For fans who plan weeks in advance to attend a band’s concert, for promoters whose job it is to arrange shows, and for the performers whose lives are centered around their tours, a canceled gig is a pain in the neck.
For the English band James, it was a literal pain in the neck that forced the group to cancel their sold-out May 27 show at the Vic, along with the rest of their U.S. tour.
Lead singer Tim Booth ruptured a disc in his neck during the first night of the six-week jaunt, and the injury got worse during the group’s next two performances. Booth wound up in the care of the San Francisco 49ers’ neck specialist, who advised him to stay on his back for a week and off the stage for a month.
The 1,400 or so fans who bought tickets for the Vic show can comfort themselves in knowing that James (touring to support their new album “Whiplash” ) is expected to come to Chicago as part of this summer’s Lollapalooza tour.
They can also get refunds.
Concert cancellations are a professional hazard. And given performers’ unpredictability, weather, illness and other factors, they are a not uncommon occurrence that offers a sometimes amusing insight into the haphazardness of the concert business.
While there’s never a good time for them, concert cancellations generally hit hardest the closer they come to a performance. “We’d prefer to have it happen before we’ve even announced” a show, says Andy Cirzan, vice president of concerts for Chicago promoter Jam Productions.
“The further you get into this before the plug is pulled, the worse it gets,” Cirzan adds, because of mounting costs for advertising, staff time, stagehands and catering. But he sympathizes with Booth’s plight. “I’m 40 years old, and if my back was thrown out, I wouldn’t even mow the lawn.”
The worst situation is a concert that goes bust while the audience is already in their seats. Rickie Lee Jones, for example, walked offstage during a 1992 performance at the Vic Theatre due to her irritation with the sound of “L” trains passing behind the building.
For bad timing, though, it’s hard to top Keith Sweat, who missed scheduled Chicago-area New Year’s Eve performances in both 1993 and 1995. The first of these was at the UIC Pavilion, where the announcement that Sweat wouldn’t appear came past midnight, following performances by several other acts. About half of a crowd of 8,500 fans eventually demanded refunds.
Weather also frequently figures into cancellation decisions. A blizzard prompted Jam to cancel a Nine Inch Nails show at Moline’s Mark of the Quad Cities out of concern for fans traveling to the venue from the surrounding countryside.
“We’d gotten to the point where we were loading in equipment,” before the decision was made not to continue, Cirzan recalls.
At the opposite end of the thermometer, heat wave-related power outages in July of 1995 derailed a Saturday night ska showcase at Metro. “The show was sold out in advance and the line was down to McDonald’s, and I still didn’t have any power,” club co-owner Joe Shanahan recalls. Despite the blackout, Shanahan managed to keep his club open the night before, when a band played an all-acoustic show by candlelight.
While blizzards, heat waves and temperamental artists provide an element of drama, concerts also fail for mundane reasons. A case of the flu prevented Victoria Williams from performing at Schubas along with her husband, Mark Olson, formerly of the Jayhawks, in the summer of 1995. Simple disinterest, in the form of poor ticket sales, caused an East Coast promoter to scrap a planned cross-country tour by John Hiatt, Steve Earle and others this past December. The Chicago performances, after initially being canceled, were rescheduled for a later date.
Such disruptions come with little or no warning for the people who put on concerts, and there’s little they can do about them. Schubas’ co-owner Mike Schuba recalls that while Williams expressed hope the previous day that a good night’s sleep would allow her to perform, she called the day of the show to tell him “in a scratchy, flu-like voice, `I just cannot get up out of bed.’ “
He had to scramble to find a replacement.
Julia Adams, co-owner of Lounge Ax, notes that her club avoids such situations because it always has more than one band scheduled to perform: “Hopefully someone brings folks in.”
When the New Zealand band Tom Cora and the X were refused admittance to the U.S. at the Canadian border a few days before their scheduled gig, for example, Tortoise, the opening act, played an extended set. As it happens, it was the highly regarded local band’s first live performance.
