Bright lights, big city concerts help sell Bozeman

Duane Morris has the coolest job at Montana State University — booking the likes of Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac and Kid Rock into the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse.

Morris has shaken hands with Dylan and had his picture taken with Matchbox Twenty. He has made sure that the fieldhouse had an X-box for Snoop Dogg’s entourage to play video games backstage and a friendly dog to ease homesickness for the Barenaked Ladies’ crew.

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2004/04/04/news/02concertsbzbigs.txt

Morris, 38, downplays the glamour of the job and his own role, insisting that hosting successful shows and building a solid reputation within the industry has been a team effort.

One wall of Morris’ office is plastered with posters from recent fieldhouse concerts — from rocker Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers to B.B. King and country star Toby Keith.

Morris’ wall is running out of room — one measure of the success MSU has enjoyed in attracting stars since he was hired 1998.

Back then, the university had just spent $12 million to renovate the fieldhouse and was eager to bring in more revenue from events besides basketball and athletics to help pay off the bonds.

Filling the fieldhouse has helped MSU’s revenues and contributed to the Bozeman economy, attracting concertgoers who also spend money at local restaurants, shops, bars and motels. For the Tom Petty concert, four in 10 tickets were sold to people from outside the Gallatin Valley — including 569 fans from Helena.

Big-time concerts have also boosted Bozeman’s image among prospective students, "a huge recruiting tool," said Tom Stump, MSU auxiliaries services director. If a teenager in Vermont hears that Bozeman has Kid Rock and John Mayer concerts, the university sounds like a happening place, not out in the boondocks.

"It’s a lot of hard work," Morris, MSU’s director of events and marketing, said last week in his office in auxiliary services, just below the Hedges dining hall. "For every 10 dates we work on, we’re lucky if two come to fruition.

"In a market the size of Bozeman, if you wait for the phone to ring, you’re going to have a lot of dark days."

With Gallatin County’s population at just 70,000, Morris has had to be aggressive in calling tour promoters and convincing them that the fieldhouse, centrally located in the state, can draw paying customers from all over Montana.

"People in Bozeman and Montana are buying tickets — that’s the key thing," Morris said. "One of the things we boast about when talking about this building — the market is in a strong economic period."

Small towns are known in the trade as lost cities, so one thing Morris did was join with a group of smaller cities — Sioux Falls and Rapid City, S.D., Duluth, Minn., Casper, Wyo., — to put together ads in trade magazines, promoting themselves as the "Lost Cities Tour."

Morris also took advantage of connections he’d built up while managing the Yakima Valley SunDome in Washington and directing North American tours for Feld Entertainment’s Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus and Disney on Ice.

"This business is based on relationships," he said. February’s John Mayer show came about after Morris heard from a friend where he once worked that a Mayer tour was being put together.

Creston Thornton, 32, co-owner of Boise-based Bravo Entertainment, which promotes most of the fieldhouse concerts, said Morris knows the business well and runs things smoothly.

"We do over 450 shows a year in 14 states, and one of our best relationships and one of the easiest to deal with is Bozeman," Thornton said.

The fieldhouse’s big breakthrough came March 24, 2000, when Dylan performed. People lined up for hours — some in the snow — to buy $35 tickets. That was probably the most ever charged up to that point for a fieldhouse show.

"That one literally opened our eyes to what the market could do," Morris said. "It is still the quickest sellout in building history."

Tom Garnsey, 43, whose Vootie Productions pioneered bringing national performers like Lyle Lovett to Bozeman, promoted the Dylan show. Garnsey said that concert also proved to local music fans that with modern sound systems, music in the fieldhouse could actually sound good.

Ironically, the Dylan show also sowed the seeds for bigger promoters to move in. Nationwide, big corporations like ClearChannel have taken over the promotion business, Garnsey said. Bravo Entertainment, started 10 years ago by Thornton and his brother with $2,000 from a credit card, has grown to the 12th largest promoter in the country.

Garnsey, a longtime band guitarist, still promotes smaller shows like Arlo Guthrie’s appearance at the Gallatin Gateway Inn. He compared himself to the Food Co-op and the big promoters to Wal-Mart. He said Dylan made it clear to corporate America that it was safe to book bigger acts at the fieldhouse.

"Those shows came down like rain after that," Garnsey said.

In 2000, Amusement Business magazine ranked the fieldhouse No. 7 among university venues of its size. That year the fieldhouse had gross sales of $741,000 and attendance of 29,000 for Dylan, Def Leppard, a Bonnie Raitt-Joan Baez concert, B.B. King, Widespread Panic, 311 and Spirit of the Dance.

James Taylor came to the fieldhouse in 2001, one week after the Sept. 11 attacks. Matchbox twenty was on stage three days later.

