XL Cover Story: An unlikely sage of the concert stage
Charles Attal went from the flying by the seat of his pants to soaring among the nation's top promoters
By Michael CorcoranApril 29, 2004
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It's the phone call every promoter dreads: an agent on the other end of the line, stammering, apologizing and then basically snatching away $25,000 in the course of a minute. "They canceled!" Charles Attal yells to the next room.
On April 14, however, the band decided to begin its tour in May, so the April 24 and 25 dates at Stubb's were scrubbed. That's 4,000 refunds.
"If that happened five years ago I would've put my fist through the wall," says Attal. "I'd be down at the liquor store buying the biggest bottle of booze they had. But I've learned to roll with the punches. The agent will make it up to us. The band will make it up to us. It all balances out in the end."
Such is the roller coaster ride of the concert promotion business. Tim O'Connor of Direct Events has said that anyone who isn't ready to put all their money in a suitcase and throw it off the tallest building in town isn't cut out for the promoter's life. Attal likens the job to playing blackjack 12 hours a day.
But if that's the case, this 36-year-old native Austinite of Lebanese descent has been beating the house. He's not only a partner in the instantly successful Austin City Limits Music Festival, which is expected to bring more than 150,000 fans to Zilker Park Sept. 17-19, but also the king of clubs, booking Stubb's, which he co-owns, the Parish and La Zona Rosa (in conjunction with O'Connor), as well as Trees and the Gypsy Tea Room in Dallas. The next frontier is Houston, where Attal has been talking to the Messina Group about partnering up on shows.
"Charles has so much flexibility with all his various venues," says William Morris agent Kirk Sommer. "If you've got a baby act, he's got a 300-capacity club (Stubb's indoors). But he can also put you in a 1,200-capacity room, a 2,000-seater or even bigger than that." Attal has become a one-stop shop for agents booking Texas shows, especially since expanding to Dallas three years ago. Getting an act from New Orleans to Oklahoma has never been so painless.
According to Pollstar magazine figures for 2003, Charles Attal Management -- he kept the name incorporated during a brief stint managing the Damnations -- was the No. 24 top grossing promoter in the country, with ticket sales of $7.43 million. In the total number of shows booked -- more than 550 -- Attal is in the Top 5.
Tossing a copy of Pollstar magazine on the desk of his office in a nondescript East Austin warehouse (the letters on the front door say "Bruce Pie Co."), Attal has to laugh at his status as a top concert promoter. Just eight years ago, when Stubb's hosted the platinum-selling Fugees at SXSW, Attal thought the name was pronounced "Fudgies."
He was beyond green. He probably thought a contract rider was a guy on a bike who delivered it.
To see Attal work the agents on a recent afternoon -- "What are you smoking?" he asks one after hearing a high asking price -- is to marvel at just how comfortable this former rare book auctioneer (his father is noted antique appraiser Lucky Attal) has grown in the promoter role.
But not everyone has been cheering Attal's ascent. "It's obvious that he's out to be some big music mogul," says Graham Williams, who books and manages rival club Emo's. "I was booking shows my senior year in high school. Attal was probably trying to decide which fraternity to pledge to when he was a senior." Williams says Attal is so aggressive in booking his venues that "he'll steal an act from Emo's, even though he knows he'll lose money."
That's a charge Attal calls ridiculous. As for his college frat life, Attal says "that has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm doing now."
A guitarist in the dreadful punk rock band Clown Meat, Attal was drafted as Stubb's booker in 1995 when a group of friends laid plans for the barbecue joint/concert amphitheater. "They figured since I was in a band, I knew the music business," Attal says.
When Stubb's officially opened a year after the SXSW Fugees show, Attal found that national acts were skeptical of playing an unproven venue. "I wanted to book Cheap Trick and they said, 'We're not playing some barbecue joint,' " Attal recalls. "I flew to New York to plead my case and the agent finally said, 'OK, but if you blow this one, you'll never get another show from us.' " Almost 2,000 people showed up to see Cheap Trick and the band declared the show their best gig of the year. Stubb's was on the map.
But Attal was in such a rush to establish his venue, he overbid for almost every show that first season and lost money repeatedly. "Every other club owner in town hated me," Attal says. "They said I was causing a bidding war and driving up prices. Now I realize that they were absolutely right, but at the time I just had to have every big show. If I lost a concert (to another promoter) I'd take it personally."
