HOW ARFA FOUND HIS OWN ROUTE.

Navigation: Main page

Author: Waddell, Ray

THE BILLBOARD Q+A

It was great to be part of the making of a superstar. My dream was, before I was 30 years old, to have an act sell out Madison Square Garden. When I was 29 and a half, Billy did it three times. In 1978 we went from a theater act to an arena act on one song, "Just the Way You Are."

I think it was out of nervousness that I wouldn't be able to sustain my business. I was scared, that's all there was to it.

I discovered that both financially and culturally me and William Morris weren't for each other. QBQ was formed with the title "Quality Before Quantity."

William Morris at the time had a huge roster and the amount of care, attention and energy toward most of the roster was nil, and it was very disappointing.

In those days you had agents that didn't care so much about signing acts but rather about beating management. They knew how to dance with management; that was their success.

It was very hard for me to co-exist and try to bust my balls for an act and see another guy getting ahead because he took this guy out to lunch who kissed that guy's ass.

I went to visit all the agencies, and everyone had problems. There is no free ride. So anyone who thinks, "I'm going to the big agency, life's going to be easier," no, you get into their world of politics, their culture, their issues.

If you go on your own, the problems are your own and you create your own culture. At least you have that advantage--if you're OK yourself. If you're fucked up as a human, you take that culture into your game.

QBQ was about being hands-on, focused, intricately involved in all the deals, all the marketing, with a tremendous passion for doing it well and being a good technician.

It's always thinking about doing something today and how it affects tomorrow. And having had the experience at William Morris at the time, a lot of the philosophy came from learning what not to do.

You're looking for quality, people who can sell tickets. Without people who can really sell tickets, you're limited. How far can you go in a car without gas? Some of the people you represent you may passionately musically love them. Some of them, you may not passionately musically love them. But you respect what they do and you do the best for them. We want to be an agency with taste and class, but I'm not a snob.

We were the orphan. We weren't in the inner family, but we were certainly very close.

There was a strategy of who to buy. Bob Sillerman made a lot of people very, very, very wealthy. To me, some of these people should be kissing his tushy. There should be Bob Sillerman Day on their calendar. He legitimized this whole live business on Wall Street. We are still being affected tremendously by what this one man did. He has been the most dominant person in changing the way we do business in the last 20 years. We're still living in it and we still don't know where it's going.

Part of the plan was to roll up agencies under the Artist Group International banner. I had an option of staying or leaving. I chose to leave when Bob sold the company.

I was in a generation that grew up going to concerts as the norm. I don't believe that's [true for] this generation. I don't believe music is as important to them.

The Woodstock generation was an aberration in time. When our time passes, we'll be in a history lesson: "Oh, yeah, the baby boomers went to concerts all the time."

The urban business is really what dominates the music business today, and there is no urban touring business. I'm not saying there's not money in it. I'm saying it is not the Eagles, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, U2, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Buffett, Aerosmith, Fleetwood Mac and Phil Collins.

There are some artists that are very reasonable and come with a plan. And then there are artists, whether it's at my company or other companies, that switch around a lot.

Sometimes an artist comes to you and says, "I want to be playing 3,000-seat theaters earning $150,000 a night," and you may say, "Well, you really can't sell that." They don't want to hear that. They want to hear that you can help them get there, because if they haven't been there they want to believe sometimes that it's not their fault.

Sometimes we deal with expectations we're not going to fill. You can get lucky, while you're the agent, something could happen--a hit record, a TV show, a commercial, whatever. But most of the time the artist becomes disillusioned or unhappy with you because you didn't give them what they were hoping for. You didn't make them a bigger star.

I really don't believe in most cases an agent makes someone a star. An agent is a tool to be used. Sometimes the tool is greater than other times.

Let's put it this way: I'm comfortable sharing my thoughts and vision with anybody. I welcome that, be it from management or the artist. That's part of the job.

But this is a specialty. In my business, all we have are the bare bones. We can't say we've got the commercial business. I can't get you TV. We have to depend on what we do being significant and offering enough.

That other stuff is a lot of smoke and mirrors. That's a part of the folklore. But there's a lot of things in the folklore. There are people that don't want to leave the big agencies because they may miss on opportunities that they think may be there.

They may be unhappy with the service, but they may not want to leave a big agency feeling if they do they may miss on an opportunity, even though it's not working. We have to compete with the perception.

As an agent, you're just an adviser. It depends on what the artist wants to accomplish and their own comfort zone. If an artist wants to sell all the seats, price might be something they have to deal with. I really believe it's the artists, especially the star artists, that really have the control. They usually make a point of what they want to make per night, per week, per month, per tour, and you adjust the ticket price in accordance.

I don't agree with that at all.

Sometimes you have to be really careful because you only have one big buyer on the national level and if the big buyer, Live Nation, closes you down, what do you do?

We had a situation with Mötley Crüe when nobody wanted to pay the money Mötley Crüe wanted to make.

There was a moment coming off the summer of '04 where promoters were beaten up, and now here comes another agent with another band that he says is gonna do well, and everyone was going "Bullshit" and [said], "Let's show him it's bullshit." Everybody walked away, and they all judged wrong.

But then the buildings bought [the tour] and won and everything changed. I looked at [what happened with that tour] as good for the business. It made everyone a little more bullish going forward. But there was a hiccup moment.

To some degree I do what a national promoter does. I don't necessarily write the check, but to a great degree, depending on the act, I am the promoter: when they should play, where they should play, why they should play, how they should be advertised.

I do things that more correspond to what a national or global promoter does than somebody who's working at an agency handling 15 acts or a territory and who can't get the whole world. They're too busy.

There are agents who get free rides, there's no doubt about it. There's also the thing of "Hey, let's not fuck the system." There are agents with people on their roster but they're making minimal money because they really have more of a "paper" relationship, where they're issuing the paper but they have very little to say about the artist.

This is a business where sometimes you build the car and sometimes you just put the gas in it. Sometimes people just help keep the agency system alive.

Fear. Fear that they can't succeed without a bigger parent. The polite thing would be to say they think they have more opportunities. But I would say most agents have gone to the bigger picture because they're not confident that they can do it themselves.

It's more homogenized. We're at the end of an era. Now we're in the twilight days of [pioneering promoters like] Ron Delsener, Larry Magid, Don Law, the people who really built the business. Now you're getting the sons of, the daughters of … You're not getting the street people. The fight is different. They're working for big brother. You have people running territories that never would be able to run a territory without big brother. They don't have the real talent. There are holes out there.

I think doing your job with integrity and passion. And being stable financially, emotionally and professionally. And then you're rewarded in all those areas.

PHOTO (COLOR): DENNIS ARFA, with AGI VP of operations AMY BENNETT, reflects on two decades as an independent booking agent.

PHOTO (COLOR): AGI overcame promoter resistance and worked directly with venues to book MÃ-TLEY CRÃœE'S successful 2005 tour.

~~~~~~~~

By Ray Waddell