‘I was very lucky’
Danny Zelisko looks back on 45 years as a concert promoter in Phoenix
Danny Zelisko was 19 when he booked a show by jazz-rock legends Mahavishnu Orchestra at Tucson Music Hall. ● A few weeks later, he brought Herbie Hancock to Symphony Hall in Phoenix. ● It was June 1974 and Zelisko had borrowed 11 grand to launch his career as a concert promoter. ● It wasn’t long before he’d lost his shirt. ● As Zelisko recalls, “My dad was an electrician. So when he gave me six grand, it was a big deal for him when you consider he was making 300 bucks a week at the time. And then my friend’s dad gave me five grand. So I had 11. I did two shows in June. They both lost money. Next was Brian Auger with Jerry Riopelle in Phoenix. That lost money, too, and that was it. I was out.”
Today, as he celebrates 45 years in a business that’s afforded him a pretty sweet life doing what he loves and hanging with the rock stars he admires, Zelisko can afford to look back on that bumpy start as just another cost of doing business.
“Doing three shows right out of the box, your first three shows, and you only lost 11 grand?” he says, shrugging it off with a laugh in the kitchen of the luxurious Paradise Valley home he shares with his wife of 19 years, Leslie. “That’s pretty (expletive) good the way I look at it today.”
It all began with the Beatles
Zelisko was 8 the day he heard the song that changed his life.
“I heard the Beatles at a record store one day,” he says. “Somebody played ‘Please Please Me’ and it blew my mind. I’d never heard anything like it. And nobody knew who they were at the time.”
Soon, Zelisko was spreading the gospel of the Beatles everywhere he went.
“I remember telling everyone I knew to listen to this song,” he says. “I’d bring them to my basement or wherever we had our turntable, a cheap little unit. And I would play the song for them and almost everybody liked it. This went on all of 1963. And then in 1964, of course, ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ happened. And that was that.”
His takeaway from that experience, he says, was “that great indescribable feeling of hearing something for the first time and knowing you’re the only one that knows about it in your little group of people, and you play it for them. Suddenly, you’re validated when they become big.”
That’s part of what appealed to him about the music business.
“Even though I didn’t really realize music was a business at the time,” he says, “there was a light that shined for me and told me, ‘You can do this, you have a good ear, you like good music, you can tell if something is going to be a hit or not.’”
By the end of grade school, he was playing in a band.
“I was the singer, believe it or not,” he says. “My friend Mitch was the drummer and sometimes we would switch and I’d play drums and he would sing. But when we got in a battle of the bands in freshman year of high school, I realized that we weren’t that good. The guys that played against us were a three piece. And this guy, he had super long hair and a Fender Stratocaster, he played ‘Crossroads’ just like Eric Clapton and he wiped the floor with us.”
At that point, he decided he was better suited to a life of watching other people play.
“I went to a lot of shows in high school,” he says. “We would go to every show. I knew a guy at the record store who I could buy tickets from without waiting in line, which made me very popular around my friends.”
By then, he was obsessed with music.
KDKB rocked Arizona — and Zelisko
Zelisko got his first taste of what Arizona had to offer over Easter break his senior year of high school on a trip.
“There was this fantastic radio station called KDKB,” he recalls. “It was like ‘WKRP,’ only without the script. And there was no Loni Anderson. But they were wonderful people. And they played the best mix of music. Everything you’d want to hear and everything you didn’t know.”
After finishing high school back home in Chicago, he eventually moved to Phoenix.
“I got back out here in ‘73,” he says. “And I started becoming known around town. I met the radio station people. I met the Celebrity Theatre people. But I had no money. Nothing to hang my hat on. I was nobody. That’s how everybody is when you’re 17 and starting out.”
He hadn’t been in Phoenix for a full year when he booked the Mahavishnu show.
“And I hired this new group out of San Francisco called Journey to open without telling Mahavishnu management,” he says. “But they found out and called me up, the manager. He goes ‘Is this your first show?’ I’m going ‘Why? Does it show?’ He goes ‘I heard you booked Journey to open for us.’ ‘Yeah, pretty cool, huh?’ ‘No. Fire them.’ ‘What? Fire Journey?’ So that wasn’t very cool. It would’ve been their first play outside San Francisco.”
Zelisko recalls Herbie Hancock’s initial reaction when he realized he was dealing with a kid.
“When I met Herbie, I had an equipment truck,” he says. “And my truck was blocking them getting into the loading dock. They said, ‘Hey, kid, where’s the promoter?’ I said, ‘I’ll go get him.’ And I got out of the truck and shook their hands.”
