Nov. 11, 1977 cover story: Concert no-shows

 

A last-minute bail-out on a show in Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 17 seriously raised the hackles on local fans. 

Nov. 11, 1977 

If the Star Fails to Show

          The show must go on. But not for Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin, Jerry Vale, Marvin Gaye, Aerosmith, Patti Smith, Raquel Welch, Queen or the Band. All of them have burned their Buffalo backers out of their bookings during the past two years. Sometimes it’s not their fault. Patti Smith’s equipment truck broke down near Schenectady. But too often it is.

          “Most groups that are on the road now can make the money whenever they want to work,” says a man who deals with promoters and groups here regularly. “They’ll say, ‘Hey, book something else for me. I’m tired. The point being, any time they want to work, they can make $50,000. They can do it at their convenience.”

          That certainly seems the case with Rod Stewart. His Oct. 17 no-show at Memorial Auditorium left 10,000 ticketholders in the lurch. Why make the wearisome trek from Washington, D.C., to Buffalo, sore-throated Stewart might have reasoned, when we’re only going to have to come back to Philadelphia.

          As a bonus, Stewart got a great game on Monday night football. One artist – Randy Newman – solves the conflict by refusing to play Mondays until the season’s over.

          The man who suffered most from Stewart’s sore throat was New York City promoter Cedric Cushner, who’d been given the Buffalo date to make up for a previous concert somewhere that Stewart had canceled.

          Cushner was on the floor of the Aud when he discovered Stewart wasn’t coming. He found out the hard way – by deduction. Stewart’s party hadn’t shown up at the hotel. Cushner then was faced with refunding upwards to $80,000 in ticket money. And that’s not all he lost.

          Phil Rosen of Harvey & Corky Productions outlines what a promoter has to absorb when a big show falls through: “You’re liable for a percentage of rental on the hall and the chairs. You’re liable for a percentage on the fork-lifts. You’ve already contracted with the stagehands’ union. You’ve got to pay them. And the advertising budget – that’s where the greatest loss is.”

          Commonly an act that cancels will offer a rescheduled date to make up the loss to the promoter. That’s what happened when Aerosmith put off its Buffalo appearance five weeks last June after drummer Joey Kramer was hurt in an auto accident. Aerosmith is highly injury-prone. They erased their October dates after singer Steve Tyler suffered an eye injury and guitarist Joe Perry sustained a severely cut hand from exploding fireworks as they took an encore in Philadelphia.

          After the June cancellation, Harvey & Corky were obliged to refund some of the tickets and mount a new ad campaign for the new show. Advertising costs in these circumstances can double or triple what they might have been.

          “Aerosmith canceled the night before the show,” Rosen recalls. “I’ll never forget – I took the call. I’d been working here for about three months, so I was still new at this, and my mouth hit the floor. We had to change our spot ads into cancellation announcements. At times like that, it just goes crazy. You’ve got to pray to God it comes down before 5:30, before the radio people go home. Otherwise, it’s really hard to change things until morning.”

          The easiest cancellations are the ones that happen early – three weeks or a month in advance. If the tickets haven’t been printed, there’s little trouble. If only a few have been sold, refunds aren’t too much of a problem. Last-minute pull-outs are the worst, especially the ones that take place after the audience is already in its seats.

          Harry W. Casey, the K. C. of K. C. & the Sunshine Band, once protested a shaky section of stage at the Aud by running to the basement and locking himself in a limousine. He came out only after he was threatened with arrest. Someone might have told K. C. to go out and break a leg, but if he did, he could’ve sued.

          “One of the toughest I ever had was a girl by the name of Warwicke – Dionne,” says Melody Fair’s Lew Fisher. “The Spinners went out, did their show. I’m sitting in a City Council meeting in North Tonawanda and I get a call that she isn’t going to be there for the second half of the show. We’d sold 2,000 seats. She claimed she fainted backstage, but she made every other performance that tour.”

          Fisher, whose background in theater goes back 30 years, isn’t a man who lets someone off the hook easily. He’s slapped lawsuits on four different absentees. He got a settlement out of court from Raquel Welch.

