Behind The Scenes Magazine

Summerfest, the man behind the worlds largest outdoor music festivalby Brian J. BarnesAt the conclusion of the 2007 Summerfest, a live outdoor music festival held on the shores of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee Wisconsin every year, Bob Babish the Vice President of Entertainment for the festival sat down to talk with BTS.“I oversee, all the talent lines and all the production for the festival, all the talent logistics, everything associated with the music side. I am also part of everything from working with the sponsorships to the department of health.” “My day starts around 8:00 A.M. and I usually am in the office until around 5:30 but the closer we get to the festival the longer those days become, not necessarily in the morning but in the evening because you are dealing with a lot of California agents.” “I am married with three children, my wife Tammy, son Anthony 21, son Benny 8 and Daughter Jenny who is 6.”BTS asked Bob to explain the whole process from the point of hearing about a band to booking them for the festival. “The talent buyer world is actually much smaller than people think. There are only so many major agencies to go around and we talent buyers are talking to each other all the time. I may be talking with Jason Wright at Live Nation in Chicago or talking with Peter Jeff at Shank Hall (in Milwaukee) or maybe Lesley Joel and every one of these people know what’s out there and what’s going on. When there’s an up and coming band I usually hear about them. I read the charts and hear the buzz that goes on.” “For national acts, we’re holding (dates for) acts for next summer already. The reason that that starts earlier and earlier is because there is a lot of traffic out there in the summer and the big names want to be the first ones to get their tickets on sale. The Country and Western acts seem to start earlier than most. We will hold those dates for the amphitheatre starting now (immediately following the end of this years Summerfest). Other bands will probably be closer to November when we start looking at things that we want, acts that we would like to see…and then we’ll start fishing early in 2008. We keep a grid and as the festival draws closer we start to move things around because a band may say that they can work in that time frame but then they’ll say ‘How does Monday look?’ then they’ll call back and say ‘How does Tuesday look?’ and it becomes a chess board. Because with Summerfest you want it to be very eclectic, you want there to be something for everybody everyday you don’t want to have two stages doing the same format. The only exception is when you are doing a theme day, we’ve done jam band theme days and had four stages all doing jam band formats on the same day.”“We do as many local bands and regional bands as we can schedule. A lot of times now days a national act will bring in two or three opening acts with them and you try to use all of those acts as well. We have the emerging artist series we call sonic bids where we pick three or four acts a day out of this electronic bid form and we put them on the U.S. cell stage (inside the festival grounds). I also have guys that work with me that have their finger more closely on the pulse of the local band scene then I do anymore. I mean ten or fifteen years ago I was in the nightclub scene a lot more but I’m a little too old for that now.”“It’s a process but we try to get it all done by the time we come out with our first brochure in the second week of April. It doesn’t always work out that way so we have the final brochure that comes out before the opening day of Summerfest.” “The most challenging part of my job is knowing that (for Summerfest) you have eleven days and you can’t get every band you want in the schedule in those eleven days. People ask why you didn’t have a certain act but what they don’t understand is that I want those bands, they may be in Europe at that time or they aren’t available to work on those dates, there’s a myriad of reasons why we don’t have certain acts at Summerfest. It’s not that we don’t want them or that I just don’t like a certain style of band that’s not true there are a lot of things that we want that simply don’t fall into our time period.”Asked if there were any acts that he wouldn’t have at Summerfest Babish said “I don’t think we would do anything hard core outside the amphitheatre because it’s pretty much a free show on the Summerfest grounds and people come out with their kids and their families. We don’t want them to walk past a stage at three-o-clock in the afternoon and really being offended by the language. When you do that sort of act inside the amphitheatre we can stretch that boundary a little bit because it’s a ticketed show and people are buying a ticket for that particular show. But in general we don’t book real hard core acts there are other venues for those acts.”Babish spoke about the challenges he has faced in his position as talent buyer. “Last years Tom Petty and Pearl Jam concert there was a pull between whether they were going to come to Summerfest or go to Alpine Valley (an outdoor music venue south of Milwaukee). Tom had had a lot of fun playing Alpine Valley. That was a show that I really didn’t know if we were going to have here at Summerfest. It was a day-by-day situation and we didn’t know which direction it was going but we sure were glad when we got that show in here. That was a big two days for us, we sold 45,000 tickets for two days and that was great for us.”Measuring success. “For a long time we considered our festival a success if we had these huge attendance numbers. We would give our attendance numbers out at 2:00, 6:00, 9:00 and 12:00 every day of the festival and the news media would write these stories about it. If after the first day of Summerfest it was cold out or something and the attendance was less than the year before they would write ‘What’s wrong with Summerfest?’ Or if the attendance was up from the year before the story would be “Is it getting too crowded at Summerfest?’ So we are better off not talking about attendance numbers at the end of the day. We look at our success at how our audience did. Did they have fun? Did we make money? But not necessarily how many people did we do?”How he got this job. “I was in the theatre department at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and I got a job at the 1812 Overture Record Store on Brady Street. That was in 1971. I was working in the record store and I started freelancing as a go-fer at concerts backstage because I was studying the theatre at school. It came to a point where I had to make a choice between doing the concert thing more or doing the record store more and I decided I wanted to do more with the concerts. I started working for the Edgeway agency here in town (Milwaukee) they specialized more in Ballet companies and Broadway shows things like that. Then the guys who were running Summerfest at the time, which was 1977, left to go run Chicagofest. The guys who were leaving called me up and said that they were looking for someone to do the entertainment (for Summerfest) and they had not found anyone and asked me ‘Do you want it?’ My interview consisted of sitting down across from Jim Butler (the head of Summerfest at that time) and he said ‘They say that you can do the job. Here’s a contract you have until five-o-clock tomorrow to sign it.’ I have been here ever since.”Asked what advice he would have for someone who wanted to become a talent buyer or a band looking to get on stage at Summerfest Bob said, “In all honesty, because it has become such a closed industry our festival in particularly is such that for part of the year there is only a few of us working and then we add staff as the festival approaches. If they want to get into the concert business they should get into the concert club at their University become one of the talent buyers for their school shows. If they really want to make a living at it they should go to N.Y.U. or U.C.L.A. where they have programs in entertainment or they can go into entertainment law, which I know that U.C.L.A. offers. Try to get an internship with one of the major agencies in New York like The Firm or ACA or ICM they all have internship programs in the summer and work their way in like that. As far as Summerfest we have interns that work as stage managers but it is not that big of a business.” “There are ways, if you want it bad enough. There are ways to get in.”Why do it? “Every year is a fresh canvass and it is awfully exciting. We sit down and look at each other and say ‘Who do you think is working this summer?’ We start to make some calls and see who is available and who wants to work and start to paint that canvass again.”“Not many people can say that they have spent 30 years at a job and they still love doing it everyday. I do.” “Some days at the last minute a show isn’t going to happen and I’m yelling at the phone and I go home and I pace up and down then I look at my wife and say ‘I love this’.Behind every artist/ band / actor is a group of hard working people that in some way shape or form helped the artist. This online magazine was created to let everyone know what goes on behind the scenes in the entertainment industry. This website contains information from entertainment industries around the world. We'll hear from some of the hardest working people behind the scenes such as Ronnie Wright ( celebrity photographer,) Ms J ( Retired Sony A&;R rep,) Neville Shende ( Celebrity entertainment coach driver,)and the list goes on . We'll also talk with artists on the brink of record deals. Such As Alvarado" How do I Tell her." We'll find out what it takes to get to the top. We will also include an international unsigned artists.