MUSIC FESTIVALS

C3 knows concerts

Austin-based promoters behind ACL Fest, Lollapallooza making waves in music industry

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, May 09, 2007

The three owners of Austin-based C3 Presents, which recently rocked the music industry with its move to do away with ticket surcharges at the three major festivals it promotes, look back at their humble beginnings in the business and chuckle. What a difference 12 years makes.

Charlie Jones, Charlie Walker and Charles Attal, nicknamed "the three Charlies" in the industry, are gearing up for the outdoor concert season, presenting Lollapalooza in Chicago in August, the Austin City Limits Music Festival in September and the new Big State Festival, with Tim McGraw headlining, in College Station in October. They're also producing shows at the new House of Blues in Dallas, five Harrah's Casinos and at Austin venues ranging from Stubb's Bar-B-Que to the Erwin Center.

The new company, a merger of Charles Attal Presents and Capital Sports & Entertainment's music division, which Jones leads, expects to sell more than 850,000 tickets in 2007.

But in 1995, Attal had no experience in the music business and was working as a rare book auctioneer, and Jones and Walker, who held entry-level jobs with Direct Events and Pace Concerts, respectively, were bickering over where to place the barricades at a punk show at the Austin Music Hall.

Today, the three are at the helm of a new company that gives Austin its highest profile yet in the concert industry. They've grown into major players in an ever-shifting business that has come to embrace C3's specialties: festivals and intimate music halls.

"They're local, but they're also national, which is great for Austin," Erwin Center Director John Graham said.

When Walker, 35, stepped down after two years as president of the North American division of Live Nation, the world's largest concert promoters, to partner with Attal, 39, and Jones, 38, the industry took notice. It's rare in the concert business, Walker said, for an executive to leave a giant public company in Los Angeles to help start an independent in a midsized market, but after living in Austin for three years in the '90s, he pined for a return.

Walker left Live Nation in January on the eve of a reorganization, but he said that had little influence on his decision.

"I'm an Austin kind of guy," he said. "Plus, I've just had this incredible chemistry with Charles and Charlie. We're like brothers. We still have disagreements, but then it's over and we move on."

Jones and Walker had an especially contentious first meeting, which makes for a story they love to tell.

"We hated each other's guts," Jones recalled. Walker laughed in agreement. The two production assistants butted heads repeatedly at a March 17, 1995, Offspring show, after which Jones told his boss, Tim O'Connor, "I'm not working with that (expletive) ever again."

But a week later, the pair cleared the air over drinks and have been close ever since. Even when Walker headed the competition at Live Nation, a spinoff of Clear Channel, the trio took vacations together with their wives (Jones and Walker are married) and girlfriend (Attal has lived with C3 promoter Amy Corbin for four years).

On a recent Tuesday in the fourth-floor offices C3 shares with Capital Sports — whose top client is Lance Armstrong — the three were giddy and goofy, more like old college roommates than business partners with millions of dollars on the line. Hours earlier, ACL Fest tickets had gone on sale, and from the mood in Jones' office, the numbers were reason to rejoice.

"Take a look," Jones said to Walker, who gazed at Jones' computer screen, then gave an exaggerated jaw-dropping, eye-popping reaction. Minutes later, Attal emerged with a big smile. Lollapalooza tickets, which had gone on sale a couple of weeks earlier, also were selling much faster than last year, Attal said.

Jones says his mentor, O'Connor, once said that if Jones wasn't prepared to put half his money in a suitcase and throw it off the tallest building in town, he didn't have the stomach to be a concert promoter. Attal likens the job to playing blackjack 12 hours a day. Sometimes you lose big. But on that recent Tuesday, the three Charlies were on a roll.

Long popular in Europe, festivals are a hot trend in the U.S. concert industry, and C3 owns two of the four most prominent pop music festivals. California's Coachella and Tennessee's Bonnaroo are the other two.

"People are busy," Walker said of festivals' appeal. "To go to, say, five concerts in the summer, it takes a lot of time and effort and expense. But with a festival, fans can can block off three days and see tons of great bands."

A knock on festivals is that they can be at hot, uncomfortable, dusty fields where fans are treated like herds of cattle, a perception Walker said C3 is working hard to change.

