DO SOMETHING CRAZY: Part 4 of 5
“Let’s start a new touring music festival to challenge Lollapalooza. But let’s do one featuring dozens of punk rock bands playing while the world’s greatest skaters ride a massive vert ramp amongst the crowd and within sight of the stage. That would be crazy!” - a conversation I had with Kevin Lyman and his partner Ray Woodbury at the home of lawyer David Codikow, the original OG founders of The Warped Tour.
From a conversation like this one, a group of us formed a company with the intention of creating a new cutting-edge summer music festival that would dethrone Lollapolooza from its perch at #1.
We met every Wednesday after work at the opulent offices of Creative Artist Agency. CAA was the most powerful talent agency in the world at the time with legendary Mike Ovitz as its CEO. They became our partner. Our brainstorming meetings would often last for hours into the night. We would order dinner in so we could keep going. As a 25 year old Dreamer with a seat at the table with music industry royalty, I was in brainstorming Heaven.
From those meetings, the largest traveling summer music festival in the United States and the longest-running touring music festival to date in North America was born.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warped_Tour
My youth got taken advantage of in those meetings, both in good and bad ways. The good was that everyone else in those meetings had big 9-5 jobs. Creating the tour was their moonlight gig. But for me, it was my main gig.
For that reason, I got thrown a lot of important bones. Someone would invariably say, “that’s a great idea, but who has time to get into that?” I would always enthusiastically volunteer. It didn’t matter how big or small the opportunity was because I was hungry.
I learned so much that first year I could have filled a book with the knowledge. It was a master class on how to build a consortium enterprise of multiple principals and their separate entities.
The bad was when we met to discuss how to divide up the equity within our core group. A company needed to be formed to own what we were jointly creating. Everyone in the room had their own company except the CAA guys, who worked in their music division.
Equity? I didn’t even know what that meant at the time. I was 25 years old and grateful to be in the room with a seat at the table. I thought, can we get back to working on the a creation of the tour already?
Why did equity matter? The Warped Tour went on to tour every summer for the next twenty five years. In its best years, it averaged 650,000 concert goers and $25 million in ticket sales. Those are per summer stats. And it ran for twenty-five freaking years! That was THE most important meeting we ever had and I was disinterested.
I could have demanded equity but I didn’t. None was offered. The lawyer, who did none of the work except make a few phone calls at the beginning would take a healthy 30%.
Ownership of the company, that would go on to actually own the tour, was the asset! Not the work and the income I could derive from it. I was so naive.
I don’t have access to the total gross ticket sales over the entire lifespan of the tour, but I’m guessing it was above $500 million. I heard through the grapevine that Vans, the sponsor I brought on board, actually bought out a few of the original partners for a hefty sum with many zeroes.
Instead, I got 15% of every sponsor dollar I brought in the first two years. At the age of 26, I made my first $100,000 in commissions in year two. I thought I was wealthy! I went out and bought a used Mercedes and moved into a killer oceanfront beach pad in Manhattan Beach. Compared to friends my age, I was Richie Rich personified! I was living large!
I didn’t realize that I had gladly accepted the low hanging fruit from much more experienced and savvy Hollywood operators. In year three I crushed sponsorship sales and was owed $290k by the tour. That lawyer I mentioned earlier was so fucking ruthless, he convinced the others to get rid of me so they could have the money I raised AND my commission.
The lawyer drew up a take-it-or-leave-it, out-of-court settlement for $25,000. It was actually nice to finally see him do some actual work for his equity.
What was I going to do? Suethe most powerful agency in the world at age 27? I would never work in the music industry or Hollywood again. Plus, I made $200k in just two years with the tour and the founders of Lollapalooza were courting me to work with them on another new tour concept. Did I mention that I grew to hate punk rock music with a passion while listening to sound checks every day while setting up sponsor stuff ? 🤣 I took the shitty deal and never looked back.
The good news is that I only had to learn this valuable lesson once. Since that experience I have owned the majority equity stake of every entity I ever became heavily involved with. And, I never worked for anyone else again. For twenty-seven years I have had only one boss - me!
If I was immature as an entrepreneur at age twenty-nine and into my thirties, then I was downright an infant at the start of my first reinvention at age 25. But despite how I got taken advantage of, my involvement with the Warped Tour and the Hollywood sharks that built it, an entrepreneur Warrior was born.
As my friend Brian Smith, who founded Ugg, often says, “you can’t give birth to an adult.”
This photo is of me and Beth at a Warped Tour stop in Asbury Park, New Jersey in year two of the festival. It’s one of the only photos I have of us together and one I cherish. A Bliss Champions customer, who is a world-class artist, painted me a beautiful rendering of the moment.
