Banding Together : Rockers Plan Benefit to Pay Legal Bills of Gary Tovar, the Man Who Helped Build Them Up and Bail Them Out

A good concert promoter tries to get an accurate reading of the numbers before an event.

Gary Tovar is widely credited with having been an especially good promoter: Observers in the music business say he was a key force in fostering the Southern California punk and alternative rock concert scene since 1981, when he founded the production company, Goldenvoice. Now Tovar has a big event coming, and he says the numbers don’t look good.

“I talked to my lawyer this morning, and he said it’s a five to tenner,” Tovar, 40, said in a recent interview. Tovar wasn’t talking about predicted margins of profit or loss. He was calling from a Phoenix jail, and he was guessing at the number of years he will have to serve in prison. Having pleaded guilty last November to four federal criminal counts stemming from his role in a marijuana-trafficking ring, Tovar faces sentencing July 6. Authorities implicated the ring in attempts to acquire a total of 162 kilograms (about 357 pounds) of marijuana that was to be sold in California and elsewhere.

While Tovar waits in jail, where he has been held without bail since his arrest on March 9, 1991, some of the rockers whose careers he helped build will play a benefit concert to raise money for his legal bills. Appearing Sunday night at the Hollywood Palladium are Social Distortion, Porno for Pyros (the new band fronted by former Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell), Thelonious Monster, the Meat Puppets, Tender Fury and Firehose.

Social Distortion headlined two nights at the Palladium in April, and normally wouldn’t consider a return engagement this soon, according to the band’s manager, Jim Guerinot. But Guerinot said Social Distortion “threw out the rule book” because of what Tovar meant to the Orange County band in its early ‘80s scuffling days, when leader Mike Ness was having drug problems of his own.

“Time and time again, Mike Ness was in jail, and time and time again I was going to Gary to get money to bail him out,” Guerinot recalled. “It didn’t take half a second for us to know we were going to do (the benefit). He’d always been there for us.”

Musicians and observers of the local concert business credit Tovar with transforming a chaotic, club-based punk scene by booking major shows in venues that could hold 1,000 to 4,000 fans.

“He was one of the first to bring in some of the big punk bands from overseas, when no one else would bring in bands like PiL,” said Dean Naleway, co-owner of Triple X Entertainment, a punk-oriented Los Angeles independent record company whose highest-profile release has been the 1987 debut album by Jane’s Addiction. “He pretty much cracked the whole thing wide open. If it wasn’t for him, a lot of us growing up in the area wouldn’t have been able to see some of these bands. None of the bigger promoters would consider taking a chance with these bands because of the violence that might occur, and nobody wanted to house a bunch of punk rockers.”

“He was doing bands that not only would nobody else do, but they’d never even heard of them,” said Moss Jacobs, general manager of Avalon Attractions, who has known Tovar since the earliest days of Goldenvoice. Avalon frequently co-promotes dates with the smaller Goldenvoice, including the upcoming Lollapalooza concerts at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. “He developed the whole genre in Southern California. Some of these bands are now fixtures in the rock scene, and he was the first to do them.”

Today, punk-based alternative rock has become a huge commercial force, with the success of bands including Jane’s Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Nirvana (all of which Goldenvoice presented before they were widely known). It was different when Tovar started promoting shows in the early ‘80s, recalled Jack Grisham, the Tender Fury singer who played on early Goldenvoice bills as a member of T.S.O.L.

“Gary was supporting bands that didn’t get on the radio, had no record company, had no booking agents--nothing. He took a lot of chances with people who were unknowns and underdogs. Doing big shows like that, it really opened the music up to a lot of people’s eyes. Before that it was all little clubs. Gary changed the scene around.”

Tovar may have turned punk-rock concerts into something approaching a big business, but Mike Watt of Firehose says he was able to uphold many of the down-to-earth punk ideals that Watt’s former band, the Minutemen, exemplified.

“He really cared about the bands and knew the music,” Watt said. “It was a really personal thing. What we were trying to do with bands, he was doing with gigs. He was not a clown from the outside, trying to cash in--which is what I felt with a lot of other (promoters). I really respect the guy and owe him a lot.”

Tovar grew up in Los Angeles and Huntington Beach, where his family moved when he was 12. He attended Golden West College and Fullerton College, then moved to Santa Barbara and became a concert promoter.

“We hit town about the same time (former President) Reagan moved up there, and I wanted to shake the town up a little bit,” Tovar said with a laugh, speaking by phone recently from the Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix. Goldenvoice, launched in 1981, began with shows in Santa Barbara social halls and community centers because “at that time (punk) was pretty taboo in Los Angeles.”

“I was a fan, and I thought the music was underrepresented at the time,” Tovar continued. “I was just going to school, and decided, ‘Let’s get something going.’ We started very low budget. Back then you could do a show for $3,000 in start-up costs. As it got bigger later on, I moved to Los Angeles,” where punk promotion was haphazard, with small-scale promoters often advertising shows, only to have them canceled. “We wanted to come in and put it on a more organized (footing), so shows wouldn’t get canceled,” Tovar said.

