Making Music, Naturally

A marina-side setting, San Diego’s legendary weather, and promoter Kenny Weissberg’s acumen for booking ticket-tested pop-jazz, nostalgia rock and comedy acts have conspired to make the Humphrey’s “Concerts by the Bay” series a local summer phenomenon.

With projections of seating almost 100,000 patrons in 1991, the Shelter Island venue’s 10th season could be its most successful yet.

So it might come as a surprise to learn that the existence of this San Diego institution was determined by a coin toss between two New Jersey businessmen in 1968.

“My father was in wholesale liquor distribution in the Newark area,” said Weissberg last week. “At the age of 50, he got into a fight with his partner--my mother’s brother--and they flipped a coin for the business. My father lost, so he became a stockbroker.”

Weissberg considers that incident his saving grace.

“If my father had won the toss, I would have been pressured to go into the family business,” he said. “At the time, I was 20 and entering my junior year in college, and all of a sudden I was free to pursue my muse, which I knew would have something to do with music.”

From all appearances, that pursuit has paid off. In a field littered with failed entrepreneurships, the Humphrey’s series has prospered largely because of Weissberg’s foresight in recognizing the venue’s potential to be an idyllic, outdoor alternative to the generic arena experience.

That fulfilled promise has purchased the 43-year-old promoter a newly remodeled home in the hills above Point Loma. Behind the manse, he has built a spacious studio for his wife of 19 years, Helen Redman, an accomplished artist with 29 one-person exhibitions to her credit.

But Weissberg trudged a long, circuitous route to personal attainment. Years of subsistence-level income earned in a variety of music-related jobs preceded his ascendance as a concert promoter. He arrived at his seemingly unerring sense of what works at Humphrey’s through a sometimes painful process of experimentation that taught him not to book according to his own tastes.

Even now, beneath the smooth surface of the Humphrey’s operation and out of public view, Weissberg daily wrestles with the dynamics of concert promotion: temperamental artists, greedy agents who overestimate their clients’ worth, snafus with the ticket sellers, problems inherent in coordinating production and promotion, and communications with staff members of the Half Moon Inn and Humphrey’s Restaurant complex, to which the concert series is a small, albeit important, adjunct.

To manage all that, Weissberg has had to engage business gears that he had purposefully avoided using for most of his life. And 23 years after being liberated by a coin that came up heads, he still is bedeviled by the commerce-versus-muse conflict.

“I like a lot of things about this job,” he admitted, gazing from his office overlooking a wharf just down the road from Humphrey’s. “Musicians and fans both love the venue, and I’m able to bring a wide array of talent to San Diego. I’ve poured my heart and soul into this job, and the success is intoxicating. But I’ve had to put the creative part of me on hold.”

Weissberg never wanted to become a “heavy-duty businessman” like his father. After earning a degree in sociology at the University of Wisconsin in 1970, he spent a year in Santa Barbara playing guitar and basketball and studying poetry with the late Kenneth Rexroth. Weissberg remembers that bohemian period of his life with great fondness.

“Eventually, I ran out of money and drove my van back to the East Coast,” recalled the prodigal son. “My parents said, ‘Oh, you’re back, you’ve had your year of wanderlust, we’ll find you a job on the stock exchange, we’ll make you a trainee . . . .’ I left 10 days later.”

Weissberg and two married couples headed for Oregon, where they planned to homestead and get jobs teaching. But in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Weissberg had a change of heart, and the group detoured to Boulder, Colo. Weissberg had a friend there and decided to stay for a while. He stayed for 12 years.

“It was beautiful, and I fell in love with the place,” he said. “Then, one morning I was listening to a local free-form radio station. I had wanted to be a deejay since I was 7 years old, when I would listen to Peter Tripp on New York’s WMGM. So I applied.”

Weissberg claimed to have four years of experience, even though he had never been on radio and “didn’t have a clue how to work the equipment.” A month later, he faked his way through his first 6 a.m. show at KRNW, which later changed its call letters to KBCO. Over the next 10 years, he added a talk show and a popular dating-game-of-the-air, called “The Communal Bathtub,” to his achievements. In 1978, he helped found Boulder’s public-radio station, KGNU.

Weissberg would wear many hats simultaneously during his time in Boulder. Concurrent with his radio work, he wrote music criticism for the University of Colorado campus newspaper, starting in 1972. Eventually, he was free-lancing for such national magazines as Creem, Circus, Zoo World, Phonograph Record and Rocky Mountain.

He was the music critic for Boulder’s major newspaper, the Daily Camera, from 1976 to 1980, when that city’s red-hot music scene boasted such transplanted rock stars as Stephen Stills, Joe Walsh, Chris Hillman, and the band Poco. In 1979, Weissberg developed a 120-seat nightclub called Molly’s Back Room--literally a space in the back of an Irish pub--where he booked an eclectic mix of mostly local talent. He quit that job after six months when the long hours began ruining his personal life. Soon thereafter, Weissberg would experience his first serious confrontations with authority over his tastes in music.

“The editor at the Daily Camera couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t write about the disco phenomenon and ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ ” he said. “He questioned the validity of my reporting about such bands as the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Graham Parker and the Rumour, and Elvis Costello, instead of commending me for being something of a pathfinder. This guy wanted me to review albums that had already sold in the tens of millions. We battled constantly, and finally he fired me over the telephone.”

At the time, Weissberg still was working for KBCO, which was changing from a free-form to a tight-playlist format. He quit rather than adhere to the new programming restrictions.

