To be an impresario takes guts. You are a fan sometimes rapid fan and need to find a way to turn a profit. In today's touring circuit it's Tom Waits warmed over covered in corporate sponsors in a sea of digital music that has been forces into peoples ears do the last two decades.
My guest today was a chance taker before full interconnection. He came up when college universities had resources to fund the arts and the brainchild of the touring circuit began.
My guest is a passionate music lover. He leans Rock and rolls with reggae and Soul to sooth the inner angst of relationships young and old. Springsteen, Mussina, Zappa, Leon Russell, Willie Nelson John McLaughlin, Kenny Gradney.
Some were Jersey natives and others were barnstorming the country when hotbeds of regional radio and regional music created an elasticity within people ears. Broader palates in Lawerenceville, and Kean College and Caldwell College.
My guest saw opportunity and inner faith and wisdom and a young age and invested in the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ. A smut house by day in the buccholic city the same as the Tower Theatre in Upper Darby, and The Stanley Theatre and the old Uptown Theatre in Chicago.
These vaudeville houses had a warm cozy feel where mushroom addled audiences listened to my guest introduce Jorma Kaukonen, little feat, hot tuna, the burrito brothers Vassar Clements, Billy Cobham and Steve Miller.
In the early eighties my guest became the go to impresario and the newly Christened Brendan Byrne Arena where huge bombs from Phil Lesh tested the structural integrity of a building that had great acoustics prior and after MIDI- Technology.
One of another kind John Scher welcome to the JFS