Promoters Feel Pinch of Economy

A year ago, as the 1991 outdoor concert season ended, officials at Orange County’s two big amphitheaters felt they had dodged the recession, a bullet that had taken painful gouges out of pop promoters’ profitability across the country.

In 1992, the bullet ricocheted wildly across the Southern California economy, and both the Pacific Amphitheatre and Irvine Meadows got hit.

“In 1991, the Pacific Amphitheatre had its most successful year ever. We made profit; we had more sellouts; it was a great year,” says Alex Hodges, vice president in charge of concert booking for the Nederlander Organization, which runs the Costa Mesa venue. “In 1992, we found out what a recession is really all about.”

“People were still buying concert tickets in ‘91,” said Bob Geddes, Irvine Meadows’ managing partner. “In ‘92, it came to a roaring halt. The public was far more discriminating with its entertainment dollars.”

The Pacific staged 30 concerts in 1992, down from 35 a year ago. Hodges said total attendance was about 250,000, down 30% from the 357,000 the Pacific reported in ’91.

Geddes said total ’92 attendance at Irvine Meadows was about 325,000, a 26% drop from last year’s reported 440,000. The number of shows fell from 43 to 31.

In recent interviews, Hodges and Geddes both said the recession’s impact was compounded because most of the season’s hottest touring attractions decided to play in stadiums that seat 50,000 or more, instead of in such amphitheaters as the Pacific and Irvine Meadows with their respective capacities of 18,700 and 15,000 (see accompanying story).

Two big package tours--Elton John with Eric Clapton and Guns N’ Roses with Metallica--played stadium dates, siphoning off four acts that in the past each had played successful amphitheater concerts in Orange County. Genesis, the Cure and U2 also played stadiums, ignoring amphitheaters where their presence would have meant lucrative multiple-night stands.

The trend toward big stadium shows, coupled with rock band Oingo Boingo’s decision to discontinue its highly popular annual series of Halloween concerts at Irvine Meadows, “cost us as many as 15 nights,” Geddes said.

Hodges says he thinks the Los Angeles riots in April had an effect on the concert business. Both the Pacific and the Nederlander-run Greek Theatre in Los Angeles had been enjoying brisk pre-season subscription sales, he said, “but from the riots on, it fell flat.”

He said he was basing his riot-impact theory on his own “informal” observations, rather than any systematic survey. “People became very anxious” about the possibility of random violence after the riots, he said, and that may have kept some potential concert customers at home.

Realizing the economy was down, Hodges said, the Pacific was cautious this year in bidding on touring attractions, which historically have enjoyed bonanzas in Orange County, where heated competition between Irvine Meadows and the Pacific has produced bidding wars.

“Without question, we had to pull in our offers and (ticket sales) projections,” Hodges said. “But we were still off. As conservative as we thought we were being, we were overly optimistic in many cases. With some notable exceptions, it was as if we couldn’t guess low enough.”

The season’s high point at Irvine Meadows was Lollapalooza ‘92, a sold-out, three-day alternative-rock festival in September. Geddes said that Jimmy Buffett was “good as always,” drawing near-capacity crowds to his two shows. The Pacific Symphony, which played five concerts over the course of its annual summer residency at Irvine Meadows, continued to post growing numbers at the box office, Geddes said, but “everything else was pretty much of a grind-it-out affair.”

Other than Lollapalooza and Buffett, the Canadian band Rush’s two-night stand in June was the only multiple-night engagement at Irvine Meadows.

At the Pacific, Hodges said, the box office highlights included a near-sellout performance by Michael Bolton and shows by Harry Connick Jr., the Steve Miller Band and Neil Young that did “very good business.” The financially rocky season ended on an upbeat note with the Pacific’s only multiple-night engagement, two sold-out concerts earlier this month by Ozzy Osbourne (who also played in March at Irvine Meadows).

“It’s a good omen,” Hodges said hopefully. “I think we’ll have a lot of good programming next year.”

Some of Nederlander’s concert programming will take place at the new Anaheim Arena, expected to open in mid-1993. Nederlander and Ogden Entertainment Services are partners in the venture, and Hodges will have responsibility for booking and promoting pop concerts there.

He said the indoor venue will open in late June or early July, with a maximum capacity of about 19,000 for concerts. Some arena concert dates have been booked, he said, “but it’s premature to mention them.”

He said he doesn’t see a conflict between the Pacific Amphitheater and the arena. “I consider them to be complementary to each other, as opposed to competitive with each other.” He said some acts may be able to play the arena on the winter leg of a tour and return in the summer to play an amphitheater show. Hodges expects that some bands will be drawn to the arena rather than the amphitheaters because it can accommodate larger-scale stage productions.

Geddes predicted that the arena won’t compete significantly for bookings during the peak summer touring season because most touring acts prefer to play outdoors. “They can do more business in an amphitheater situation. They gear their tours around (playing outdoors).”

But Geddes speculated that his rivals at Nederlander may push extra hard to fill the arena with concert dates, because so far the building has been unable to attract a professional sports franchise.

“They’ve got $100 million invested there, with no (sports) tenants. It could get real goofy.”