After losing the rest of his money on the Auger show, he had to find a job to pay his bills.
“One major thing I learned was when you’re setting up a business, make sure you have some money for your own bills. I had nothing to lay back on.” Alice Cooper speaks as Zelisko looks on at the Tucson Convention Center in 2011 at a benefit in the wake of the shooting that left six dead and 13 injured, including Gabby Giffords.
COURTESY OF ENSCHWAGER PHOTOGRAPHY
The following year, he got a call from Everett Hetzel, who owned a waterbed store and was looking to set up a concert for one of Zelisko’s guitar heroes.
“He calls me up and he says, ‘Do you want to do Jeff Beck and Mahavishnu Orchestra?’ I go ‘Yeah, but I got no dough.’”
So Hetzel said he’d front the money for the show.
“They got $4,000 each,” Zelisko says. “And we did the Convention Center, not Symphony Hall, where it should have played. But it was still Jeff Beck, and he was on the album ‘Blow by Blow.’ We didn’t do well. It lost money. I think I got paid 500 bucks for my work. But I got a job selling waterbeds out of it.”
It wasn’t just a steady paycheck. It was somewhere he could set up shop.
“The guy who owned the store said, ‘Look, you must need to make phone calls. I’ll give you a job. I’ll pay you whatever an hour. You’ll make commissions. And you can use the phone when you’re not selling somebody a bed.’” I actually started making a pretty good living for 20, 21 years old, by working in this waterbed store. And I was able to call everybody and maintain connections.”
Streisand and the filming of ‘A Star Is Born’
In 1976, he got a phone call from Bill Graham’s people asking if he’d like to help out with a concert at ASU’s Sun Devil Stadium for the filming of “A Star is Born.”
“They were gonna do this giant stadium concert and they needed to draw enough people for Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s big musical scenes. So they got Peter Frampton, Santana, Graham Central Station, Montrose and the L.A. Jets, whoever they were. I was Bill Graham and Kris Kristofferson’s guy for a week and a half, got paid great, ate great. Everything was great, trust me. It was the ’70s. So everything was happening. It was an eye-opening experience for me.”
That same year, Linda Thompson at KDKB asked Zelisko if was familiar with a Tempe club called Dooley’s that had opened just a few weeks earlier.
“So I went over there, fell in love with the place and got an appointment for a meeting,” he says. “I’d just turned 22 and I was the advertising agent and booker for Dooley’s just like that. And now I’m somebody. I can book shows. I’ve got a venue. I’ve got money behind me. And I tried to fill the room as many nights as I could for them so they cold sell booze.”
A few months into his new job, Zelisko says, “The owner calls me in and he goes ‘D Boy’ – that’s what he called me – ‘We don’t want to be at risk for these shows. These people are crazy. You’re crazy. Everyone’s crazy. Let us run our business and you book the bands.”
The owner fronted him the money for his first show – Grover Washington Jr. in January of ‘78.
“And it sold out two shows, which I knew it would,” Zelisko says. “I made the most I’d ever made at that time, almost five grand. In 1978. On two shows. And off I went. I gave them back their money and never asked them for money again.”
The birth of Evening Star Productions
By that point, he was booking shows as Evening Star Productions. It wasn’t long before his company had developed the kind of track record it takes to get things moving in this business.
“From there, those years started rattling off,” he says. “I established a name for myself. Dooley’s was my room. And it remained my room until about 1995.”
By 1980, he was doing well enough to try a bigger room.
“The first arena show I booked without anyone’s help or someone saying ‘Come on in and be the local guy’ was Bob Seger,” he says. “I did him at the Coliseum, 1980. Sold it out.”
The night of the concert, Seger canceled.
“He’d stayed up partying for a couple nights and he was in Phoenix where the air’s extremely dry,” Zelisko says. “And he smokes like a fiend. So he goes, ‘I’m not singing tonight.’ I was really upset. I would have made a lot of money that night, but I ended up making more money, because he says, ‘How long did it take to sell out?’ I said ‘Just however fast we could sell the tickets. There were gone in one day.’ He goes, ‘All right. We’ll do two shows.’ And we sold out two shows. So now I’m a player.”
By 1990, Evening Star was booking shows at Desert Sky Pavilion, one more option in Zelisko’s growing menu of venues to fill.
That same year, Charlie Levy joined the team, a 19-year-old intern whose first job was acting as a runner for the Paul McCartney concert at ASU Sun Devil Stadium.
