Trying to Keep Tours on Track

With a neat crown of silver hair and the ability to appear completely at leisure in his knotted tie, Rob Light has the mien of a top-notch financial consultant: a man of measured appraisals who does all his homework so he can predict what’s beyond the horizon. “If we can get to the other side of the Olympics without another terrorist incident,” he says in even tones, “we’re going to see big things.”

When Light talks about big things, though, he’s thinking of rock tickets, not stock tickers. The affable 44-year-old is a partner in Creative Artists Agency, one of show business’ superpowers, and heads its music department, the deal-and-detail squad that handles concert tours of big-name acts from Destiny’s Child to Bob Dylan, Faith Hill to Lil’ Bow Wow, Ozzy Osbourne to Christina Aguilera.

Light, a passionate music fan, will be the first to tell you that while memorable concert magic is created in the moment--in improvisation, in the thrill of audience connection--memorable concert business is measured in mounds of contractual pulp and seasons of planning.

The desk in his Beverly Hills office is topped with tidy stacks of paper that, in four or six or eight months, will become rock tours. But these days it’s an untidy world, to say the least, and who can say what harsh winds may scatter those papers?

“There are a lot of questions to be asked, from questions of the economy to the state of the nation and questions of security and, really, the mood of the public,” Light says. “After what happened on Sept. 11, a lot of what we did was based on gut instinct. Now, further out, we’re trying to consider all the information we can get and plan from there.... Part of it is you have to try to read the mind of the American public.”

Similar psychic efforts have been underway throughout the entertainment world in the 110 days since the terrorist attacks. Filmmakers, comedians, television writers, musicians--all have almost certainly paused at least once to consider the new audience awaiting them, the new context around them.

Light and other concert industry executives not only have to divine the mind of the public, they also have to do it months in advance and gamble millions that they will present the right show at the right place at the right time.

Light’s mind-reading tells him two obvious things about 2002 concerts: Tickets will be cheaper and security will be intensified. He also says that the industry is moving toward more multi-act and festival shows to lure fans who might be inclined to save their money or avoid large gatherings.

“I think you’ll see more packages and varied combinations than in the past,” Light says. “Partially for economics, but also being aware of the public and how often they are going to go out. Is somebody who went to six concerts last year going to go to as many this year if money is an issue? Or if world events and just wanting to stay home more is an issue? What is going to get somebody off the couch to go? If it’s a can’t-miss or once-in-a-lifetime grouping of acts, that will do it.”

More generally, Light expects a surge in business because of the escapism and community that can be found amid the cheers of arenas. “Unless something else happens,” he says solemnly. “Then all bets are off.”

It’s past dinner time, and most of the offices and hallways at the crisply appointed CAA headquarters are empty. His comfortable office has no photos of him gripping hands with rock stars. Instead, the walls are dominated by expensively framed kid art (five children at home) and memorabilia representing his passion for golf and the New York Giants football team.

Light, sipping hot tea, is battling a head cold and is not the type of guy who loves interviews, being of the mind that newspaper articles should be about musicians, not agents. He has agreed to talk on this occasion because he wants to share his optimism about the near future of the concert business--although at times he sounds as if he is trying to persuade himself as well as the listener--and, even more, highlight the intriguing role concerts have played in the healing of the country since Sept. 11.

“The weekend after Sept. 11, there was no football or baseball games, but the concerts were back,” he says. “There is a community in music that you don’t find in sport. It’s about connection, not competition, and there’s a catharsis and meaning in concerts.”

Light was one of the few onlookers allowed into the tightly secured Los Angeles soundstage on Sept. 21 when CAA clients Alicia Keys, Faith Hill and Bon Jovi were among the musicians who performed on the austere, somber telethon “America: A Tribute to Heroes.” A month later, Light was in the tightly packed aisles of Madison Square Garden for “The Concert for New York City,” a far more raucous affair that veered from tears and gentle ballads to bellows and the Who’s power chords.

