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Austin promoter under fire
A week or so ago we reported that the Roches, claiming they are owed more than $7,000 for a performance at the First Unitarian Universalist Church on Dec. 1, 2007, have filed a breach of contract suit in Travis County against promoter Sally Cooper and her Austin Acoustic Series.
We recently talked to Suzzy Roche of the New York-based singing group and relayed her claims to Cooper for comment. Cooper does not dispute that she owes the Roches money and says she intends to pay every cent, but so far the Roches have received only $200 of the $7,500 guarantee.
“They’ve made it their goal to run me out of business,” said Cooper, whose only experience in the music business before starting the series in 2006 was working at a Camelot Music record store in San Angelo from 1994 to 2004.
“I started having a bad feeling even before we came down,” Roche said by phone. “We have a contract rider that specifies the sort of PA (sound system) we require and the one she was offering was not sufficient.”
Cooper said she had handed the specifications to a local sound company, which provided her with the PA. “I thought I had the PA they had asked for,” Cooper said.
At sound check, Cooper recalled, the Roche sisters were livid. “They were screaming at me,” said Cooper. “They were saying ‘You’re an effing liar, only they didn’t use ‘effing.’”
“Our sound man said it was the worst PA he’d ever seen,” said Roche, “so we told Sally that this was something she had to take care of. She had to get the stuff on the rider.” To make matters worse, Roche said Cooper also told the group before the show that she couldn’t pay them that night because the money was all tied up with the ticket agency. “She had told us beforehand that the show was going to be a sellout, but then she met us out front and said she’d sold only 160 tickets. “My heart sank. I remembered that e-mail from Carol Tingstad, where she warned us about playing for Sally Cooper.”
Tingstad is a Seattle booking agent whose duo Tingstad and Rumbel had received a $2,500 check from Cooper that had bounced a year earlier. Although Cooper told Tingstad she would make good on the check, Tingstad says she has yet to receive a penny. “It’s being taken care of,” said Cooper. Performer Eric Tingstad recently filed a bad-check complaint against Cooper with the Travis County attorney’s office.
Another Tingstad client, new age pianist David Lanz, also recently discovered a check for $2,400 from Cooper had been returned in April 2007 for insufficient funds. He said he wasn’t aware of that until last week when he was doing his taxes. “That doesn’t sound right,” said Cooper. “That show was over a year ago.” The venue of the Lanz concert, Unity of Austin, still has not been paid the $250 rental fee, according to Susan Vigliano, former Unity office manager.. “She sounded great on the front end,” Vigliano said. “But things got wacky after the show.”
“She had an excuse for everything,” Roche said of Cooper, who was inspired to start her concert series after attending the Folk Alliance in Austin in February 2006. “I don’t buy that idea that she was a green promoter in over her head. I think she knew exactly what she was doing.” Roche said that “In 30 years of doing this, we’ve never not been paid after the show.”
“People of Austin should know that the name Austin Acoustic Series is really an insult to the town, this musical paradise,” Roche said.
Cooper said she doesn’t know exactly how many tickets were sold to the Roches concert, but if it was 160, the amount she told Roches’ booking agent Jeff Laramie five days after the concert, that means about $5,600 was taken in. So, where did the money go?
“Expenses ate up everything,” Cooper said. “I had $500 in hotel bills, $350 in advertising. The venue rental was $1,000 and on and on.”
But Dottie Sizer, office manager of First Unitarian, said Cooper’s rental fee of the 330-capacity room on Dec. 1 was only $490.
The Austin Acoustic Series continues this weekend at First Unitarian, with Johnsmith on Friday and Kate Campbell on Sunday.
“I learned a big lesson from the Roches show,” said Cooper. “I don’t give guarantees anymore.” The acts now play for a percentage of the door.
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