Three In One: Andrew McMahon, Jack’s Mannequin & Something Corporate Perform Historic Red Rocks Show

It’s not often you see someone open, support and headline a concert, but Andrew McMahon was up to the Herculean task last summer when he became the first artist ever to accomplish the feat at the beloved Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, on July 23.

It was a watershed moment dubbed “Three Pianos” for the singer-songwriter and pianist, who first took the stage as solo act Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, then as Jack’s Mannequin and closed out with Orange County rock band Something Corporate to become the first artist to perform three sets as three different acts at the iconic venue.

Each set represented different chapters of McMahon’s musical career spanning over two decades, and the sold-out Red Rocks concert was not only the pinnacle of his career but also the most successful. The show grossed $808,4446 off 9,170 tickets, according to Pollstar Boxoffice, and it reminded the SoCal artist why he couldn’t stay away from the music business. Whether it’s touring with Something Corporate in 2024 — which was also a success with sold-out concerts at venues like the Hollywood Palladium, San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre and Ryman Auditorium in Nashville — or on his own as Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, the experience on the road and revisiting his past with fans has given him much-needed cathartic release after overcoming acute lymphoblastic leukemia 20 years ago.

McMahon, who is managed by C3 Management, has remained on the road this year with Jack’s Mannequin’s “MFEO Tour,” celebrating not only the 20^th anniversary of the band’s debut album, Everything in Transit, but also 20 years of McMahon being cancer-free. The band has played sold-out shows across the country and wraps up the trek with a hometown show at The Sound at Del Mar on Nov. 23.

Pollstar recently caught up with McMahon after performing a few songs at Oak View Group’s Theater Alliance Gala at YouTube Theater in the Los Angeles area, and he opened up about the Red Rocks experience as well as the rising interest in pop punk and emo, challenges many artists face today and his favorite concerts.

Pollstar: It was great to see you performing at the Gala. What’s it like to perform in such an intimate setting like that one?

Andrew McMahon: As I was down in the dust, watching Betty Who and Ron Funches, I was like, “Okay, I just got to figure out a way, because it’s a tough room to play.” It’s kind of the joke, “What do you get the person who has everything?” These people get the coolest shows in the world. I was like, “OK, I’m just going to play a few tunes, do a big song from every project in hopes that somebody can pin down where I fit in the landscape.”

Obviously, it’s a room full of music lovers, and so many of them that I’ve worked with over the years, and having done this for as long as I have, it was fun going to that cocktail party being like, “I know you!” and getting to kind of reconnect with some people.

But then also just to see people in our line of work that are doing the work of giving back to the arts in their communities. I think, needless to say, a lot of these things aren’t getting the funding that they need from other sources. So, it’s nice to see these organizational venues actually making a point to support the arts and distribute support out to their communities.

Talking about one of those venues that have supported you, tell me about the show at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. It must have been surreal to be the opener, support and main act.

I will be the first to say that was probably the pinnacle performance of my life to date. It’s something that we toyed around with and talked about for a while. What if we were to get all of the bands together and try and put on one epic show? Having management based in Denver, obviously, the C3 crowd is super, and Red Rocks is sort of like the holy grail of live venues; they were the ones that kind of pushed me to do it. I was not bullish about selling 10,000 tickets. That scared the shit out of me. I think the most I had sold up to that point was probably 4,000-4,500 tickets. I was like, “How are we going to do this?”

They believed, and it sold out so fast, and then it was like, “Oh shit, okay, now the people are coming. What are we going to do?” For me, it took up the better part of the year last year. It was like we were just constantly iterating and trying to figure out how to platform all three of these acts and have them complement each other. It was probably one of the top five highlights of my career, and getting to do it with all my bandmates to live out this catalog with the people who performed these songs when they were written and, in the studio, and on the stage was just so special.

It’s awesome to see these bands I grew up with from the 2000s have that kind of success, and we’ve noticed many of these acts having a bit of a resurgence. What are your thoughts on that trend?

It was really only when I turned 40, I was like, “I’ve proven myself that I can do this outside of this scene.” I’ve done other projects. I’ve worked in other ways, and then all of a sudden, I found myself going, “Why are you running away from this? This is beautiful.”

And it was me and [Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carraba], we did a summer tour together ahead of We Were Young was a thing or before any of these things were going up. We’ve been planning it for a year and we put it up and all of a sudden, we were like, “Shit, this is happening.” We could sense it when we were out doing that tour, and this was in 2022. It was like we were sort of at the beginning of this thing, watching When We Were Young pop-ups and all these bands get back together and be bigger than they were when we were kids.

Both Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin individually played their biggest headlining set in the last two years. I’m grateful. I love what I do and to be able to continue to do it and have new people coming to these songs and have people who were fans back in the day coming and getting to see us put on a show with real production, which was never really a thing that we did back in the day. Now we’re getting to go out with these beautiful rigs and lights and video.

Who knows where we are in this wave, breaking or cresting or wherever it’s at, but I know it’s been cathartic for me. Something Corporate kind of disappeared before it ever really fully bloomed, in my opinion, and Jack’s Mannequin was tied to such a really tricky moment in my life, that to get to revisit both catalogs with the guys who were there at my side has been a really beautiful way to experience this music again in a sort of environment that’s less fraught and less caught up in all of the coming of age bullshit that was part and parcel of that that time. It’s been awesome.

It’s a combination of a lot of things, but I think the music resonated with fans when they were left to their own devices during the pandemic because it has this angst and emotionality that was right for that time of introspection.

