Venues and acts get creative in face of high fuel prices
by Gil Kaufman
While gas prices have been on the rise for the past two years, last month’s sharp spike at the pump has forced a number of bands, as well as venues, to radically change their tunes. Some acts have outright canceled tours, doubled up with other bands in crowded vans or scaled down to a smaller acoustic set-up to save money. For their part, venues are trying to meet the supply side of the equation, offering biodiesel on site for tour vans and encouraging fans to carpool to shows.
One venue that is taking on the issue seriously is the Meadowbrook U.S. Cellular Pavilion in Gilford, N.H. Since January, the 6,500-capacity venue has had a deal in place with a local biodiesel outfit to supply biodiesel fuel to any act that requests it while playing the venue, at the artist’s expense. “It’s not a permanent solution, but we cut a deal with Simply Green Biofuels where they bring a truck over and fill up the buses and trucks for any artist who requests it,” said Chris Lockwood, director of Marketing for the venue, which he believes is the only one of its kind in the country offering the biodiesel option to acts.
So far, the only artist to take the venue up on the offer has been Melissa Etheridge, whose rider stipulated that the venue had to provide biofuels for her tour fleet when she played on July 5.
“We’re in central New Hampshire, so it’s not that easy to find biodiesel around here,” Lockwood said. The Pavilion has also hooked up with alternative energy provider Amenico to convert its second stage generator to one that runs off of used cooking oil, which is provided by the venue’s own catering facility.
“It’s even better for the environment than biodiesel and it’s so clean you can dip a piece of bread in the fuel and eat it — there’s no waste at all,” Lockwood said.
While most amphitheaters haven’t yet followed Meadowbrook’s lead, new-for-2008 festivals such as July’s Rothbury Festival in Michigan have led the way in terms of greening venues.
“Artists don’t yet have the clout to say they won’t play a venue if it isn’t green, because they’ll be shut out of 70 percent of the venues in the country,” said Carrie Lombardi, one of the organizers of the Rothbury event. “But festivals are leading the way and hopefully venues will be next.”
When it came to greening Rothbury, organizers set a goal diverting nearly 80 percent rate of garbage from the landfill through recycling, composting or reclamation. That goal was achieved by having one of the fest’s 540 volunteers standing at every waste station 24 hours a day to ensure attendees were putting their trash in the right place, a Herculean effort, but one that Lombardi said was worth it.
The festival also used only compostable items in the vendor area, with 500,000 corn-based cups available to food vendors. “Like any green endeavor, there is an investment up front,” Lombardi said, adding that the cost of greening figures was not available yet at press time, but would be calculated once organizers determined how much biofuel was used to power all the stages and production facilities. “That makes it hard when it’s your first year, but we are committed to a goal of near zero waste and we know it will pay off in year five or six.”
The long-running Vans Warped Tour has been using biofuel to gas up its entire fleet of semis and production vehicles since 2006, bringing along its own fueling truck to keep the production running on the cleaner fuel, and sparing the environment from carbon-monoxide emissions to the tune of more than 500,000 pounds a year.
The nation’s biggest concert promoter, Live Nation, is in the midst of a major project that is aimed at bringing its venues up to speed on sustainability, according to Brian Allenby, manager of operations and education for the environmental education non-profit Reverb, which has been helping bands green their tours since 2004.
Reverb, which has a database of all the biodiesel suppliers around the U.S., is working with LN this summer to bring biodiesel fuel out to LN venues for all the tour dates by the Dave Matthews Band, John Mayer, Jack Johnson and Maroon 5/Counting Crows. “Artists love it and the drivers love it because they don’t have to stop and they can just show up in the morning and fuel up and they’re ready to roll,” said Allenby. The service bears no cost for the venue, but does involve a bit of extra expense for the artist to have Reverb arrange the delivery. But Allenby said getting it there is no problem, since biodiesel is available near just about every LN venue, eliminating the need to change traditional summer tour routing.
With a number of venues now fueling their own vehicles with biodiesel, Allenby said he thought the use of the fuel might catch on and lead to more widespread availability on site at sheds across the country, especially if LN takes the lead. In the meantime, Reverb is in the midst of doing a survey of 40 LN venues to help the company assess where their venues are on the path to sustainability and put together a financial and staffing plan for 2009 and the future. “The margins in this business are obviously slim and ticket sales are not great right now, but what we’re trying to do is assess who are the waste management companies and concession vendors that Live Nation can leverage its power with to reach these goals,” he said.
“There are a lot of practices Live Nation can put into place with no additional costs, like working with carpooling programs that might also catch on.”
Which is why, this summer, LN has teamed with the carpooling company PickUpPal for all the dates on three of the four tours Reverb is working with, offering priority parking to any group of four or more who sign up online to attend a show using PickUpPal. A section in the VIP lot is reserved for the carpoolers, which benefits LN because it means their nightly car inventory is lower, which lowers staffing costs for traffic management, gets fans in and out faster and leads to more concession sales to fans who spend more time in the venue than stuck in traffic.
Peter Shapiro knows all about the greening of venues. The former owner of New York’s pioneering Wetlands nightclub — which was a hub of music and social activism in the 1990s — as well as the founder of the environmentally-themed Green Apple Festival series of free events, Shapiro said the example set by Rothbury and Meadowbrook can only help create the model for what is economical when it comes to amphitheaters switching to alternative fuels.
“As much as can be done to commercialize and commoditize those kinds of changes is good because it will create the path,” said Shapiro, who is attempting to forge another new path with a 20,000-square-foot venue he’s building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that will combine a bowling alley and 600-capacity venue.
It’s not just major venues and promoters who are feeling the pinch, though. In a recent interview, Dallas-band the Backsliders said they’re combating the high cost of touring by flying to key cities and renting backline gear or borrowing gear from friends in bands in the towns they are playing. Other acts are skipping smaller markets and hopping among major hubs such as New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, or just skipping tours altogether and opting to play only big festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella and Bumbershoot.
With artists near the middle and bottom of the touring chain seemingly suffering the most from skyrocketing fuel costs, you’d think more would be fretting about it. But, so far, that’s not the case, at least according to Jackson Haring, general manager of High Road Touring, which represents everyone from Aimee Mann, to the Indigo Girls, Yo La Tengo, Feist and Portishead.
“I don’t know that anyone is radically changing their routing yet. I haven’t really seen any of our acts reacting yet,” he said.
“Bands who are lower on the food chain are being impacted, but they’re bands we’ve never heard of. What you might see is that national touring for a band on that level will be out of reach soon and certain parts of the country will become prohibitive, like the West Coast or the Northwest. So you might see fewer baby bands playing those areas.”
For bands higher up on the musical food chain, Haring said he expects that fewer European acts will be flying over to try their luck, mostly because of the combination of fuel costs and the anemic dollar. “The problem is, do you do smaller legs? If you put more dates in there, you will spend more because the overhead for hotels, gas, crew will add up between those larger paying gigs,” he said. Mostly, he suspects that tertiary markets will begin to suffer and you may see bands splitting hotel rooms, or passing them up all together to sleep on the bus and bunking with their support acts and sharing expenses, as well as backlines and equipment rentals, which, will, of course, create a ripple effect on the entire support structure of the live music ecosystem.
Interviewed for this story: Chris Lockwood, (603) 293-4700; Jackson Haring, (415) 332-9292; Carrie Lombardi, (303) 413-8308; Peter Shapiro, peter@brooklynbowl.com; Michael Roth, (213) 742-7155; Brian Allenby, (207) 221-6553
