RETRO PROMOTER LAUNCHES THE CLASSIC ROCK EXPERIENCE

By Linda Deckard, VENUES TODAY

Much as he did in the late 60s, early 70s when he was with East Coast Concerts and Concerts West, Rick Bowen is promoting his new creation, “Flashback – the Classic Rock Experience,” the old way. He’s promoting and co-promoting with venues, negotiating 80/20 merchandise deals, keeping ticket prices low and lining up classic rock radio stations as marketing partners.

The event is a flashback to the music of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, “the music I used to promote,” and features major video and laser production along with 30 musicians on stage, many of them with some notoriety. Bowen said the idea for this “concert event” was hatched three years ago when he saw the Celine Dion production at the Colosseum in Las Vegas during a Concerts West reunion party and then attended a Trans-Siberian Orchestra holiday show at the Colonial Center in Columbia, S.C.

He decided to abandon his retirement from the music promotion business and create “Flashback,” which many are also referring to as “The Mystic Orchestra,” when his mind began envisioning along these lines: “What if you took all that TSO is doing and mix it with the video concept Celine had and present it with the music you were famous for presenting back in the 70s? What if Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin were on stage together? The show was born that night in my mind.”

The first leg of the tour will play 8,000-10,000-seat arenas in 48-53 cities, Bowen said. Eventually, it will play about 100 cities a year. He envisions it as a perennial for arenas, coming back year after year as does TSO, but without the holiday timeframe of that group’s Christmas show.

It will rehearse and open at the Mobile (Ala.) Civic Center, one of 23 SMG-managed venues on the initial route. The opening date is Aug. 27. Bowen has set a four-tiered ticket pricing scenario, generally $57, $37, $27 and $17, with a retro $7 ticket for children under what Rainbow Ticketmaster founder and Bowen partner Lou Dickstein calls “a liberal 12,” and for radio promotions. “It’s exactly like the old days for me. We want that one $7 ticket, the flashback ticket price that the radio station can promote out. They used to be $5 in advance, $6 day of show,” Bowen said.

The average price per ticket will be $38, but it’s scaled so that “Mom and Pop and a couple kids can come for less than $60,” Bowen added.

Jay Hagerman, manager in Mobile for SMG, was among the first arena managers to jump on board when Bowen, an old friend from his own Concerts West days, called. The tech rehearsal will occupy about 10 days, followed by the opening show, which can and cannot be a good thing, he said.

“As an arena manager in a B-market, this is fantastic,” Hagerman said. “We need this type of programming. We’re not going to get Bruce Springsteen.”

Hagerman made the call to SMG to help Bowen book a route. Bowen met with the SMG marketers during the Event & Arena Marketing Conference in Washington, D.C., and hashed out a plan. “This is going to be a visual sell,” Hagerman said.

Bowen said marketing will mirror family show campaigns, starting 60 days out in most markets. He will go heavy with television, followed by radio and print. He will utilize some billboards, which make a great visual for the show. In the small markets, he expects to spend $25,000-$40,000 on advertising; triple that in the A-markets.

Bowen is finalizing the fall route and starting on next spring. He is booking as many “nostalgia buildings” as he can, finding the viable, well-maintained arenas that are more than 20-years-old to add to the marketing potential. In Philadelphia, for instance, he’s going into the Global Spectrum-managed Wachovia Spectrum, the nostalgia building, instead of the newer Wachovia Center.

Merchandise will skew toward the high end, “no $12 T-shirts,” Bowen said. He is currently talking with potential third-party merchandisers, though his company may do it in-house. Ed Unitsky (“just Google him”) is the creative artist. T-shirts will range from $20-$60; program books, $15; “plus lanyards and miscellaneous stuff, light up flashback fans, stuff for the kids, candles.”

The show production will hang 50,000-60,000 pounds. It will travel in six trucks, unless they can pare it down to five or six buses. There are 30 in the cast, 32 in the crew. There will be a huge emphasis on lasers and video. “Our laser show is costing us probably $35,000 a week,” Bowen said. “Lasers were big back in the Floyd era. Psychedelic stuff was big so we felt we wanted to put our money into that rather than firecrackers raining down sparks.”

The production cost is budgeted at $85,000 per night, Bowen told Venues Today. That does not include rent, marketing and catering. He’s hoping to average 6,000-10,000 attendance per show, five shows a week. “Break even, in most markets, is 40 percent,” he said. “In a 10,000-seat hall, I need 4,200-4,300 seats to break even. In smaller markets, advertising and rental costs so much less.”

The initial cost of production was $5.5 million, he said. The Mystic Orchestra “is not just five string players we pick up in every city. The orchestra is all pros, musicians who have been out with everybody from Yanni to Kanye West. The English guitar players are state of the art. We have some incredible vocalists. The music on this show is going to be jaw-dropping, like nothing you ever heard before,” Bowen said.

The music director is Frank Gilcken. the Mystic Orchestra features 14 rock musicians and singers, as well as an 11-piece string-and-horn section, and includes guitarists Phil Hilborne and Jamie Humphries.

There are seven video screens to present this event/experience – “three on stage, two on the Zeppelin and two scrim screens hung over the audience. Everybody will get a good view of the video. There will be a video for each song, some themed, some vintage footage. It’s like going to an IMAX show with a big orchestra behind it. The show may morph into music of the 70’s, music of the 80’s in three or four years. It may not be late 60s, early 70s forever.”

Bowen thinks the cycle will be eight-12 years and has been advised it should play the Pacific Rim and perhaps Europe in the future.

“I would be really happy if we did anywhere in the $16-$20 million range,” Bowen said of gross potential August to August. Things have changed since Bowen left the industry 25 years ago…or not. — Linda Deckard