One of his chief early obstacles was the violence associated with punk rock. In 1983, three Goldenvoice concerts turned into melees. And in 1985, Tovar said, he had to give up his steadiest venue, the Olympic Auditorium, because of unruly fan behavior.

“Most of the time I thought it was just good energy,” said Tovar, who moved back to Huntington Beach in the early ‘80s and was based there for most of his 9 1/2-year tenure as Goldenvoice’s owner. “But when it started getting violent I stopped doing the Olympic. It started to become a gladiator ring: who could be the toughest guy in town.”

As alternative rock gained momentum through the decade, Tovar found other venues and Goldenvoice became a well-established player in the Los Angeles concert market. (Goldenvoice now has exclusive promoting rights at the Hollywood Palladium and also does many shows at the Palace. Last year it branched out and began to stage concerts in Hawaii as well. In Orange County in recent years, Goldenvoice has promoted just a few concerts at UC Irvine’s Crawford Hall and at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim.)

Tovar’s concert promoting career stopped with his arrest. After he was jailed, Tovar turned over ownership in Goldenvoice to Paul Tollett and Rick Van Santen, two key assistants who at the time had been with the company about five years. Tollett said Goldenvoice promoted 110 concerts in 1991, and projects a total of 180 shows this year.

Paul Jarosz, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Tovar, said the promoter was indicted as the “organizer or supervisor” of a pot-trafficking ring that sought to purchase its merchandise in Arizona for resale in California and elsewhere. Jarosz said that the case against Tovar began with three separate drug investigations by local and federal authorities in Tucson and Mesa, Ariz., during the summer and fall of 1990. In those investigations, Jarosz said, $681,000 in cash was seized from the drug ring.

Jarosz said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration took up the investigation, linking the three separate cases to a single drug-trafficking operation. Tovar was indicted along with eight others. Jarosz said one of the nine stood trial and was convicted; all others have pleaded guilty. Jarosz said Tovar has pleaded to two counts of conspiracy to possess marijuana with intent to distribute, one count of attempted possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute and one count of operating a continuing criminal enterprise. The prosecutor said that the possible penalty Tovar faces for those charges ranges from 16 months (the time he will have served by the time he is sentenced) to life in prison.

Under federal law that allows the government to seize assets linked to an illegal drug operation, Tovar has forfeited a home in Hawaii and a 1986 Jaguar sports car, according to Rick Jones, one of Tovar’s defense lawyers. Under a stipulation reached with prosecutors earlier this month, Tovar will be able to keep a condominium he owns in Colorado. Goldenvoice is “not affected” by the seizure of Tovar’s property, said Reid Pixler, the assistant U.S. attorney handling the property forfeiture case.

Tovar said he didn’t want to comment specifically about his case until after he is sentenced.

“I’ve gotten used to my fate,” he said in an even voice. “Everything’s OK. I wish I could be with my wife. I miss her most of all.”

Tovar said he has spent his months in jail exercising and reading. “I lost about 40 to 50 pounds. I run seven miles a day to keep busy and lift weights. I’ve been doing a lot of reading--James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw, Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Oscar Wilde. I have nothing but time. It’s been a long road.”

The former promoter said he gets to keep up with the alternative-rock scene by listening to a Phoenix radio station, KUKQ, that “can (play) anything they want, and they really update you on the bands.” Tovar said he is gratified by the recent commercial explosion of the alternative-rock style that he helped promote.

“I was really proud of that. We carved our niche, and I knew eventually that if you hammered something hard enough, it would come about. It’s not like these heavy-metal bands that get big in 15 minutes. With the kind of music I did, it took years. I’m proud of the Peppers and Jane’s and Social D, of course.”

Tovar said proceeds from the upcoming benefit will help him “clean the slate” on legal debts he says total $75,000 so far and will grow if he appeals his sentence. “I’m used to doing things on my own, and for the first year I tried to fend off” having to request a benefit concert.

“I’ve never had to ask anybody for help,” he said. “I had (Goldenvoice) throw out feelers (to the bands involved), and it was a good response. I want to say ‘Thank you’ from the bottom of my heart. Sometimes people get lost in the shuffle. I’m grateful they came through for me.”

U.S. District Judge Paul D. Rosenblatt will sentence Tovar. Before he does, defense lawyer Jones said, the judge will receive a bundle of nearly 100 “wonderful” letters written by the former promoter’s friends and associates in the rock-music world.

Tender Fury’s Jack Grisham sent one. “I’ve explained to (the judge) that whatever Gary has done, in terms of honesty to me and caring and being real supportive, I’ve never worked with anyone better.”

* Social Distortion, Porno for Pyros, Thelonious Monster, Meat Puppets, Tender Fury and Firehose and Bug Lamp play Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Hollywood Palladium, 6215 Sunset Blvd. $20. Information: (213) 962-7600 or (714) 740-2000.