
Speaker 2: touch of Gray. It's like a top five, top forty
Speaker 2: hit right, so they were huge underground fm ys whatever.
Speaker 2: But then it goes mainstream and so the shows get
Speaker 2: overwhelmed with people trying to break in. I remember standing
Speaker 2: out in the hill at sarah Tooga Performing Arts Center,
Speaker 2: completely sold out and there there were like ten thousand
Speaker 2: kids outside the fence, and finally they broke the fence
Speaker 2: down and they came over. They came over the fence
Speaker 2: like lemmings, you know. So you know, it became it
Speaker 2: became clear to everybody we couldn't play amphitheaters anymore. And
Speaker 2: and they never wanted to play stadiums. They had turned
Speaker 2: me down like two years in a row to play
Speaker 2: stadiums are big stadiums. They played like Roosevelt Stadium. But
Speaker 2: you know, that was thirty thousand and finally, when the
Speaker 2: last year that we did amphitheaters, it was so much
Speaker 2: and and you know, some of the ampethsaders said, you
Speaker 2: just can't come back. I took another shot at doing
Speaker 2: stadiums with them, and they said, no, it's a rip
Speaker 2: off to the fence. I said, how about this, What
Speaker 2: if I got a support act that was big enough
Speaker 2: in each of those cities to be a sellout one
Speaker 2: night arena act and they opened for you. And all
Speaker 2: we had to do was up to take a price
Speaker 2: by five dollars because they were very every sensitive about
Speaker 2: ticket prices too, all right, they said, can you do that?
Speaker 2: I said, yeah, I can do it. You know, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna have to pay the acts, you know, six figures,
Speaker 2: but yeah, I can do it. But you'll make as
Speaker 2: much or more money, more money actually. So one year
Speaker 2: it was Steve Winwood, one year was Cosby Sills and Nash.
Speaker 2: One year it was Bob Dylan and Tom Petty together.
Speaker 2: One year it was just Dylan in a bit and
Speaker 2: Grateful Dead backed up Dylan. So it was spectacular success,
Speaker 2: spectacular success. Their ticket prices were still less than almost
Speaker 2: everybody's and and uh, you know, the audience, the audience got,
Speaker 2: you know, a huge headliner. Even with those huge headliners.
Speaker 2: In the beginning of the show, stadiums were maybe a
Speaker 2: third field. By three quarters of through the show, they
Speaker 2: were packed. And they were smart enough. You know. I said,
Speaker 2: they didn't have any hit singles, but they had their
Speaker 2: equivalent of hit singles. Uncle John's band, Casey Jones, you know,
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera playing in the band, so they
Speaker 2: sort of recognized that and tended, more than in other situations,
Speaker 2: play a bunch of those songs towards the end, and
Speaker 2: so the audience went completely fucking nuts. So, you know,
Speaker 2: in their own way, they were great showmen. You know,
Speaker 2: they weren't you know, they weren't slick, they weren't they
Speaker 2: didn't use a lot of tricks, but they were great showmen.
Speaker 2: And you know, to this day, listen, I think I
Speaker 2: could be wrong, no way to know. I think the
Speaker 2: Grateful that are bigger now than they ever were. I
Speaker 2: think that the entity the Grateful dead from a merchandising
Speaker 2: point of view, From a music point of view, I
Speaker 2: think they're bigger than they ever were. I think other
Speaker 2: than the Beatles, not only the most sociological important act,
Speaker 2: I think other than the Beatles are the biggest act
Speaker 2: in the world. Well, I can't count Taylor Swift and
Speaker 2: the biggest rock act in the world, and we'll continue
Speaker 2: to be. You know, you talk to kids who weren't
Speaker 2: alive when Jerry, when Jerry was in the band, and
Speaker 2: they're absolute dead heads. So you know, it's you know,
Speaker 2: it's a great salute to.
Speaker 1: Them, absolutely the debtor forever. We can't go on forever.
Speaker 1: Then we'll have to do this again. John. There's so
Speaker 1: much we couldn't even get into never mind we're dead stories.
Speaker 1: But I want to thank you so much for talking
Speaker 1: to my audience. No thanks, I'm happy to do it again.
Speaker 2: You bet.
Speaker 1: Until next time. This is Bob left six
Speaker 2: S