Not fat-free, just free

MATT ALLEN is in the back courtyard at the Al Wooten Jr. Heritage Center, an after-school center for kids in South L.A., and, somehow, it’s become career day. The kids are asking the Long Beach native about his job, and as he tells them about it, they drool in pink and blue, awestruck by his answer.

“I’m the most famous ice cream man in the world,” he tells an 8-year-old girl, beaming as she sucks down a Bomb Pop. “Not that I really know what that means.”

He may not know what it really means, but it’s true: When you mention Ice Cream Man to anyone who’s met Allen in the last three years, immediately they’ll conjure up his image in their head: floppy hair, lanky body, perpetual smile. And everyone smiles back. Because this Ice Cream Man comes with a topping: He never sells anything. It’s all free. No catch.

And who doesn’t like free ice cream?

That question could be the impetus for Ice Cream Man’s mini-empire, one that’s found him hobnobbing with rock royalty (he’s been backstage at just about every major festival of the year; his next stop is at the Detour Fest in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday) on his way to his professed goal of distributing 500,000 free ice creams.

He’s logged more than 20,000 miles to distribute 60,000 treats so far -- giving out ice cream wherever someone’s itching for a Drumstick. Sometimes it’s kids in South L.A. Sometimes it’s patrons walking across the parking lot at Coachella. And often, it’s someone on the street who spots the truck and gets a bit curious.

He started out by selling product in a small town in Colorado. But Allen -- who gives his age as “the mysterious place between childhood and too old to fulfill my dreams” but seems to be in his late 20s or early 30s -- is, of course, a self-confessed dreamer. “It’s much more fun to think as big as you can think,” he says, “and then scale down if necessary.” After he purchased a 1969 ice cream truck, he threw an ice cream social in Ashland, Ore., giving away the extra product he had at the end of the summer. Lines formed. News crews showed up. And the idea for Ice Cream Man was formed.

Now Allen has legions of Ice Cream Man helpers across the country. They volunteer when he’s in town in exchange for concert tickets, backstage passes and other perks, and companies look at Allen’s unusual business model as a possible boon for them too. That model is this: sponsorship.

After slinging cream at the 2004 All Tomorrow’s Parties rock festival in Long Beach, he had an idea. What if he went from music festival to music festival, both backstage and in the audience, and spread some corporate goodwill along with his flavorful treats?

IT sounds crazy, but the idea of companies covering his living expenses and supplying him with product worked. Ice cream firms signed on immediately. And other companies -- such as Guitar Center -- saw Allen’s plan as a perfect opportunity to get in touch with their client base. Recently he partnered with Toyota, who extended his fleet from just his ailing, iconic ice cream truck with two brand-new Yarises, painted with his grinning Ice Cream Man logo.

“It’s so noninvasive for someone. Everyone loves ice cream,” says Kyle Rogers, Guitar Center’s marketing manager. It’s also the kind of direct marketing that companies dream of. When Allen serves up an Otter Pop to someone who’s sweaty coming off the stage, he also hands them a discount card for Guitar Center -- a useful piece of swag for a musician, and a dream for a company reliant on word-of-mouth for their stores.

“It doesn’t feel like there’s any hidden agenda behind it other than free ice cream,” Rogers says of Allen’s plan. “It’s important to us because of the authenticity. There’s no smoke and mirrors with Matt.”

Dameon Guess, marketing director and vice president of Jakprints, a custom sticker-and-apparel company, agrees. He was tentative when he originally partnered with Allen, making him pay for half of a $2,000 run of stickers to promote the Ice Cream Man website (full of photos and anecdotes from the events Allen attends). But a funny thing happened when the stickers ran out: Guess went online and saw that Ice Cream Man referrals had led to $12,000 worth of business. “I love what he does,” he says, “and I’ll continue to support him as long as I can -- he’s art in the making.”

Rogers calls Allen the Andy Warhol of Ice Cream, and if it were just his sponsors saying that, it could seem a little suspect. But the artists who he’s met are equally impressed. Wayne Coyne, the singer for the psychedelic rock band the Flaming Lips -- who recently invited Allen to their tour bus at the Austin City Limits festival for a personal delivery -- describes Allen lovingly as “a Dr. Seuss character,” adding, “He’s finding his own format -- which is what all artists do, in a sense. They find their own way to be unique. I think he’s doing that.”

But for Allen, who once rode a bicycle cross-country and worked in a chocolate factory, it’s not necessarily art at all. When people ask him why he does it, his answer is simple: “If you could travel the world and give away ice cream, would you?”

weekend@latimes.com