Cover Story: Downtown on the rocks

Marcie Allen does booking. That’s not just a declaration, it’s the name of her company: MAD Booking. In particular, she books free summer concerts in downtown areas, including the popular On The Bricks series launched last year in Centennial Olympic Park.

It’s a pretty nice racket the 28-year-old former sorority girl has going — one of those rare situations where everybody wins and the consumer isn’t getting stuck with the bill. MAD Booking’s free concerts are made possible through corporate sponsorship: The sponsors get a captive audience to promote their goods, the booking agent makes money from the sponsors, the city gets thousands of warm bodies walking through an otherwise empty downtown and the people get free concerts by completely legitimate, if not always enthralling, national acts.

It seemed to work pretty well last year, when MAD partnered with local modern-rock station 99X to book bands and promote the series. But leave it to people in the music business to muck it up.

On The Bricks is returning for a second year, but because MAD and 99X couldn’t make nice, we may end up with two Friday-night summer concert series across the street from one another. The first, On The Bricks, finds MAD now teaming with local Top 40 station Star 94 to present bands ranging from India.Arie to They Might Be Giants to the Drive-By Truckers. And the second, 99X’s Downtown Rocks, is operated by the city’s (and world’s) largest concert promoter, Clear Channel, and features more mainstream modern-rock acts such as Nickelback, Cake and Silverchair.

If both take place, many fear that bleeding noise between the two stages, as well as difficulties with traffic, parking and crowd control could make neither very much fun for anyone.

How an everyone-wins event devolved into a bitter power struggle involves plenty of he-said/she-said, laced with a good bit of folly. Keep in mind, this battle for territory doesn’t come with the baggage of religion, history or deadly force. We’re talking concerts here.

Peter Conlon sells tickets. But that’s not all he does. As the co-founder of Atlanta’s Concert/Southern Promotions — bought in 1998 by concert biz behemoth SFX, which was bought in 2000 by media megacorp Clear Channel — he’s hands down the largest concert promoter in Atlanta. His company operates the Tabernacle, the Cotton Club and the Roxy, produces concerts at Chastain Park Amphitheatre, Fox Theatre, Symphony Hall, Philips Arena and the Georgia Dome, plus throws the mother of all Atlanta music events, the annual Music Midtown festival, which takes place this weekend near the Civic Center. He’s been working in the concert business for decades. Since before Marcie Allen was born.

And all those things are why 99X approached Conlon’s Clear Channel operation after last year’s On The Bricks about organizing a free summer concert series for 2002. Why would 99X partner with Clear Channel just as it ended an event with MAD that it called a great success?

Here’s where things get cloudy.

According to 99X General Manager Tom Holiday, at the end of last summer, Centennial Olympic Park General Manager Mark Banta and other park officials told him the park did not want to repeat On The Bricks in 2002. “It was probably a little too much for the wet grass in the park,” he says. “Every week they told us, ‘Oh my God, we gotta move the stage because it was wet here and wet there.’ And rightfully so — they’re horticulturalists. But at the end, the park said, ‘We’re not going to do it again.’”

That’s news to MAD’s Allen, whose job it was to renew the On The Bricks’ lease of the park. She says she never got that message from the park. In fact, she received confirmation of her renewal in September. And Banta denies ever telling anyone that On The Bricks would not return to the park.

As far as why 99X wouldn’t have asked MAD to move with them outside the park, the station’s program director, Chris Williams, says it was just a business decision. “We just wanted to get bigger and better.”

In early October, Allen got a meeting with Holiday to discuss On The Bricks 2002. By then, 99X’s plans with Clear Channel were already under way. Seeing an opportunity to merge the two concerts into a weekly two-stage festival, Holiday offered Allen a sponsorship deal with 99X’s Top 40 sister station, Q100.

“That was humorous,” Allen says of the offer, which she rejected. “At the time, Q100 was a brand new radio station. To be offered Q100 so 99X could go and do another event with Clear Channel — that’s ridiculous.”

Within two days of her meeting with Holiday, Allen had secured a new sponsorship deal with Star 94, a more established local pop station. And soon after, 99X formally announced its plans for Downtown Rocks, which would be held on Friday nights in the summer — eight of which coincide with the nights already scheduled for On The Bricks — across Butler Street on the north side of Centennial Park. In an amusing bit of spin, Downtown Rocks identified its site as Butler Street Park. In fact, it’s a gravel parking lot owned by Coca-Cola with no official name.

