Exec Profile: Jam Productions

Arny Granat and Jerry Mickelson of Jam Productions have been the undisputed top promoters in Chicago for more than a decade.

Their company does more than 600 shows per year and is a major concert promotion force in about a dozen states.

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One of the industry’s most enduring partnerships began when they were in their early twenties. Their fathers used to play cards together on a weekly basis but the two had never met until one day the senior Mickelson decided to get them together via a conference call.

Before that fateful day, Granat had experienced a painful introduction to the concert business that might have scared off those of fainter hearts. While attending Michigan State, Granat had a fraternity brother, Mickey Shapiro, who used to do shows at an East Lansing club. He talked Granat and several others into investing in a show headlined by Edwin “Double O Soul” Starr.

The night of the show, Granat got to the backstage door just as they were carrying someone out. It was Shapiro who told him as he passed by, “It’s in your hands now.” Shapiro had a bleeding ulcer and he was on his way to the hospital. Granat, who didn’t have a clue what to do, was left to settle the show. Shapiro, however, wasn’t the only one who wasn’t there come showtime.

Starr didn’t show up either. Needless to say, that first adverse adventure into concert promotion cost Granat his investment. But that incident wasn’t enough to prevent his later teaming with Mickelson. Their tenacity (they might say stupidity) was a prerequisite for their building Jam Productions into what ultimately would become one of the major powers in the concert industry.

When you guys first started promoting in Chicago you were competing against Frank Fried’s Triangle Productions and the big shows brought in by Jerry Weintraub’s Concerts West from Los Angeles and Howard Stein from New York. How did you establish your niche in the market?

JM: The thing that set us apart from everyone else was we were the first promoters who really started doing clubs. I don’t think any of the major promoters in 1972 did club shows. The big promoters back then used to wait for small promoters to do the shows and then they’d grab the acts when they grew out of the clubs. We really created our niche in Chicago by doing the new acts at the bottom of the ladder. Our strategy was to do the best new acts before anyone else. We also looked to do bigger shows in other markets that weren’t locked up by other promoters.

Doesn’t Jam book quite a few clubs exclusively today?

JM: Why do you have to use that word?

AG: We don’t like the word “exclusive,” but we do book shows into a lot of places, like Park West, Cabaret Metro, The Vic, and Schubas.

JM: Park West has been in existence as a showcase club since 1977. There are very few clubs which have been around that long and it’s still probably the nicest one in America.

Besides you two, who are the other talent buyers at Jam?

AG: There’s a lot. Scott Gelman, Andy Cirzan, Don Sullivan, David Goldberg and Steve Traxler. Then there’s Nick Miller and Brian Powers who do the club booking.

How active is the company in Minneapolis?

AG: We’ve been doing Minneapolis almost as long as Chicago. That’s our other home base, so to speak. Our local representative there is Richard Shapiro of Company 7. We maintain a full-time presence in that market.

JM: We practically live there. We book a lot of shows at First Avenue. And Minneapolis was also where we did our first major show. It was March 19, 1972. Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac and Long John Baldry at the St. Paul Civic Center.

AG: I remember Jerry and I drove up to Minneapolis to do that show. We did 10,000 people and made about $8,000 on a sellout. On the way back, we’re going, “$8,000! My god, if we do 10 shows a year we’ll make $80,000!” If we saw a farm, we’d say, “We’ll buy a farm.” We’ll do this, we’ll do that. We were in seventh heaven, riding around with erections. Our next show was April 1st, April Fools Day, in Columbus, Ohio at the Veteran’s Auditorium.

We had Deep Purple, Buddy Miles and a group that nobody knew at the time, Nazareth. That show sold out in advance and we were going, “This is great!” Then about three or four in the afternoon on the day of the show we got a telegram. Deep Purple canceled. We don’t know what the hell to do. We talked to Buddy Miles and he says he’ll play an extra long set. We decided we’d let people sit through Nazareth and then make the announcement.

If people wanted a refund they could then leave. We figured enough people would stay that we would be okay. So we went on stage at about 8 o’clock and said, “We have something we have to announce.” And we proceed to tell them that Deep Purple has canceled. But people in the crowd started yelling out, “APRIL FOOLS!!! APRIL FOOLS!!!” We were trying to say, “No, we’re not kidding.” It took us about five minutes to convince the crowd that this wasn’t a joke.

That got the audience really upset. All of our theories about how many people would stay went out the window and we ended up losing money. That’s when the reality of being concert promoters set in and we sold all the farms in our mind that we were gonna buy. We realized we were in a business.

Doesn’t Jam also partner shows in Phoenix with Dan Zelisko’s Evening Star Productions?

