Aykroyd Talks
House Of Blues

The House of Blues is celebrating its 20th Anniversary with 20 months of festivities.

We talked to founder Dan Aykroyd about the event and the history…..

We don’t want to take up too much of your time here

Oh, no problem! I’m always excited to talk about House of Blues.

Before we get to specifics, any thoughts on this 20-year anniversary?

Basically, congratulations to our executives and our staff and our line employees who have made this a success. As you know, in the entertainment and bar industry, if you get to seven years you’re really lucky. If you get to 14, well, you’re alive and can probably keep it going. If you get to 20, it’s an institution.

So I just have words of congratulations for everyone and I’m going to be imparting them personally as I travel around the country, visiting the various venues.

How has your role evolved over 20 years, and where do you think it’s going?

Well, 20 years ago, Isaac Tigrett, who is the primary designer, founder, originator of the House of Blues concept (he’s also the cofounder of Hard Rock), he came from an entrepreneurial family. They came from Memphis, Tenn. His great uncle, Isaac, whom he was named for, started the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad, which was sold to Illinois Central. His father, John, was an entrepreneur who helped start Federal Express in Europe, was an adviser to Fred Smith and started Trailways Buses, so Isaac had a fusion of entreprenurial business sense with a love of rock ’n’ roll and blues, and a whole lifelong steeping in the culture of Memphis. He grew up around Stax/Volt. He knew all the recording artists. He was there at the most seminal time in American music, which was to me and to him the Stax/Volt movement.

So he started Hard Rock, then sold that on the public markets and made a lot of money. He went away and, in 1994, he called me up and said, “You know, the Blues Brothers, even though John has passed away and it’s not what it was, this is a brand that could be revived.”  And his idea was to take the old line drawing of John and myself, the whole Blues Brothers ethos, the photographs from Rolling Stone, the whole concept of Jake & Elwood, the Bluesmobile and the culture of all of that, and put them out front, as an advance awareness platform, for a set of juke joints built across the U.S.

So this just started from a seed. He began to get the idea of [what] the food would be like – a Southern BBQ / Louisiana cuisine and urban New Orleans cuisine. But that core followed from the food to rural Southern American folk art, and right now House of Blues probably has the biggest and most valuable collection of Southern American folk art in the world, from Howard Finsters which go for $100,000 and up. It’s a very valuable asset – which is owned by Live Nation, because Live Nation owns House of Blues and I’ll get to how that happened.

So, Isaac had a confluence of music and culture and cuisine and he put it all together. We went to Boston where two gentlemen – Patrick and John Lyons of the Lyons Group (John owns the Avalon in L.A., and they used to own all the bars on Fenway there). They said, “Well, honestly, we can’t have a 1,000-capacity venue competing with us in our territory but we will set you up where you’ll have such exposure, and you’ll get your company started after we put you in this location.”

So Pat, John, Isaac and myself, and Judy, opened the first House of Blues in Cambridge, Mass., in Harvard Square.  And it was a small little shack of a building that was a French restaurant, and that’s where Isaac tried out the diamond plate on the bar and the Jon Bok sculptures with all the combination locks and the hammered tin, the cans that are used in the sculpture.  We refined the cuisine, then we started to have music, and we broke acts. Monster Mike Welch was 12 years old when he took our stage and now he’s a big blues star. We broke him, broke all kinds of people, brought the venerables, Junior Wells, everybody. And it started to roll as far as the Cambridge academic culture. They got it right away. And Pat and John were so right to put us into the heart of that culture. As academics, they understood the music, that blues wasn’t dead, that it was being revived and could go on. We had great bookers. Teo (Leyasmeyer) was our booker for years. He had booked venues throughout Boston. He’s passed away. He and his partners were great.

So we had this one little juke joint, and it’s just working great. But Isaac wants to expand. Well, next door to us was a small house and, in that house, sat the executives of the Harvard Endowment Fund – the multimillion-dollar driver for the Harvard Academic Institution. So we’re sitting right next to them, they start to come over, they start to eat the food, they start to meet people, we get introduced. They look at the concept, and they decide they’re going to seed the first investment for our private equity round, which got the company started.

So there we go. We’ve got Harvard behind us, we have Charlesbank Capital Partners, we have Apollo Group, we’ve got all kinds of great banks saying, “We like this idea as something that will work as a commercial venture.”  So, what to do next? We had to build showrooms unlike any other in America – the kind they used to do when they’d build ballrooms in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s when they would actually build rooms for big bands. That stopped in the ’50s. After that, if you wanted to see a blues band or go to a 1,000-seat venue, it was either the Beacon Theatre, a converted theatre, a converted mall, you know what I mean? There was no custom, purpose-built nightclub venue in the country that had the advantage of sightlines, the science of audio, and the musician/audience interaction. So Isaac then set out to design the first juke joint on an expanded scale, and that was L.A.