I can only speak for myself, but we always felt like fish out of water in the scene in both of my projects, really. I can’t even tell you how many shows I played where it was like you had to put armor on to go play shows with a piano on these stages. But what I can say is our goal was always just to write really great pop music. The songs always started with a voice and a piano, and the goal was always to write a classic song. I’d always hoped that these songs would stand the test of time.

Because of the cyclical nature and how fast the cycles move now over the last 10 or 15 years, new generations of young kids are going back to that sound, and they keep picking it up, and it just sort of seems like this snowball that keeps picking up speed.

You’ve been through a lot in your life and career. There was a video that recently went viral where Shirley Manson of Garbage spoke about the challenges of artists today. From your perspective, how has the business changed over the past decade?

We could talk for days on this. If you look at the time that my first band was signed, the music business is always going through something traumatic, and without a doubt, the artists are always the ones getting the worst end of that whatever that trauma is. For the sake of maintaining my optimism and not ever wanting to come at music and this joy of getting to live your dream with cynicism, I really try to put my head down and do the work. I’m very fortunate that I’ve been able to cultivate and keep a fan base for this long. I’m able to iterate and find ways to continue to make money doing what I do.

I will say I feel anxious for young artists. I feel really worried about a young artist who doesn’t want to just be a social media influencer but somebody who really wants to sit in their room and write great music, what their opportunities and what their path is toward an actual sustainable career.

I watched that Shirley Manson video, and I felt for her. I just came back from Australia and Japan. I can’t make a dollar going to Australia and Japan, but I go because there are fans there and we figure it out. But touring has gotten so expensive for all of us. The prices of buses have doubled in the past handful of years. Everything is through the roof. The cost of crew, the cost of all of it has gone up, and we’re still getting paid the same amount of money. Yet, there’s an entire secondary market that has sprung up solely for the purpose of reshaping the economies around these shows, creating a sense of scarcity where often there isn’t one and milking our fans for the sake of these ticketing companies and for the sake of the secondary market and the brokers and everybody involved.

It’s disheartening. I want to keep tickets affordable for my fans, even if that means I’m coming home with less money, yet there’s this whole other world of people getting rich off the shows I put up. I think that part of it is really tough for me, and I do worry about where this is going to leave artists. Spotify, it’s a joke what people are getting paid. Millions of people are listening to these songs and they’re getting paid pennies. I do think there’s got to be some accountability at some point if we want to keep hearing music from up-and-coming artists. With Something Corporate, we sold what at the time was a small amount of records, but we got paid because the records sold and we made our publishing and money came through it. You have to really be smart to make money as a young artist.

I’m very fortunate; I’m not on the complainer side of this. I find ways to take care of my family by doing what I do. But I think, just getting in a van right now and traveling the country to play for 10, 20 people a night like we used to do on a shoestring, even that has got to be just so out of control.

We should all be bending over backwards to help cultivate the arts and make it reasonable for young people to take a chance on their dreams.

It’s tough because artists have to also be influencers, promoting themselves on social media, and they rely so heavily on merch sales, too.

The crazy thing about these venue cuts is they’re taking 25% of your gross. T-shirts cost twice as much as they used to. If you want to keep a t-shirt affordable, you’re going to have a venue taking eight bucks off the top of every one of my T-shirts after I’ve already spent $10 to print them. I’ve worked in this business for so long, I know and love people on side of these sides of issues where we don’t see eye to eye. But I think it is time to consider: yeah, it’s great that a Taylor Swift concert can sell a ticket for $7,000-$8,000, but the question you have to ask when people are starting to spend a month’s salary on a concert ticket … do they have any more money to go see another show?

You look at the industry as a whole and it’s making money, but you have to ask about the actual health of the live music business. If all of that money is being made on the backs of the top 20 artists, but then meanwhile you have these other artists going into clubs who are having to fight for eyeballs and get paid when fans who would have gone to see 10 or 20 shows in a year can really afford to go to maybe two or three with the secondary market inflated prices.

Those are the things that I think about every day, and I’m trying to lend my voice to and get involved in legislation and initiatives to try and work on that because I think we are at an inflection point where codifying the secondary market into law is going to be the death of a lot of great music.

It’s tough, but I don’t want to focus on that gloom and doom because you have some great things coming up, including your Jack’s Mannequin tour.

The last Wilderness record I put out outside of a couple of singles that came out last year was called Tilt at the Wind No More. Coming out of COVID, it was such an inspired record. I joke it’s like gathering strength, but part of this adventure is doing these reunions, which I loathed to do initially, but finally found my taste for it and got excited to be on the road and experience these things. I sort of drew this sketch out, which I’m going to do Something Corporate, do these Jack’s Mannequin dates with the goal of slow walking through my musical history, to find out where I landed and what I feel like I need to make next, and we’re sort of about to run into that moment.

The next year of my life is up in the air. I’ve got a T.V. project that I’m working on developing. We’re talking about doing some possible symphony dates, and some smaller shows to counterbalance what the last couple of years have been — maybe just a couple of really cool, intimate piano shows. But the goal really is to make space to explore and get inspired and figure out what the next thing is for me musically.

Any shows you’ve been to recently that were inspiring?

I saw Franz Ferdinand a couple of weekends ago, and it was such a badass rock and roll show. I got to see Paul Simon at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and it was beautiful in a million ways. It was so human and so connected, and that show blew my mind.

It’s been a year or so since I’ve seen the Olivia Rodrigo show I went to. I’m like such a geek for Olivia. I just think she’s amazing.

I saw Sarah McLachlan over the past year, and that was amazing. I grew up on her music, and my wife and I got to go and have this amazing hang at that new Acrisure Arena in [Palm Desert], which was really cool. We saw Vampire Weekend a couple of weekends ago. I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot there, but there’s a lot of good music to see.