Such conceit almost sank Stubb's in its second year when Attal paid too much for a George Clinton show and lost almost $15,000. "I didn't know how close we were to closing," says Attal, who took tickets and ran sound to save money. "My partners told me afterward, when things got back on track."
Eventually Attal earned the respect of top agents. "Wolfie gets it," says Sommer, using the nickname adopted by agents when word got out Attal's real first name is Wolfred. "He understands what we need and he delivers every time." Sommer recalls the time he called Attal at home at 10 p.m. because a client playing Stubb's that night needed a DVD player for its act. "Charles unplugged his own DVD and took it down to the club. I mean, he bitched every minute of the way, but he and his staff always do what needs to be done."
"I was just (messing) with you, man," Attal says to Smith's agent. "It's the only way I can get you to return my calls."
Having agents promptly calling him back has not been much of a problem in recent years, but Attal found that he had to practically start all over again when he tried to break into the Dallas market in 2001. "We do more urban shows in Dallas than anybody else," Attal says, "but the first one was tough." Attal had booked Lucy Pearl, featuring members of Tony! Toni! Tone!, at the Gypsy Tea Room and two days before the show they had sold exactly one ticket. "The big urban radio station didn't know who we were. They wouldn't even announce the show or give away free tickets." Attal and company kept hammering away at the station and finally convinced them that Charles Attal Management was legit. The station announced the show and it sold out in two days.
After his first-year fumbles, Attal has learned some tricks of the trade, such as papering the house when a show is tanking. Last year, a David Lee Roth show that needed to sell 1,500 tickets to break even had sold less than 600 a day before showtime, so Corbin and a group of friends went all over town, giving away free tickets at hair salons, ice cream shops, record stores and all the rock radio stations. When more than 1,000 freebies were redeemed, the bar did its best non-SXSW business of the year and the show, a potential $10,000 loser, ended up breaking even.
"The stress of the concert business is unbelievable," Attal says. And potentially dangerous, as he found out four years ago when he collapsed in his Los Angeles hotel room while on an agent-courting trip. When he returned home and described his symptoms to his mother, she took him to the hospital right away. He ended up spending five days in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer. He'd lost a third of his blood.
"That was my wake-up call," says Attal, who's learned to lean heavily on Corbin who, in the past year, has become his live-in girlfriend. ("I'm the boss at the office," he says. "She's the boss at home.") Corbin started working for him five years ago out of a spare bedroom in a house in Travis Heights; today they rule over a budding concert empire that includes booking one of the Top 5 music festivals of the country.
"I didn't even know I was going to be booking the ACL Fest until the day of the first press conference (in April 2002)," Attal says. "I had shared an office with Charlie Jones and we'd become friends," he says of the Capital Sports & Entertainment concert division head. "After the press conference he said, 'Well, what do you think? Do you want to book this thing?' "
Where the lead time for booking the ACL Fest is currently 10 months before the event, Attal booked it all in two months the inaugural year. "I called in every favor I had," he says. "Being aligned with the TV show helped. But, still, no one really knew what to expect back in May 2002."
The concert industry was still reeling from the effects of 9/11, with ticket sales down 20 percent across the board, Attal says. But the first ACL Fest was an unqualified success. The break-even point was 30,000 fans each day; 42,000 showed up the first day and about 35,000 the next.
On the first day, the fest was too successful. Long waits for shuttle buses, wristbands and concessions had hundreds of fans fuming. But by the end of that first fest, almost everyone agreed that a new Austin live music tradition had been born.
There was a moment during that first ACL Fest when it all sank in for Attal. He was standing with his parents at the side of the stage during Robert Randolph's scorching set on the final night. Attal had been telling everyone they just had to see this great pedal steel guitarist and Randolph had come even better than advertised. A pre-teen girl, moved by the music, danced with abandon behind the drum riser and the level of intensity just kept getting higher and higher.
Lucky Attal surveyed the scene and started to say something to his son, but instead just took a deep breath and gestured out to the ecstatic crowd, which stretched out as far as you could see from the stage. "You did this," Lucky Attal seemed to want to say, but, seeing the look of satisfaction on his son's face, he didn't have to.
mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3652
