Long Live (The King Of New York) Rock! Ron Delsener Marks Seven Decades In The Concert Biz With Life-Spanning Doc

There’s a bittersweet, elegiac feel to director Jake Sumner’s documentary “Ron Delsener Presents, ” harking back to an era in the rear-view mirror of regional concert promoters, classic rock icons and $1 shows in Central Park. The industry went from a world of cigar-chomping hustlers replaced by corporate monoliths, from Frank Barsalona to Michael Rapino, from Premier Talent to Live Nation.
The rock landscape was carved up like Mafia fiefdoms, into individual territories that included (and still includes in many cases) Don Law in Boston, Larry Magid in Philadelphia, Jack Boyle in D.C., Jules Belkin in Cleveland, Tom Hulett and Brian Murphy in L.A., Arny Granat and Jerry Mickelson in Chicago, Bill Graham in San Francisco and, of course, NYC’s Ron Delsener going at it against competition like Howard Stein and Graham at the short-lived Fillmore East.
“I’ve known Ron in a peripheral way since I was a kid attending all these rock shows,” said Sumner, who makes his feature-length directorial debut with the project. “He would get me and my sister tickets to the Knicks or the circus. And then we’d write out thank-you notes to Mr. Delsener.
“What’s great about it is how he’ll just tell you this off-the-cuff story about Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, putting on Cream, Janis Joplin or Aretha Franklin. I was always compelled by that. I thought we could make a movie about the birth of the live music business through his story.”
Delsener, who will turn 89 in July, was, as the film dubs him, “the Godfather of Gigs” or “the Sol Hurok of Rock,” his self-described role model as a child, an impresario who famously brought the Bolshoi Ballet to the U.S. and promoted classical shows by the likes of Van Cliburn, Andres Segovia and Marian Anderson.
The film, which was produced by Sumner, Margaret Munzer Loeb and James A. Smith, captures Delsener’s whirlwind existence – even after his semi-retirement from Live Nation several years ago, he’s still tirelessly working the phones for clients like Mario Cantone of “Sex and the City.”
Delsener agrees that the current live concert promotion landscape is nothing like the world he grew up in, starting with his role working for Don Friedman, the man who booked the Beatles into Forest Hills Stadium as part of a summer music festival back on Aug. 28 and 29 in 1964.
“In the old days, a guy’s word was his bond; you believed what he told you,” said Delsener. “These days, you can get away with anything. The people in the business today are much different than way back when.”
Seeing the Beatles at Forest Hills, Delsener remarks in the film he’d “never feel so happy again,” then proved his entrepreneurial instincts early on, collecting everything the Beatles touched at their Riviera Idlewild Hotel room by JFK Airport – from cigarette butts to unwashed bedsheets to discarded tissues – and auctioning the lot off to fans with the help of disc jockey Murray the K. Delsener stood at the back of the stage during the show, taking a memorable photo of Ringo at his drum kit silhouetted by the light behind him, which was published in the New York Daily News.
That night at Forest Hills crystallized his ambitions to book these nascent rock ‘n’ roll acts from the U.K., most of whom were controlled by Barsalona at Premier Talent. One of his first ideas was to convince the city to get behind his idea to put on rock shows at the Wollman Rink in Central Park, sponsored first by Rheingold beer, then Schaefer, with tickets selling for the sum of $1 for shows featuring Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Benny Goodman and Nina Simone.
Kiss’ Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons as well as Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye reminisced about seeing those shows, while a series of talking heads sing Delsener’s praises, including Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Billy Joel and Jon Bon Jovi as well as concert biz vets such as Dennis Arfa, Tom Ross, Doc McGhee, Peter Shapiro, Delsener’s wife Ellin, daughter Samantha and business-partner sister Harriet, who only recently left her post at Live Nation.
“I wanted to have the best stage, the best sound, the best food at my venues,” insisted Delsener. “I hired Warner LeRoy from Tavern on the Green to provide top-notch catering.”
Delsener reminisces about booking the likes of David Bowie for his debut New York performance at Carnegie Hall, then taking over the Academy of Music and renaming it the Palladium, where The Clash played their first memorable shows in the U.S. on Sept. 20 and 21, 1979. At the latter performance, Paul Simonon smashed his bass on stage, captured in a photo which became the famed cover of their London Calling album. Asked what he thought about Nirvana, whose concert he promoted, Delsener cracks, “I loved them… they sold out the place.”
The storied promoter also memorably put on shows at both Madison Square Garden and Jones Beach Theater in addition to many other touchstones, which weren’t always easy to book. Delsener’s consummate skills with artists are perhaps best illustrated by the story of how he got Simon and Garfunkel to reunite for the historic “Concert at Central Park” on Sept. 18, 1981: by convincing Simon it was the temperamental troubadour’s own idea.
The film captures Delsener poring over his incredible collection of memorabilia, which has mushroomed to such an extent, his wife was forced to flee to a separate apartment. He muses about selling his archives to an institution as Robert DeNiro had done recently to the University of Texas at Austin. It is a telling moment, much like the end of Citizen Kane, where the title character’s life is reduced to a series of crates in an empty warehouse, including his childhood sled.
“Some of these posters are real works of art, and are worth a lot of money,” explained Delsener about his trove.
“Ron’s basement is an amazing site,” added Sumner. “There are signed Babe Ruth baseballs as well as little trinkets and tchotchkes that have no meaning to anybody but him. He still has every contract, every backstage pass. For me, it was a dream. It’s a mish-mash, like Ron’s brain. It has everything in it. I spent most of COVID just archiving it. We even found a thank-you letter I wrote to Ron when I was 6 years old.”
In 1996, Delsener ended up selling his concert promotion company with longtime partner Mitch Slater to Robert F.X. Sillerman, who acquired virtually every local concert promoter for his SFX Entertainment, which was then acquired by Clear Channel Communications for $4.4 billion in 2000, then eventually spun off to become Live Nation. It was one of the first steps to creating today’s more corporatized live industry.
The lifelong entrepreneur insisted the impetus to sell his company came from Slater’s bout with Parkinson’s disease, which took his life in 2020, and with the increasing difficulty of making it in the concert promotion business as a mom and pop in a streamlined corporate world. No longer was he betting with his own money, which he admits took some of the visceral thrill out of the game.
“I was the guy who set the conditions and terms. … I didn’t ask anybody else what to do,” he said. “It was hard to give that up. But concert promotion has become this huge dog-eat-dog business. It’s a different world. The talent holds all the power now.”
“I don’t think Ron can give this up even if he wanted to,” said Sumner. “Show business is in his blood.”
With his 89th birthday on tap in July, Delsener admits the only thing that frightens him is mortality.
“Who wouldn’t be afraid of dying?” he said with a shrug. “My wife just told me I’ll never retire. … I’m going to do this the rest of my life. I want people to know I was a nice guy. I tried to make people happy.”