          “In the old days, it was a sacred thing – the show must go on,” Fisher remarks. “In this new era, there’s no responsibility to the public, no discipline. Theater was always a matter of discipline. There was no coming on an hour late or taking an hour’s intermission.”

          Promoters can’t always sue, though. All contracts allow for illness or “acts of God.” Jerry Vale bowed out of his Melody Fair date this September with a note from a doctor. Some promoters have physicians available to examine “ailing” performers. Crosby, Stills & Nash, feuding in 1969, claimed sickness to cancel a Buffalo date then. The promoter ordered a check-up on the West Coast. The trio failed to show for it.

          No matter how angry a promoter gets, it usually doesn’t pay for him to display it. If the act is a moneymaker, it may never play for that promoter again. Furthermore, the act’s booking agency may withhold other shows. Or give them to rival promoters.

          Festival East’s Jerry Nathan figures he’s lost Jethro Tull shows here over the past few years because of a problem on a date he handled at Cornell University. Tull’s contract demanded seats on the edge of the stage. The school safety office had other ideas – regulations called for an aisle across the front. Tull’s people were irate and refused to play. A college official had to be summoned to relax the rule. Tull went on, but bad feelings remained.

          And sometimes it pays to get riled. The usually even-tempered Nathan flared up once when Joe Walsh’s crew began building runways into the orchestra pit at Kleinhans Music Hall, blocking the view from the best seats. He gave them five minutes to tear them down or else it was no show. They did.

          The biggest harm cancellations inflict is on the promoter’s reputation. Harvey & Corky’s Rosen acknowledges that the process of receiving tickets, tabulating them and sending back refund checks is a back-breaking burden for the company’s tiny bookkeeping staff. Nathan, who was obliged to pay back 66,000 fans after Led Zeppelin canceled a Rich Stadium date last summer, says it’s not only extra work, but also a hindrance in settling accounts.

          The fan’s biggest gripe is the 50-cent service charge, which the ticket seller keeps. The reason for this, Nathan says, is that promoters no longer give ticket agents a share of the concert proceeds. Furthermore, stores which act as ticket outlets no longer want to do the work for free.

          The service charge is legal, says Bruce Schmidt of the State Attorney General’s office here. The ticket seller has, after all, rendered a service. There seems to be no specific state law governing cancellations and refunds, but many other statutes can be applied. Like the one on larceny. In the case of a bankrupt promoter, however, the ticket holder becomes just another unsecured creditor, just like the banks, backers and businessmen who’ve been stung.

          This is not to say that all modern entertainers are indifferent to their audiences or their reputations. Charlie Daniels, the patriarch of Southern rock, said while he was here for a sold-out show earlier this week that the only things that stop him are a death in the family or whenever he or the bass player come down sick. The others in the band can be covered for.

          Daniels had to cancel five weeks last winter after he severed a nerve in his thumb while in Washington, D.C., for the Inaugural. He’d been opening English walnuts with one of the knives he collects and got careless. He made up some of the dates, took a loss on others.

          But other tragedies don’t stop him. He’d heard about the fatal plane crash of his good friends Lynyrd Skynyrd 20 minutes before he was going on stage in St. Louis. He went on anyway.

          “It hit me harder than anything that hit me since my father died,” Daniels attested. “I was real tight with Ronnie Van Zant. It blew me away, man. But we’re professionals. We decided we ain’t going to blow a set over them. They wouldn’t have blown a set over us.

          “I don’t have any patience with these people who go, ‘Oh God, the road, it’s so cosmic,’” he elaborated. “It takes a man to put up with the road. If you can’t take it, get back and milk the cow for mama. What kind of ------ would I be if I canceled a show because of a hangover! If somebody buys a record or a concert ticket of mine, I feel I owe them something.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Charlie Daniels in 1977.

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FOOTNOTE: All the concert cancellations in 1976-77 were leaving Buffalonians feeling jilted and Rod Stewart’s no-show was the last straw. His snub wasn’t soon forgotten. For many, it was goodbye and good riddance. He wouldn’t be booked into the Aud again until 1989.