"Our business philosophy is to overdeliver on customer service," said Walker, who oversees day-to-day operations at C3, while Attal concentrates on booking and Jones works on finding festival sites and working through the red tape to make concerts a reality. "We read every e-mail from fans," Walker said.

At last year's ACL Fest, organizers set up a tent and surveyed about 500 fans, who received a bottle of water after answering questions for about five minutes. One complaint that kept coming up was that fans hated hidden service charges. Three-day wristbands advertised at $90 to $115 often ended up costing $120 to $145, with various handling, service and mailing charges tacked on. The new policy for C3 Presents festivals is to add the cost of ticketing to the price. The expense might be the same as when service charges were tacked on, but now there are no surprises.

"They are very innovative in their approach to the business," Live Nation's South division President Bob Roux said of the three Charlies. "I look forward to working with them and competing with them." The two entities are partners in booking the House of Blues in Dallas, which opens next month, but in many cases, they go up against each other in buying shows.

Jones said the C3 Presents partnership is built on firm ground: mutual respect. "I've seen Charlie (Walker) go in and clean up companies," Jones said. "We had grown so fast and had gotten pretty maxed out, so when we looked at who could best streamline all the things we've got going on, it was Charlie Walker. No question."

Walker said he, along with the rest of the industry, marveled at the urban park festival model that Jones and Attal successfully used at the ACL Fest in Zilker Park and then in reviving Lollapalooza at Chicago's Grant Park. The touring Lollapalooza festival, which shook up a staid concert industry when it launched in 1991, was presumed dead in 2004, when it was canceled because of poor ticket sales. But Jones and his marketing team did research that reinforced the strength of the Lollapalooza brand. Capital Sports licensed the Lollapalooza name from the William Morris Agency and founder Perry Farrell, and boldly changed just about everything about the festival. It would no longer be a youth culture caravan, but a destination event held at Chicago's jewel of a park. The lineup, meanwhile, would appeal to a broader segment of the population. Basically, Lollapalooza became an edgier ACL Fest in downtown Chicago.

Attal said Lollapalooza lost an undisclosed sum of money in 2005, the first year the Austin company produced it, but said the loss is an investment that started to pay off last year, when more than 166,000 passed through the the park's gates.

Last year, Jones and Attal signed a five-year contract with the City of Chicago to produce Lollapalooza in Grant Park. The deal calls for C3 to donate $1 million a year to the Chicago Parkways Foundation. C3 has explored the possibility of expanding the ACL/ Lollapalooza model to other cities, but nothing has been firmed up yet.

But one new event on the horizon is the Big State Festival, C3's foray into the country music market. The festival, featuring Tim McGraw and a mixed supporting cast of Nashville acts and Texas singer-songwriters, looks to be the country counterpart to ACL Fest. It's slated for Oct. 13 and 14 at Texas World Speedway in College Station.

With the addition of Walker, who credits Live Nation's country promoter Brian O'Connell for teaching him the Nashville ropes, C3 plans to promote more country music than the old company did. The company has yet to book an entire national tour by a major act, a field Live Nation dominates, but C3 recently has expanded bookings in Kansas City, Mo.; St. Louis; Omaha, Neb.; Shreveport, La.; and Houston, among other cities.

"We don't limit ourselves based on geography," Walker said. "We only limit ourselves if we feel we would be taking on more than we can do well."

C3, which has 50 employees (compared with 3,000 at Live Nation), plans to find its own office space soon, separate from Capital Sports' athlete management division.

"We're just busting at the seams," Walker said, calling the impending move more of a space necessity than an attempt to distance the new company from "The House That Lance Built." With Fourth Floor Management, whose clients include Blues Traveler, Robert Earl Keen and Sparklehorse, also part of C3 Presents, there's just too much going on in that floor at the corner of Cesar Chavez Street and San Jacinto Boulevard.

Jones' office was indeed cramped, but happily so, the day ACL Fest tickets went on sale. It didn't help that Walker was practicing his chip shot among all the people coming in and out. One shot got away and ricocheted off the wall, and the three best friends with the dream jobs laughed in unison. The stuffy offices of William Morris it wasn't.

"We're in the entertainment business," Walker said. "It's supposed to be fun."

mcorcoran@statesman.com