“If I’d been allowed to exhibit my own tastes more freely,” Weissberg speculated, “I might still be in either radio or journalism today.”

Due to attrition, meanwhile, the Boulder music scene had been steadily deteriorating. Before losing his job, Weissberg had written articles critical of certain local businessmen and musicians. Some of the musicians openly dared Weissberg to do better.

“So, having been a closet musician since age 14, I formed my own band, Kenny and the Kritix, at age 32,” said Weissberg. The initial lineup included former Spirit and Firefall bassist Mark Andes, now with the band Heart.

With most of Boulder’s musicians and rock scribes in attendance, the band debuted Dec. 3, 1980, earning standing ovations with a theatrical, 90-minute set that featured props, lights, and costume changes. Kenny and the Kritix stayed together for three and a half years.

By 1983, Weissberg was ready to leave Boulder. “I was 35 and broke. By then, I was writing for the Denver Post--the biggest newspaper in Colorado--and I was still only making $100 per free-lance piece. I didn’t want to work in radio anymore. My band was a glorified hobby. It was time to move on.”

A year earlier, Weissberg had come to San Diego to interview for the position of assistant program director at KGB, whose front office included two friends from Boulder. When that fell through, Weissberg and Redman travelled the West Coast looking for work before returning to Boulder. Then in December 1983, Weissberg got a call from friend and former Boulder psychologist John Lee, who had moved to L.A. after some business ventures bore fruit.

“He flew me to three different cities and gave me my choice of jobs, one of which was to work in San Diego for Southland Concerts, which he’d just co-founded with (San Diego promoter) Marc Berman,” Weissberg said. “John Lee offered me more money than I’d ever made to relocate and learn the concert business.” Weissberg accepted, and once he arrived here in December of 1983, he was provided with a Mercedes and a condo on the beach and paired with a hyperactive 19-year-old co-worker named Marc Geiger.

A year earlier, Geiger--while an employee of Marc Berman Concerts--had attended a wedding on the lawn behind Humphrey’s Restaurant and had been struck by the spot’s possibilities. Under the Berman aegis, Geiger promoted six concerts at Humphrey’s in 1982. Lee later absorbed Geiger and Berman into his Southland company, and Geiger promoted 15 shows at Humphrey’s in 1983 before Weissberg came on board to assist him in promoting the fledgling series.

“Geiger was the brains of the operation, and I learned the rudiments of the concert business by watching him like a hawk for six months,” said Weissberg. After both Geiger and Berman left Southland in 1984, Weissberg was given sole custodianship over the series.

“John Lee asked me if I could run Southland Concerts, of which the Humphrey’s thing was a small part, and I lied and said, ‘Yes,’ ” Weissberg said, laughing. “Then, I told him the key to success in San Diego was not to bid against other promoters for Huey Lewis or Billy Joel at the Sports Arena--which is what he wanted to do--but to develop Humphrey’s into a truly professional venue. Even though at the time it was a relatively small lawn area with a foot-high stage and no canopy, I felt it had real potential.”

But first, Lee and Weissberg had to sign an agreement with Richard Bartell of Bartell Hotels, the new owner of the Half Moon Inn complex. With that deal inked, a reluctant Lee heeded Weissberg’s recommendation to spend money on a larger, permanent stage, and on sound and lighting improvements. Weissberg also convinced Bartell to redesign the landscaping to accommodate more seats (the venue, which seated 600 in 1983, now seats 1,200).

Lee and Southland backed out of the picture in 1987, and Weissberg signed with Bartell to be Humphrey’s exclusive promoter. It’s been a sanguine situation for him ever since, but with an annoying asterisk attached.

“There’s a major difference between the ‘me’ who lived in Boulder and the ‘me’ who lives in San Diego,” he said, wistfully. “For most of my time as a writer, as a deejay, and as a musician, I dealt only with music that I liked. Here, with someone else putting their money on the line, I have to book what I discovered long ago are San Diego’s tastes.” Acquiescing to the first musical compromises of his life has meant facing periodic personal crises.

“To have to book an artist every year from 1984 to 1989 just because San Diego wants to see him--like Chuck Mangione, who I think is a total hack--would make me want to quit my job,” said Weissberg. “Helen would have to talk me out of it. It continues to gnaw at me that I can’t turn people on to new acts or sign artists who involve me emotionally because it wouldn’t be financially responsible. Musically speaking, I have no interest in 75% of the acts I book.”

The exceptions have included Roy Orbison, Miles Davis, the Roches, Everly Brothers, Fats Domino, Roger McGuinn, Emmylou Harris, Al Green, and Bonnie Raitt. It was Orbison’s 1987 concert that provided Weissberg with his greatest thrill as a promoter-fan.

“He was a major idol of mine,” said Weissberg, “and his show was one of the most profound musical experiences of my life. He’d take perfect (vocal) crescendoes to these high notes, and I had chills, I’d leap to my feet with tears in my eyes. I was emotionally wrecked. After the show, I paced in my dressing room backstage, deliriously screaming Orbison’s name and going ‘Whoooo!’ I was ecstatic that I’d brought him to town.”

But such moments are few for Weissberg. “I try to be an anarchist 5% or 10% of the time and book a Ladysmith Black Mambazo, a Ruben Blades, a Milton Nascimento,” he said.

“The rest of the time I’m a business head. But this is my eighth year at Humphrey’s, and that’s more job security than I’ve ever known. That continuity has been a very stabilizing factor in my personal life. And that’s more important to me than anything.”