Now a concert promoter at Stateside Presents who owns three downtown venues, Levy says he learned “so much” about the business in the few years he spent working for Zelisko.
“And I had such amazing experiences,” he says. “I remember the time Jon Bon Jovi stopped by on his cross-country motorcycle trip to say hi to Danny and I was working the front desk. That was, like, a normal day. Or going to Danny’s office and him being like ‘Sit down. Do you know who King Crimson is?’ I’d be like ‘No.’ And he’d say, ‘Listen to this record.’ So all afternoon, I’d be just listening to King Crimson in his office.” Those were different times, he says. “There weren’t large corporations and big businesses doing concert promotions. There were independent promoters throughout the country that owned certain areas. Bill Graham had Northern California and the San Francisco area. Pace Concerts had Texas. And Danny Zelisko owned the Southwest. He was the Don Corleone of Arizona.”
Times were changing by 2001, when Zelisko decided to sell his company to SFX, which was purchased by radio broadcaster Clear Channel Communications and then spun off into yet another company, Live Nation, in 2005.
“I lasted five years with Live Nation,” Zelisko says. “And that was enough. For both of us. By then, you had a team of people in Los Angeles buying a lot of the tours that were going into these amphitheaters. So by this time, I’m no longer in touch with each agent for each group and buying my own shows for my own markets. I’m basically an order taker. I’m a checkout boy at the grocery store.”
He left Live Nation in February 2011, on Valentines Day.
At the time, he says, “I didn’t know if I was going to continue this, to be honest. But then Jackson Browne and Alice (Cooper) wanted me to help them with this benefit after that tragic shooting in January 2011 in Tucson.”
The Giffords shooting inspires a benefit show
That benefit for the freshly established Fund for Civility, Respect, and Understanding was held at the Tucson Arena on March 10 in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that left six people dead.
“I wasn’t prepared to do anything,” Zelisko says. “At Live Nation. I had telephones, checkbooks, employees, staff, an office, all that. Suddenly, I had nothing. I was starting from scratch, which was really hard to do. And I didn’t know if I wanted to do that. But all of a sudden, here was this show. We had less than a month to put that together. And this is without my team. I had no team.”
He didn’t even have a name for his one-man operation. That was Jackson Browne manager Cree Miller’s doing.
“Cree called me up and she goes ‘What name do you want me to put on the poster?’ I said, ‘I don’t have a name.’ She goes, ‘I’m putting Danny Zelisko Presents. You come up with something better before I print it, tell me and I’ll put that on.’ There really wasn’t time to think about anything but taking care of the show. And I was happy that it went so well. It was a gas to do and have all those great people under one roof for a few days all together. It was magic. And I knew that I would miss it if I didn’t do this anymore. So that’s what kept me doing it.”
By 2012, he’d secured the accounts for a Vegas casino and Talking Stick Resort. The State Fair brought him on to do their concerts, which he’d done since 1980. He was booking lots of shows at the Celebrity.
“And off we went,” he says. Today, he’s still adapting to the new realities, booking 125 concerts a year by the artists he loves in any room that seems like it would work, from here to New York City.
Having worked with Zelisko for 20 year as the owner of the Celebrity Theatre, Rich Hazelwood has seen firsthand the work Zelisko has invested in building and nurturing relationships with the artists he promotes.
“I think he’s, by far the strongest promoter,” Hazelwood says.
“And part of that is the fact that he’s built relationships with these bands for the past 30 years, 40 years. They know him and he knows them. He not long ago flew to Chicago to one of the band’s birthday parties. I can’t even tell you who it was, but Danny does those kinds of things that I don’t think anybody else does. Building that relationship is his is deal.”
Alice Cooper is one of those artists Zelisko has gotten to know over the years.
“It’s hard for me to give a quote about Danny ‘cause he’s one of my best friends,” Cooper says. “He’s one of the best promoters in the country and certainly the best (golf ) sand player I know. He cares as much about the music as any of the bands that are playing for him. That’s rare.”
At 64, Zelisko is still very much connected to that 8-year-old who turned his friends on to the Beatles in Chicago.
And that 8-year-old’s mind would be blown if he knew he’d one day work with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney.
“Music just happened to be the thing that turned me on,” Zelisko says.
“I was very lucky to have heard it all the way I did and have it work out like it has. You know, it’s one thing to really like music. It’s another thing to get involved. It’s a crazy wild dance, the music business. And I didn’t know that at the time. Had I known, I probably would’ve jumped into it even harder and faster.”