And with the unveiling of two rival concert series, the recriminations began.

Allen, who has reason to not want a competing music event across the street from hers, believes that the addition of Downtown Rocks will create major logistical problems. According to Allen, half a million people attended On The Bricks over 12 weeks last year, with close to 80,000 on its single largest night. Double those numbers for two concerts, and there would be reason for concern.

Allen gave her statistics to the downtown Neighborhood Planning Unit March 25, the night Downtown Rocks presented it with its festival application. Apparently, her case was compelling, because the NPU voted unanimously to recommend the city deny Downtown Rocks a permit.

However, the NPU indicated it would likely approve Downtown Rocks if it changed nights to Thursday or Saturday. No dice. “It’s the night that belongs to 99X,” the station’s Holiday says. “We created this event last year. It started out as Freeloader Fridays. Those were all 99X listeners down there last year on Fridays, and they’re expecting to go down there again on Fridays.”

Downtown Rocks also could get approval if it remained on Friday, but moved to a location farther from Centennial Park, such as Underground Atlanta. Uh-uh again.

“Where we did it last year is where people expect to return — there’s a homing instinct here,” says Holiday. “We want to have it within a realm of where we did it last year.”

While the mayor, who makes the final decision on permits, is not bound to follow the NPU recommendation, it would be very unusual for her to go against its decision. And subjecting the neighborhood to an event it doesn’t want would have negative political repercussions for her. The mayor has said she will make a decision on Downtown Rocks sometime this week.

Clear Channel’s Conlon remains undeterred, in part because he thinks Allen alarmed the NPU with inflated numbers. “The crowd estimates from last year are absurd, there’s no way there was those numbers,” he says. He believes that, with a coordinated effort, the city and Centennial Park (controlled by the state) could easily handle the crowds, which he estimates in the 15,000-20,000 range. “This is Atlanta, we’re not talking about Mayberry here.”

In all this, Allen wonders why Conlon, who has said he doesn’t believe in non-ticketed events as a business strategy, would even want to get involved in Downtown Rocks. After all, Conlon operates three major venues in Atlanta, including one, the Tabernacle, within blocks of Centennial Park. To pay the rent on those venues, he needs to have top-selling acts appearing there regularly through the summer. Why would he take part in removing up to 80 national touring acts from the market in order to present them for free?

Allen questions whether Clear Channel is more motivated by the possibility of destroying On The Bricks than by creating a second viable free concert series. “I think if you saw my event go away next year, their event would go away,” she says.

This isn’t the first time a Clear Channel company has been accused of anti-competitive practices. But Conlon counters that he was left with no choice other than to create competition. After all, if Clear Channel had turned down 99X, the station would’ve found another booking partner — and that would’ve only made matters worse for Conlon’s bottom line.

“Obviously a play at the Tabernacle is value to us because we have an ongoing business down there that pays rent and taxes and has to do shows,” Conlon says. “However, when this type of situation starts evolving, we have to get involved. The situation last summer did cost the Tabernacle a tremendous amount of business. Fundamentally, would I rather be doing all these shows in the Tabernacle? Yes.”

Do all concert promoters answer their own questions? Seemingly so. Allen says, “Do I think it’s malicious what they’re doing? Absolutely. Do I think they want me to just go away? Absolutely. Am I going away? No.”

Fine, says Conlon, just make room for the new (old) guy in town. “Having two events in downtown is great for the city. It’ll get national and international attention — there should be three or four. It gets down to someone who doesn’t want competition saying, ‘I want to be the only one down here.’ And that’s not good for the city.”

Ultimately, if Downtown Rocks doesn’t get its permit for Friday nights at the Coca-Cola lot, it will have no choice but to find an alternative night or location. Underground Atlanta is still out there as a possibility, assuming, of course, that the downtown NPU approved it. David Patton, the NPU’s chairman, thinks Underground would be a great solution, but expresses exasperation at the amount of time and energy the issue has already taken. After all, we’re talking concerts here.

“These are two free concerts downtown and we have plenty of other issues throughout the neighborhood that we have to deal with,” Patton says. “I just got off the phone with someone dealing with loitering and drug dealing along Boulevard. That’s what we have to spend our time on. We’ve made our decision, and they’re keeping us from being able to take care of our business. We need the mayor to lead on this issue, and hopefully she understands what the neighborhood is saying.”

As you may have noticed, 99X sponsors the Sound Menu music listings in Creative Loafing.??