The events, beamed out to the world and later scooped up by music buyers on CD, could hardly have been more different. The agent realized only later that he had attended the closest thing the U.S. public would have to a funeral and a wake for its Sept. 11 losses.

“The telethon and the ‘Concert for New York’ were actually bookends,” he says. “If the telethon was stark and grief-ridden and sad--yet hopeful--it had a very different tone than the ‘Concert for New York,’ which had the atmosphere that it’s OK to feel good about ourselves and to be proud of ourselves. There was still sadness, but there was the beginnings of healing too.”

The healing is ongoing, of course, the scar tissue building. Light sees it at shows, in the faces of fans and in his offices. Some of his younger employees were too rattled to fly in the weeks after Sept. 11, and Light wisely shrugged it off, even though key concerts went unstaffed.

There was a more subtle fear too: that the intrusion of such wrenching events would make the usually glamorous business of concerts either impossible or unimportant. Now, Light sees energy returning and business picking up. There’s even a pleasant new mystery: the unlikely resurrection of REO Speedwagon.

“I’m serious,” he says. Light laughs and explains that ticket sales for clients Speedwagon, Styx and other so-called heritage rock acts (he prefers that term to “classic rock”) are so brisk that agents gather and giggle with delight every Monday morning when the new reports arrive.

There has been a solid market for several years for 1980s bands offering the newest generation of nostalgia, but Light says these groups are now selling 5,000 or 6,000 tickets for shows on the first day of sales. “I really wouldn’t be surprised if it has some connection to what’s going on. It’s comfort food. Country music too I would expect to do better and [rock] music that drills down a level to emotional cores. Not just the loud, aggressive stuff. Like Slipknot--will people really be wanting to hear that a year from now?”

It’s an interesting time in the concert business. Tickets sales were down this year even before Sept. 11, although grosses were about the same--a function of the wild ticket price inflation of recent years. Through the first six months of the year, the average ticket price among the 50 top-grossing tours was $46.69--43% higher than prices three years ago.

Industry observers at midyear looked at the groaning economy and predicted a reckoning. Promoters and veteran artists would have to slash their prices or face the prospect of venues one-third empty. Now, with the economy in a frostier place, Light says ticket prices are “so completely out of whack” that it will be hard to find the right range. It’s also hard, he says, to tell veteran artists that lower prices and smaller paydays aren’t a loss of prestige, just a sign of the times.

One of the few totems of celebrity in Light’s office is an acoustic guitar signed by Hall & Oates, a client when the department was launched 17 years ago and still in the fold. Light smiles when asked about the long run, but he gets just as excited a few minutes later talking about a new client, O.A.R., a young Ohio band gaining a national cult following through the Internet and word-of-mouth. “It’s amazing what happens in the college towns and with the young fans who chase the music for the pure love of it,” he says.

Light became passionate about music as a career while attending New York’s Syracuse University in the early 1970s. The strong, independent campus radio station helped propel him into the profession, as it did with classmates John Sykes, now president of VH1, and Phil Quartararo, now president of Warner Bros. Records, and a number of other key executives.

Light worked up, in classic fashion, from the mailroom at International Creative Management. Through the years, his job has given him front-row seats to concert history--Live Aid, he says, now that was a good show--but he thinks listening to James Taylor sing “Fire and Rain” at “The Concert for New York City” may have been the most emotional stage moment he’s ever witnessed.

He expects more moments like that in the next year: “The catastrophe that has happened, in a way it reminds me of when Kennedy was killed. The music in recent years, the pop stuff, is a lot like the music that was popular in the years before Kennedy was killed. Terrible, superficial music.”

After the assassination, he continues, the explosive success of the Beatles was not only a much-needed tonic for youth, but the band’s ironic, sophisticated persona was also tailor-made for a generation that was suddenly too cynical for Fabian.

“There was a moment and there was music, there’s this follow-and-lead relationship that has happened in times like that ... and now music matters again and I think people want music that matters. And they want to see it live.”

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Geoff Boucher is a Times staff writer.