House of Blues
Celebrates 20

The House of Blues is celebrating its 20th Anniversary with 20 months of festivities. We talked to CEO Ron Bension and founder Dan Aykroyd about the event and the history of House of Blues. First up, Ron Bension.

The celebrations commenced Dec. 4 at the Sunset Strip location with a performance featuring ZZ Top. How it will end is yet to be decided.

What are your thoughts going into this period?

It’s quite a milestone when you start thinking of all the history of the House of Blues. You really look back at some of the big, big acts. Clapton, Gaga. You start thinking about that and realize these buildings have some history to them. We thought that we’ve gotten to a place now, especially after working with Live Nation to reorganize the club and theatre group, it’s time to go out with a celebration and show everybody that we’re alive and well and very, very fresh. So it’s exciting. We started off with a big anniversary kickoff on Sunset Boulevard. We spanned the two decades with ZZ Top and Flogging Molly with a great show. We’re going to go out into each one of our markets and we hope to get 10 tours out over the next 20 months with acts that could be considered underplays to come into the building, just like we’ve done throughout our history. It’s going to be great. Each time the tour goes through we’ll do something special in the marketplace and I think it’s going to be a great year-plus celebration.

I’m assuming some of the artists cannot be mentioned yet?

Well, we’re talking to groups like Third Eye Blind and Panic At The Disco. Flogging Molly is already on sale. Great groups with large fan bases that we know will do well and enjoy their tour through all of our buildings. It’s as much about the bands as it is about us because there’s going to be a lot of activity around these tours and it will be a nice thing to be associated with.

The brand’s held up. Any thoughts about the long-term future?

The reality is the House of Blues is pretty much the only live music brand in the world. When we talk to our customers, agents and the bands that we work with, there’s a history to it but there’s a freshness, too. When you think about the up-and-coming acts that we put through the venues – Imagine Dragons, who just sold out after one hour on sale, Mac Miller, A$AP Rocky – we have this great historical soul and at the same time we offer the current, contemporary, hippest acts that are in the music business.

I think that’s the plan: to stay true to our roots, provide great experiences for the fans, great experiences for the bands and, at the same time, continue to reinvest in the restaurant and our Foundation Rooms.  There’s no magic scheme that we’re going to change what we do. We’re going to continue to improve what we offer and stay on the front lines of live music.

I think some people think of it in a different way but you just look who’s playing our buildings and it’s the who’s who of upcoming acts that are able to sell 700 to 2,000 tickets.

It could have been a 20-day celebration, or a 20-hour marathon. In what ways will a 20-month celebration be sustained?

When you think about what we want to do around each tour that runs through, it’s a significant effort of marketing, PR and promotion. We felt that you can’t do it in 20 hours; you can’t do it in 20 days. So we started looking at the pacing and ensuring we can do what we want to do in the markets. We want everyone in the market to know when they’re coming through town. We didn’t feel we could do that every single week and do it justice. We’re looking at these tours as a celebration and being in partnership with the band. I just felt we didn’t want to force some kind of time frame that causes marketing fatigue, I guess.  We’d rather do it right than do it fast.

The end of the celebration is still a ways away, but how will it wrap?

Well, it’s not going to go out at the same time. It gives us time to work with the bands on getting substantial marketing plans. Panic At The Disco is going to sell tickets and we hope they’re a band we can work with. We have every confidence in our marketing and their popularity. We’ll be fine.

Although this is essentially a celebration of this company’s place as a live music venue, it’s about the tours, our restaurant Crossroads having a new celebrity chef in Aaron Sanchez, and a reemergence of our Foundation Rooms being a cool, hip place. We have a charity foundation – the International House of Blues Foundation – and a dollar of every ticket sold for the 20th Anniversary tours will be donated to Action for the Arts, which provides instruments and funding for after-school programs for young kids. For Thanksgiving we provided 20,000 meals to the needy. It was a huge goal for us and our team members and staffs around the country gave of themselves and their time to do this. We do it every year. This is all in the DNA of what the House of Blues stands for.

I’m assuming you’ve been to a House of Blues and they are really cool. They do have a certain vibe to them that in today’s environment doesn’t exist. We’re really proud of the buildings and what they stand for, what they feel like. It’s about the whole building.