Writing the Life of the Concert Promoter

P.T. Barnum’s Struggles and Triumphs, published in 1869, is a definitive work of nineteenth-century autobiography and a vital starting point for a tradition of show-business memoirs that has continued up to the present day. In the book, Barnum presents himself as the master of American amusement through a narrative that highlights moments of great risk and great financial reward. Emblematic is the tone Barnum strikes as he introduces the topic of one of his most celebrated promotional efforts, the American concert tour of the Swedish singer Jenny Lind, whom Barnum brought to the United States in September 1850:

And now I come to speak of an undertaking which my worst enemy will admit was bold in its conception, complete in its development, and astounding in its success . . . That I am proud of it now I freely confess. It placed me before the world in a new light; it gained me many warm friends in new circles; it was in itself a fortune to me—I risked much but I made more.

(Barnum 171)

Risk and reward: the tension between these terms is emblematic of the moral economy of capitalism writ large, based on the presumption that only those with the fortitude to risk losing everything are the rightful earners of large profit. It is the perceived necessity of risk as the justification for reward that, I would argue, serves to construct capitalist enterprise—and the specific business of being an American showman—as a fundamentally masculine pursuit.

A century after Barnum’s autobiography was first published, the business of showmanship was reinvented by a group of entrepreneurial figures who oversaw the creation and growth of the rock concert industry. Some of these figures, in particular the San Francisco–based promoter Bill Graham, have achieved near-legendary status on an individual level, but their collective efforts have rarely been assigned importance in existing chronicles of rock history, at least not relative to the scale of their achievements. Taking it upon themselves to set the historical record straight, no fewer than six of these men have written memoirs to recount their careers in the concert promotion business. First among these books was Graham’s post-humous memoir, published in 1992. Since 2000, Graham’s autobiography has been joined by those of Sid Bernstein, the promoter who brought the Beatles to Shea Stadium; Jerry Weintraub, perhaps the most powerful concert promoter in the industry until he left the business to move into film production; and three regionally influential promoters: Pat O’Day, based in Seattle; Barry Fey, who worked out of Denver; and Pat DiCesare from Pittsburgh.

These six promoter-memoirists are inheritors of Barnum’s legacy as an entertainment promoter of enduring influence and as the narrator of show-business life and livelihood. Taken together, their books provide the material to treat live music as an industry—and not just as a series of discrete events that occur scattered over time—which adds a significant and largely unexplored dimension to our understanding of the rock era and its evolution. Charting a series of individual paths into concert promotion, they allow us to observe the complex relationship that existed between local scenes and national trends in live music promotion and production. More fundamentally, they make a case for concert promotion as one of the most significant and underappreciated areas of the modern music industry, and the concert promoter as a figure who has exerted a peculiar sort of agency over the unpredictability of the rock concert economy—a point to which I will return at the conclusion of this essay.

Writing about the history of live music in England since 1950, a team of British researchers headed by Simon Frith have claimed that a focus on live music—rather than the more common emphasis on recordings that has characterized popular music historiography—offers a different sense of chronological development (Frith, Brennan, Cloonan, and Webster 62). As they explain, change in popular music appears less abrupt and more gradual in the live music sphere, such that the move toward rock and other youth-oriented styles, for...