Snoop Dogg’s near-sellout show in December 2002 was, Morris said, probably the largest rap or R&B performance ever in the state of Montana.

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers appeared in July 2003, the fieldhouse’s highest grossing concert to date. Most tickets sold for $49.50.

The Crosby Stills & Nash show in April 2003 sold almost 6,500 tickets, but didn’t sell out.

"We do a lot of research on a band before the date is confirmed," Morris said. "We call radio stations — are they playing any product? Is there any new product on the way out? We call record stores — are they moving any product?"

If a group like Incubus is touring, Morris will grab some teenagers or walk upstairs to the MSU dining hall to ask students what they think of the band.

Such explorations may be the reason rumors sometimes get started that a big-name act is coming to Bozeman.

Whether the fieldhouse lands a concert depends in part on the competition. MetraPark in Billings is the biggest venue in the state with 12,000 seats. The Adams Center at the University of Montana holds 7,500.

MSU’s fieldhouse is in the middle — geographically and in size. It has 8,900 seats, though between the stage, video screens, sound mixing boards and other gear, a typical concert has room for 8,100 to 8,400 reserved seats.

"For years, if you were going to route shows through Montana, you played Missoula or Billings," Morris said. "We’ve worked very hard to muscle our way in. We’re certainly holding our own in terms of market share. We’re going to lose some shows to Billings because of (MetraPark’s) bigger size. Artists can walk away with more money."

Setting ticket prices is up to the promoter and the performers’ manager and agent, although one factor they consider is the fieldhouse’s track record.

In Bozeman, as in the rest of the country, ticket prices have been climbing. While Dylan tickets were $35 four years ago, tickets for the July 9 Fleetwood Mac concert cost $65 and $85.

But those prices may be the lowest in the country for the Fleetwood Mac tour, said Bravo’s Thornton, who is promoting that show. Most venues are charging $100 and up, he said, for the No. 4 touring act in the nation in 2003.

"We had them push it down to $85 and $65" for Bozeman, Thornton said.

So, where does all the money go?

Most of it goes to the performers, Morris said.

"There’s a reason they’re living in mansions," he said. "Touring is a way they can make more money than record sales."

Nationally, ticket prices have soared, from an average $24 for a top 50 tour in 1993 to $55 in 2003, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Morris is reluctant to give out details about the fieldhouse’s share of the take, not wanting to give away secrets to the competition.

The fieldhouse’s published rental fee is a $2,500 minimum or 10 percent of gross, although a maximum cap may be negotiated.

The fieldhouse sold 94,252 concert tickets and grossed just over $3 million from 1999 to 2003, Morris said. He cautioned that doesn’t mean the fieldhouse took in 10 percent of $3 million.

So far this fiscal year, the fieldhouse has generated around $80,000 in revenue from four or five concerts and several smaller events held since July, Stump said.

On concert nights, Morris and his colleagues can’t sit around and enjoy the music. They must settle up with the promoter. The fieldhouse is in the enviable position of holding the ticket money.

Off the top comes rent, plus charges for its small army of workers. For a sold-out show, there may be 10 stagehands, 40 ushers, 40 security people, eight campus police, six in the ticket office and 35 working concessions. In charge are the managers — Dusty Kurtz for tickets, Brad Murphy for fieldhouse operations and Melanie Stocks, sports facilities director.

It would be impossible to put on major concerts — especially during basketball season — without the fieldhouse’s dedicated crew, Morris said. They sometimes work until 3 a.m. — tearing down a stage, striking chairs and reinstalling the basketball court’s portable floor.

The performers get either a minimum guaranteed amount, or a percent of the net, Morris said. Performers typically get 85 to 90 percent of the net, while the promoter gets 10 to 15 percent.

"The promoter takes the risk," Morris said. "The moral is that we all should’ve stuck with guitar lessons a lot longer."

"You’re the last person to get paid — if you get paid," Garnsey said. Because the artists get most of the ticket money, he added, promoters try to make money by selling beer, parking and $40 T-shirts and souvenirs.

If everything is going smoothly, the special chocolate drink that the band wanted has been shipped in from California and is waiting backstage. University venues sometimes have a bad reputation for being less professional, Morris said, so he tries to go the extra mile to provide everything the performers request.

"I want them to feel like it’s Madison Square Garden," he said.

If there’s a crisis, Morris jumps into the breach. A week ago he scrambled to line up a popular local band, The Clintons, to fill in as the opening act for Barenaked Ladies after singer Howie Day was arrested two days before the show.

Seeing the Clintons on stage was a great moment, Morris said.

"That’s a group of guys with unbridled passion to play music," he said. "They got a standing ovation — I’ve never seen that for an opening act. That to me is what that business is about. Sometimes it gets lost in the dollars and cents.

"Hopefully (concerts) contribute to the quality of life for the people in the state. That’s a pretty cool feeling."