Cirzan regards the salvaged Hiatt/Earle shows as a bit miraculous, too. “I’ve never had a date cancel and have it come back and just play Chicago,” Cirzan says. “When a tour cancels, that’s pretty much the end of it.”
In this case, however, JAM and its co-sponsor, radio station WXRT, had an additional interest in the holiday-season shows, which were to serve as a toy collection center for children in Chicago-area hospitals. The promoters set about rescheduling the event as an autonomous two-night stand, calling in old favors from the performers, with whom they’ve had lengthy relationships.
The resurrected concerts, Cirzan says, gathered “massive amounts of toys. It had a happy ending.”
Most of the time, however, concert cancellations end unhappily for the promoters, who must absorb the financial loss that results. Though promoters don’t have to pay performers if a show is canceled, “we always get spanked in those situations one way or another,” says Cirzan.
In addition to refunding the Keith Sweat tickets it sold, UIC Pavilion also paid $2,000 out of its pocket to refund tickets sold by the promoter, who went bankrupt. “It’s part of our policy to preserve public faith,” says Toshiye Yokota, the Pavilion’s assistant director for programs.
The debacle also was consuming staff time long after the show ended. “I can’t remember how many hours in the days and weeks after that we spent dealing with the public and the press and our legal counsel,” says Pavilion associate director Shaune Sissak. “It just went on and on.”
Ray Quinn, part owner of the North Side club Martyrs’, recalls waiting to hold a sound check one night when the evening’s performer, Zairian soukous music pioneer Tabu Ley Rochereau, called. He was still at his Los Angeles home.
Six hours later, thanks to a last-minute replacement and free admission, Quinn had a crowd dancing to soukous music. Still, the evening fell far short of his expectations before Rochereau’s no-show.
“We had about half the show I thought we’d have,” Quinn says. “It could have made money and made everybody happy, but he just blew it off.”
Quinn estimates that between loss of revenue, advertising costs, equipment rental and the band’s deposit, the cancellation left him out $5,000. Shanahan puts his losses from the ska show at the same amount, while Schuba says a cancellation can cost him from 5 to 15 percent of his monthly business, depending on the night of the week and popularity of the performer.
“This is a pretty new business,” Quinn says of his club. “At this stage, we need all the shows to go well in a month to make it to the next month.”
To recover from the blow, Schuba says, “you buy less beer the next day. . . . You say, `Can I wait a few days before I pay this liquor bill?’ You cut corners where you can.” Those cuts, Schuba and Shanahan note, include their own paychecks.
Less tangible than the financial loss, but also important, is the loss of reputation. “In terms of our image with the public, I think it was the hardest hit we took,” says Sissak. She notes that the general public doesn’t distinguish between the show’s promoter and its location: “All they see is the Pavilion gave a bad show, it didn’t live up to what it promised. So we have to work to recover our reputation.”
“The names we have come through and play for us do give us notoriety” and keep people checking his club’s schedule, says Schuba. Williams “never did come back. It’s one less feather in our cap.”
Both Quinn and Sissak say they’ve changed the way they do business as a result of their experiences. “I will definitely never send a deposit to anyone that’s not with a reputable agency,” says Quinn, who booked Rochereau directly. The UIC Pavilion, Sissak says, now requires a letter of credit covering the venue’s rent and expense in full.
Otherwise, there are few steps available to guard against unexpected events. It’s possible to purchase insurance against show cancellations, but according to Cirzan, it’s cost-prohibitive for small events. Nor do the financial realities of the concert business allow for setting money aside for such contingencies.
Cirzan also observes that promoters can’t even rule out booking artists with whom they’ve previously had a bad experience: “If we stopped working with artists just because they’re difficult, our concert load would halve itself.”
Adams agrees, noting that the local quartet Sea and Cake canceled shows three consecutive times for reasons ranging from illness to the death of a band member’s mother. Following that stretch of bad luck, though, “they’ve always come back and played.”
The only recourse when a concert goes bad, Adams says, is to “deal with it and not get too upset about it. . . . If you want a job where you’ll know what’s going to happen, you don’t want to be in this business.”