AG: Yes. Danny’s from Chicago. He actually asked us for a job here and we told him the only thing we had was a runner job. He still has our letter to that effect. He ended up moving to Arizona and we’ve now been partners for over fifteen years. With Danny, we also do Las Vegas and Albuquerque where we partner with Big River. In addition, Jam has local representatives in nearly every Midwestern market which we promote in. Some of them have been our partners for many years.

With 4,000 more seats than the Rosemont Horizon, what impact do you think the new United Center will have on the Chicago market?

JM: The question is, how many concerts will they really wanna get? We don’t know the impact yet. And there is also the UIC Pavilion for some shows.

AG: A lot of dates will go to the Black Hawks and the Bulls, plus there are circuses, ice shows and other things they will want to do.

What’s your prognosis for business in ’93?

AG: If it’s anything like the last two or three months, it isn’t looking good for early ’93. I do like one thing that’s happening; acts are playing theatres now. We need to develop these acts. There’s a lot of acts like Pearl Jam that are developing into future stars. These are the types of acts that will hopefully be playing arenas soon. We have to keep developing acts.

What’s your opinion of this year’s concert business versus ’91?

JM: Better. There were more headliners touring that did better business in 1992.

AG: Plus, we tried to be more prudent in our buying patterns.

JM: We passed on more shows in 1992. At the World Music Theatre we did fewer shows. We did 26 total events and grossed over $9 million. We averaged 15,000 people per show. I don’t think any other shed did a higher average.

AG: Almost 400,000 in attendance. That was more people than we did our first season when we did 35 shows.

The World is also one of the largest-capacity amphitheatres in America.

AG: Right. It was built so that we could do stadium-size shows. That helps give us a little luxury, if you wanna call it that, of being able to pass on some of what we thought were the very risky or overpriced shows.

JM: We didn’t care if they were big or small, just if they were stiffs or not. I mean, without naming names, there were plenty of stiffs out there.

AG: A show can do 6,000 people and make money.

JM: Right. If a show can do 6,000 people, and it would make money, we’d do it. But there were shows out there that did less than 2,000 people and we didn’t wanna be the ones to do ’em. We passed on a lot of ’em this year.

Is that decidedly different than the way you booked in 1991?

AG/JM: Yes!!!

JM: In 1991, there were fewer headliners out that were doing business. We were not forced to do them, but we were just trying to book a schedule. We were trying to book what made sense, but then the bottom just fell out on some shows. I mean, who was to say that business was gonna be as bad as it was?

With all the changes up at Alpine Valley in Wisconsin, did that affect your booking patterns at the World?

JM: We did a couple of shows there ourselves this year. But Alpine and Chicago are two separate markets.

AG: Acts can and should play both markets. A lot of people play Milwaukee and Chicago all the time. It was a misnomer, at best, that Alpine and Chicago compete for the same audience. It isn’t.

What would you say was the smartest thing you did in the planning for the World Music Theatre?

AG: One of them would be that we built it with the idea of being able to put stadium shows in there.

JM: Right. The capacity being as large as it is, but yet it’s small enough, the lawn is, that it doesn’t look so large. There’s 10,000 fixed seats undercover and then 20,000 to 25,000 on the lawn.

AG: It’s the largest under-cover venue in North America.

JM: This year the capacity was 30,000, because we changed the hill around. But we’re gonna work on it again and get it back up to 35.

Because of the World’s large capacity, you were the only amphitheatre to book U2 and Genesis on their stadium tours.

JM: Although availability of Soldier Field was part of it, the bottom line was that the acts can earn more money at the World because the expenses are so much cheaper. The other important thing we did in planning the World, besides the large capacity, was we built a stage that could handle a stadium-size production.

With the benefit of hindsight, what about the facility would you have done differently?

AG: It just cost a lot of money to do. We spent an awful lot of money to build this venue. If anything, we built a Rolls Royce when maybe a Cadillac would have done fine.

JM: It’s the most expensive shed ever built.

AG: In the long run, it’ll pay off, but in the short run, it’s tough because we’ve hit right in the middle of the economic problems the country’s having and there are fewer solid touring acts…etc., etc.

Isn’t Jam also involved in trying to build a shed in Minneapolis?

JM For about six years. We’re still working on it.

Do you think that promoters need to have an amphitheatre as part of their arsenal in order to survive?

JM: In the aggressive market we’re in, yes.

AG: I would say so. If it wasn’t necessitated by today’s market, maybe we wouldn’t have done it. But we made a bold move by doing it and we had to cover our ass… and go into the ‘90s. It was a big step, maybe four steps instead of one step, and we took the four steps in a single leap and bound, kinda like Superman.

Looking at what’s happened economically in the last few years, do you think that as an industry we’ve maybe let the price of our product, which is concert tickets, get too high?

JM: Absolutely. I think it’s permeated every part of society. I mean, tickets for the Blackhawks are up to $60 a ticket. The Bulls are $55 a ticket. I think we’re seeing it happen everywhere. Movie tickets in downtown Chicago are $7.50.