We built it with a moving bar, where it splits open. Have you seen it? You walk into the L.A. venue on the porch/restaurant level, or the Crossroads Restaurant level as they call it now, and there’s a bar there and it’s closed. Then they hit a button and it opens up to the showroom. The opening night was spectacular. L.A., custom-built showroom, the bar splitting open to reveal John Fogerty playing for an audience of Hollywood luminaries. He started with “Suzie Q” because Isaac and I wrote him a letter saying, “You are the only person to open the big nightclub for us. You’re the only person that can convey how genuine blues is. You’re everything, epicly, ethos-wise, mystically that we need to open this club.” We just begged him in this letter, and he did it. And we had a spectacular night.

I sat on the board until 2006 and things started to happen. We started to roll very quickly. New Orleans was opened, then Chicago, then we got a deal in Vegas at Mandalay Bay to open on their top floor a Foundation Room, a private dining room and then a nightclub down in the hotel. Then we did deals in San Diego and Cleveland, converting Woolworth’s stores. And Greg Trojan was running the company at that time and, as aggressively as he could, expanded.

And the board stayed behind Greg and the executives, and we faced the following three, absolutely catastrophic events.

Number one: we put money into broadband streaming technology. We thought we could send out content then, in 1997-98. We thought could broadband stream but there was the dotcom bomb. All of the technology and hardware became obsolete and companies went out of business. We no longer had operators. We had to write off a huge investment. An investment, as you know, in the restaurant business that is very hard won! That cash that comes in is very hard to get – it’s like squeezing blood from a stone. The restaurant / ticket-selling business is really run for the consumer. It’s not run for ourselves. It’s to give the consumers an experience. Because as a profit-margin enterprise, there’s better places to be than big events and concerts. The costs are high and very prohibitive. It’s one of those businesses, born in America, that lives to serve the public. And that’s what we did with House of Blues. We lived to serve the public.

So that was a $15 million to $20 million write-off of money that came into the company. That hurt us bad.

Then, in 2000, we’re sitting in front of public banks and they’re saying, “We’ll offer you $150 million cash and $700 million valuation” and we had Henry Blodget sitting there in front of us and Mary Meeker and all the top private bankers at the time. And, well, the second catastrophe was the stock market crash of April 2000. One week we had all these bankers taking the House of Blues worldwide, next week we can’t get them on the phone.

And the third thing was 9/11. And that killed hospitality for two to three years. So, we crawled out these holes, kept the company together, hired musicians, kept  the good relations we had with musicians, and did a spectacular job of bringing to the consumer the best of concert experiences. I know you’ve been to many of them. We had James Brown open up the clubs for me, five or six of them. We just had a wonderful run of music and fun and then Live Nation offered to purchase the company in 2006 to take up the banks, to take up the debt. And, most principally, save 2,500 jobs at the chain around the company.

So I stayed on the board right through that, fighting for the life of the company. And then, at that point, I left the board and remain a consultant to Live Nation for the House of Blues brand. And I’m the best Foundation Room customer and I sort of help with the awareness and to help revivify the brand with this 20th Anniversary.

Ron Bension, Michael Grozier and Michael Rapino are totally behind getting the employees a reinvested sense of where they’re working and that they’re kind of in a church! It’s an institution, like the Church of Christ or the Vatican. It’s the Vatican of Blues! And to work there is an honor and the employees actually recognize that. And we’re trying to cultivate that, bringing a better experience to the consumer. More shows, the quality of the Foundation Room / dining room, the charity work that we do through the Foundation program that educates inner-city children. It’s just a great institution and, at 20 years, I’m so proud I helped start it and helped it survive. And I love my parent company, Live Nation, for its interest in it. It’s a baby brand for them but it’s one of the hippest things they own. I think you’ll agree.

Ron Bension said that one of the big points moving forward is to not fix what isn’t broken.

Well, the litany, of course, is quality as far as the food purveyance, a staff that is engaged, interested and recognizes the consumer is what drives the business, and the variety of the music experience.

