Q’S With Atomic Music Group CEO Scott Weiss: From Car, Biker & Tattoo Festivals To The World

Atomic Music Group was formed in 1994 but for a couple of years was “essentially a one-client company,” Weiss tells Pollstar.

Scott Weiss:  Actually, it really wasn’t until 2007 that I started taking on more clients. I was taking on legacy artists that were iconic in their genres, like Reverend Horton Heat, and I expanded my company initially with Supersuckers, Nashville Pussy and Jello Biafra. That was the beginning of what Atomic ultimately became.

From there, I made a conscious decision to see what I could really do with my company. Melody King had left what was then The Agency Group and Tom Hoppa left APA.

 

Their clients came over with me and that began my first real expansion into the ultimate direction of where we were heading. 

It was a slow but steady expansion as myself, Melody and Tom began taking on more clients but, ultimately, the defining moment of AMG was with Davis McLarty in Austin. He had his own firm called Two Chord Touring and a very similar roster of legacy artists like Dale Watson, Kelly Willis and a lot of big Texas artists. Davis merged his firm with mine.

Then, Logan Bosemar left New Frontier with her legacy clients like Ray Wylie Hubbard and Suzy Bogguss.

At that point is really when the major expansion gelled. So we opened our Nashville office with Logan running that and our Austin office with Davis running that. 

From that point, we started bringing on other agents who were either leaving other agencies or other lone wolves who were running their own businesses, and we started absorbing them into what 

we ultimately became, which is an incredible cast of characters.

They are acts that, for the most part, have rarely if ever had major hits but many of them are virtual household names. They are legacy artists and cultural icons of certain genres.

For example, if you’re running a tattoo festival or a motorcycle convention or car show, and you have live music, I guarantee you are calling us and booking our bands. It’s impossible to have a car, bike or tattoo event and not book our bands. Some of our clients are synonymous with that lifestyle.

Many of our bands have never had the benefit of hits, but are playing 200 dates a year or more. Some of them have been doing that for 20 or 30 years. Give me a band like that; I’d rather have that than a band with a Top 10 hit that’s here and gone. 

It’s turned out that we are knee-deep in that genre but by no means does that define our company. We’ve got as many straight-up country acts as we do metal bands and that’s completely psychotic to me, but it works. 

Courtesy AMG – Scott Weiss
Scott Weiss (center) has made a career of coloring outside the box with such artists as Jello Biafra (L) and Slim Jim Phantom of Stray Cats.

About four years ago, my wife and I bought some land down in Manzanilla, Mexico, right on the water. While we were building this house down there, the word just sort of circulated that we were in the music industry. I was down there supervising the construction and all of a sudden, over a period of six months or so, all these CDs and mixtapes started landing on the construction site in my little mailbox.

One guy introduced me to another guy, who turned me on to this DJ, and through this DJ I wound up meeting this other guy up in northern Mexico, Enrique Bravo, who was in the music business representing a bunch of Mexican bands.

But he had these great connections all through Europe and Latin America for these alternative Latin bands and he joined AMG and he runs our Latin division, which is really a large part of AMG now. We have three Latin agents and about 30 Latin clients. It’s the fastest-growing sector of our company. I’m really excited about where that whole genre is headed. The sky is the limit. 

It’s incredible how underrepresented the genre is and what’s also equally incredible is how consistently well these shows perform at the box office when they come in. In virtually every market in the country, there’s a street team of people that want to be involved in promoting these shows. And even though these people don’t necessarily own venues or have formal companies set up, there’s a network of people who are buying and promoting shows and doing very well. It’s on the forefront of what is going to be significant. It’s already significant but it’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s to come. 

Just as there is with traditional American music, there’s everything from metal to folk and everything in between. In Latin music, it’s the same thing. You’ve got everything from Julio Iglesias to Sepultura and in between. 

There’s Latin punk bands, there’s cumbia, there’s accordion dance bands that do cumbia out of Texas. There’s really progressive house DJ artists. There’s literally everything. In Southern California particularly, there’s a total crossover in the car culture / greaser / gearhead world where rockabilly and Americana blend and it’s all really just one rock ‘n’ roll genre.

In the ’50s, rock ‘n’ roll was East L.A. Mexican rock ‘n’ roll with Ritchie Valens and “La Bamba.”

And so that whole scene never really left the east side of Los Angeles; it just was never really all that big. So that blends with rockabilly, especially in Southern California, you go to any of the rockabilly events and they’re heavily attended by Latinos. And our rockabilly acts go to Mexico a lot, and Brazil. They’re in demand down there quite a bit.

 

It took a while, but even Coachella has a Latin stage now. You know when that happens, it’s busting out in the mainstream now. When it starts hitting St. Louis on the club level, it’s everywhere. 

There’s so many people residing in North America now that are from South America. When these artists come and tour up here, the fans are very loyal and they support them. These shows are very consistent performers at the box office. We’ve developed this consistent pipeline between artists and promoters, and it’s a very reliable network of talent and promoters and it works. And it’s expanding.

I signed Kinky Friedman, who I’ve idolized since I was a kid! I attended University of Houston on a tennis scholarship. I was a real fan of this local guy there, Shake Russell. I left school halfway through my freshman year and turned pro. I had to retire with knee injuries so I returned to Houston and weaseled my way into a gig as Shake’s roadie for $100 a week. 

One night, Shake was opening for Kinky at Rockefeller’s in Houston. I was backstage tuning Shake’s guitar and Kinky walks in. He was just off the Rolling Thunder Revue with Bob Dylan and I was just in awe. So I was checking Kinky out, staring at him actually, and finally he looks at me and says, “What the fuck are you looking at?” I was just like, “uhhhhhh.” I just put my head straight down and went back to tuning the guitar. 

So, when I went down to Austin to talk to Kinky about strategy for 2019 touring, I reminded him of what had happened whe we first “met” and of course he didn’t remember. But he just looked at me and went, “Oh, lordy.”

I’m really happy with the direction we’re going. Personally, I spend the majority of my time just running the actual business. I enjoy overseeing the development of the business and most of the actual booking of concerts is left to everybody else in the company.

I’ve got 21 agents besides myself. They do 90 percent of the booking and I spend my time on business development and, as far as the future goes, I am really focused a lot on developing the international side of our business with the Latin aspect of it. I really enjoy that challenge. It’s pretty interesting to me to be able to work on that side of it.