Early on, back when tickets were $5, wasn’t the Aragon Ballroom your trademark venue?

AG: Yes, but Jerry and I actually started by doing security there.

JM: That was right at the time we were first getting started and we weren’t getting a lot of shows. Whenever somebody did a show, we’d go in and do the security for them. It was a good learning experience, because we got to see how shows did. What shows did business and which ones didn’t.

AG: We became friendly with the building owner, and when the promoter, Jan Wynn, stopped doing shows there, we jumped right in.

That was our “big” venue. Anytime we wanted to take one of the acts we had developed up to arena level, we had to go to the Chicago Stadium, which back then was the only place to do big shows. We had to make some ridiculous deals just to get into the stadium and could never get more than a small piece of the pie.

Do you think acts staying loyal to the local promoters who helped develop them is an increasing problem today?

AG: No, it’s an ongoing problem.

JM: We still have to face business managers and kamikaze promoters who try and upset the marketplace by greed and wanting to become…

AG …for some reason, promoters.

JM: They wanna be as big in the business as Bill Graham was.

AG: I think the tour accountants should just be tour accountants and not think that they know any more than that. We should all do our own jobs and work very closely to try and keep what we have going. You know when someone starts raising the guarantees and price of production, it gets passed along to the consumer.

Are you concerned about the development of new headliners?

AG: I wish radio would get together and start playing better music. That’s one way of exposing people to new acts. I think radio is very important. We’ve got to get radio to be more aggressive and play new music.

Hasn’t Jam been involved in some Chicago radio stations?

JM: We have WVVX, a heavy metal station that’s been on for over seven years. We broker the time and have our own sales staff and programming staff. Arny does sales and I handle programming. Before that, we actually started WXRT back in 1973.

AG: Back in the ’70s we thought it was a conflict of interest for promoters to be involved with a radio station, as stupid as that sounds today, so we sold our share for about three months of rent, which at that time seemed like a lot of money. Jerry and I had an office and lived together in an apartment behind the station.

Today, of course, WXRT is one of the top stations in Chicago. It’s our goal to be involved again in a major radio station someday in Chicago. As for WVVX, there was a void in the market. We have a lot of metal shows coming through Chicago and no one was playing the music. Jerry said, ‘Play the music and they’ll come,’ and so we made this deal to put the music on the air. It’s not money driven. We really feel like we’re giving something back to the people that want to hear this music. Plus, it allows us to play the music and advertise shows that we have booked.

What do you think the North American Concert Promoter’s Association’s greatest accomplishments have been so far?

AG: First of all, surviving as an organization. Then I would say in trying to focus attention on our industry’s common needs. The agent, the manager, the promoter, all of us. We feed off of each other and more than ever we need each other. If the major promoters don’t survive, there’s only gonna be two or three major companies left and they’ll be telling people what to do. It’s the Pac Man effect.

NACPA is important for us internally because we learn something from one another. At first you sit in a room and you think nobody has your problem but you. Then you realize that at least twenty people have your problem. You can learn something. Someone may know how to save money this way or make money this way or have a new idea. If you learn one thing that saves you $50,000 a year, it’s worth the price of admission. The members are all pros and just as important, they are the guys who survived.

We’ve been hearing about the death of the independent promoter for years. Do you think they are still threatened?

AG: Yes. Look at how many are left? When we started, there were hundreds. Then there were 60, then 50, then 40. What is it now? Maybe 20 or 30? We’re in danger of becoming a dinosaur business. We don’t have new people coming in. I imagine that almost half of today’s promoters could go out of business at any moment. Not that they will, I’m just saying they could. Either out of exasperation, saying, ‘Fuck this, I’m not taking it anymore,’ or for financial reasons.

I think that promoters have to adjust to survive. We have a private corporate party department with three or four people and that’s all they do. We have expanded into legitimate theatre because you must diversify and have other ancillary income streams. If you just try to sit there and make money from concerts, you’re almost doomed. We’re fortunate enough to be in Chicago. I pity the people who aren’t in a major market.

Any final points you’d like to make?

AG: This is no longer a mom and pop business. Jerry and I started off with a $12,000 line of credit. You can’t do that anymore. We all made this business what it is and we’re all guilty as much as the next person for not protecting our asses better. We’re not smart enough to have answers for the future, but we all hope there is a future. We’re mavericks. We’re riverboat gamblers, 1990s style.

We keep doing it till we can’t do it no more. We will continue to work the smaller rooms because we believe in the farm system. I don’t know about other people but we won’t give that up. We all have to remember our roots and where we came from. We’ll just have to keep hitting our heads against the wall, until we have flat foreheads!

Mickelson and Granat still run Jam Productions.