And the fourth thing, of course, is the support of the community. Wherever there’s a House of Blues, we’re supporting the community. We’re doing events all the time for public service. So I think we should stay with those things. And widening the awareness by maybe opening a few venues, like one in Canada. Toronto would be ideal. And maybe one in London. This is going to be a very profitable baby brand for Live Nation – one that I strongly urge they don’t look at for divesting at any time because it ties in perfectly with what they’re all about.

If it got divested, it would just become a restaurant company. You’d just get some chain company come in and buy it and not understand the concert side of it. Rapino understands the concert side, and I feel like his stepson. And I want to remain in the good graces of that company, and so does everybody at the House of Blues because they can take us to where we were going in the early 2000s. We can now make the leap with their backing. We can go to Europe. We can keep the consistency and quality up where we were imperiled before.

So times are good?

Yeah, times are good now. It’s great. We’re booming in New Orleans, we’re going to have a huge Super Bowl season, huge Mardi Gras season. Our clubs are still giving the consumer the experience they love. So I am committed to another 20 years. Hopefully I’ll have 10 of them to actually dance around in.

Before we go, can you give us one anecdote about the House of Blues?  And by the way, there are lots of anecdotes of you meeting people at the House of Blues.

Well I love that. In Chicago, the tour buses pull up at the architectural monuments there at the State Street bridge, and I’ve had Polish and Korean tours – two buses, each, respectively – pulling up at different times when I’ve been there. And I’ll go and say, “Come in for a free lunch.” And I will bring all of the bus riders in for a lunch in the porch restaurant, and I’ll just pick up the tab. And then they walk out, and they’re tweeting and buzzing and talking about House of Blues. So whenever I’m at a venue, if I’m not stage right, on a stool, with a microphone, and a headset helping run the show, I’m out front. When I’m there I don’t sit down. I don’t have dinner; I’m on my feet like the staff, and I love greeting people at the door. Especially Sunset Boulevard. I’ll bring people in right off the Strip into the Foundation Room and I’ll serve them Crystal Head Vodka.

But the great anecdote, of course, which tells you how blues artists have always lived on the edge, and how danger is in every business is we opened the Marina City venue in Chicago, the beautiful corncobs there, the beautiful skyscrapers. It was designed by Bertrand Goldberg, who was in his 90s and was so supportive of our efforts to change it over to the House of Blues. He was the original architect and people were saying, “Oh, Bernie, you can’t change it! It’s a legacy building!” and he said, “No, no. Let these new guys figure out a new age for it.”  So we opened Marina City and had two police boats, two fire boats, and Mr. Goodman and Mr. Belushi – Jimmy – and myself, were wedged into a tiny jetstream-powered vessel called a hydroforce. Now if you can picture, like, the front of an airplane just chopped off, with just the canopy and the nose but nothing behind it but a jet motor – a water-jet drive that pushed it along. This thing was the most dangerous piece of marine machinery I have ever entered in my life. It was absolutely perilous. And there was only seating for two but somehow Goodman wedged himself in the back. So Jimmy and I, and Goodman, in full-blue thunder suits, in the middle of the Chicago River, with waves tossing – and this thing ran with a stick. The stick was your steering and it was also your throttle. And the canopy had to close completely in order for it to run.

Now, with this canopy closed, if we had gone over it, we would have gone down to the bottom and drowned within a minute. Anyway, I closed the canopy, I fired the thing up and I think, “Fuck! This will be the fastest ride because I don’t want to be in this thing ever again in my life.”  And so I start this thing up – and it looked great! It had the Blues Brothers badge on the side, and the logo, and blue lights, and sirens, and the cops were chasing us with fireboats. It really looked good. Go to YouTube and you can see how dangerous this thing was. And I gunned it and I got into the dock real quick and we escaped this thing. I gave it away to somebody. I couldn’t have it anymore.

So that was a really funny and dangerous night – a total mix of what House of Blues is all about. And then we went upstairs, and it was November, and we got on motorcycles and went  around the block, freezing, and rode up on our charity ride and went in to start the evening. But we could have gone to the bottom of the Chicago River, which I suppose could have been a good grave for Elwood Blues.

Anything else?

The real gems are the lesser-known House of Blues. The Cleveland one, the San Diego one. I think most clubgoers and most of the populace know about Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando and New Orleans. But Cleveland and San Diego are real gems. And the one in North Carolina, at Myrtle Beach, is my favorite, architecturally, because it looks like a swamp house. And there used to be a gator farm next to it. So we’re beautifully represented in all these places.  Houston and Dallas are really on fire, servicing those communities beautifully.

It’s an institution. It’s the Vatican of Blues.