Interview with Rick Kinney
Rick Kinney is the owner of Even Keel Event Productions LLC. His love for playing music from an early age culminated into a quest to have his own large standing room music hall and put on the type of shows that he traveled all over the Midwest to hear.
When we talked, he had just finished the deal on $5 million in funding to renovate the Clyde Theatre in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and will be starting construction any day.
RW: Could you tell us about how you got started playing music, and how it led to the restoring of the Clyde Theatre?
RK: I grew up in New Haven, right outside of Fort Wayne. We had moved out from Los Angeles when I was five years old. I was actually born in Hollywood, believe it or not. I started playing drums when I was seven and started playing gigs when I was thirteen, and through that I started promoting our band here in Fort Wayne. We would trade shows with other bands. We would promote bands from Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, and we would play shows for them. It was a way for us to get exposure in their market, kind of a trade system. From that I learned how to promote shows in Fort Wayne and about live music in general. I ended up touring with Moser Woods, which is the band I still play in today, in fact, I just got done with a rehearsal. I’m still doing that.
I’ve always been promoting shows because I’m a musician. It started out as trying to get our bands on other bills with other artists. When I was 13 years old, I got ahold of my friend’s parents’ copying machine and we put fliers on a sheet, made as many copies as we could, and cut them apart with scissors, and then went to carnivals and festivals to pass out fliers to our shows. That’s how I became a promoter, that was the beginning of it. Street level promotion at its finest, literally walk up to anybody who had two legs and say “Come hear us play.” That’s how I started promoting, then that turned into me getting our band into other markets like Indianapolis.
When I was 17 we started doing show trades with other bands, so we would bring them from Chicago to Fort Wayne. We would promote these shows really hard on co-bills, and in turn they would promote shows for us in all these other markets. Then we’d go play shows with them, we’d gain fans in these other markets, that was the trade thing that we’d do. That led to promoting even bigger shows. I realized that I had a lot of experience in different facets of the industry. I still promote shows for Moser Woods in Fort Wayne. It’s just a thing I do for fun, but we do still manage make a little bit of money from it.
I started wanting to go to more concerts and realized that a lot of the bands that I wanted to see didn’t play in Fort Wayne. They played in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, St. Louis. When we got old enough to drive, my friend and I would pack up my car and we’d go to Chicago or whatever city where the bands were playing that we wanted to see. I think the reason that they were there and not in Fort Wayne was because we didn’t have the right venue. Those other cities had big old theaters with the seats removed, that had been turned into 1500 capacity concert halls. I still to this day drive out of town to see concerts in other cities. I’ve been to hundreds of concerts—national, local, regional, all over the Midwest including Fort Wayne. The reason I travel all over the Midwest isn’t because I want to drive three hours, it’s because the acts that I want to see don’t come to Fort Wayne. One of the reasons why that is we don’t have the right size venue. We don’t have a standing room venue in Fort Wayne with the right capacity. I’ll get back to why that’s going to change in a minute.
The other side of what I do is audio engineering. I went to The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, Ohio when I was 20 years old, and it was a phenomenal experience. There are people who went on from there to make huge Grammy Award-wining albums. It’s unbelievable. I graduated in 2001, and started working in some recording studios in Fort Wayne, and then some small clubs as a sound engineer. Then I got a job with Markey’s Audiovisual, worked for them full time for about 8 years, and ended up traveling all over the United States doing everything including rigging, lighting, driving a truck, someone who maintaining equipment, and working a lot of shows.
Around 2009 or so I quit my full time job there and started working freelance, as an audio engineer, rigging engineer, lighting engineer, ended up getting into management and tour production, and tour management, and at the same time kept promoting shows here in Fort Wayne. I figured out that I needed to do something with all the different skill sets and turn it into something that would actually be profitable. I was promoting all these shows in Fort Wayne with bands from out of town, it seemed like everyone was having a good time, but I was putting all the energy into it and really wasn't making a lot of money. The clubs were making money, the artists were making money, everybody was having a good time, but I wasn’t reaping a whole lot of rewards.
At that point I decided to step it up a little bit and try to find my own venue and fulfill my dream of giving Fort Wayne, Indiana that big standing room concert hall. I started looking around and realized that there weren’t a whole lot of venues that were empty, and so I decided I would just rent a venue myself and see if I could sell tickets in order to test the market. I rented the Foellinger Theatre in 2010, and hosted a big classic rock concert, teamed up with the local rock radio station WXKE Rock 104 and Whatzup magazine. I promoted it pretty hard at street level and handed out over 5,000 fliers with my little street team and sold a lot of tickets. The company that was doing the catering there made a ton of money, the venue made a ton of money, the artists made money, I made a little bit of money but didn’t hardly get paid for my time. So I realized that I either had to sell more tickets or get my own venue.
The next year I did same thing, and sold twice as many tickets and everybody made a lot more money, but me. I realized that I had to own the refreshments, the venue, the production, and wanted to put the whole thing together myself. I kept thinking that what we needed in Fort Wayne was a large 2000 capacity standing hall.
Somebody was giving away a free grand piano on Craigslist. I drove up to Kendallville, Indiana to pick it up and had it professionally moved into my house, then I asked the guy who was moving it for me who could tune it, and he gave me a number of a guy named Larry Merriman. He came over and told me that the piano was too old to be retuned and needed to be restrung. Not only did he restring pianos, he also restored them. We became friends he decided to take me under his wing as his protogé. I started that in 2009 and worked with him through 2011 while I was searching for a venue. He asked me if I’d ever heard of the Clyde Theatre. I said “No” and he took me out but it didn’t look that great from the front. We drove around to the back, and when I saw that 48 feet tall roofline I said to myself “I know exactly what’s underneath that roof, and I know what should be happening with that building.”
That afternoon I looked up the tax information and who paid the last taxes on the building, the next day I did a walk through and they said they were asking $380,000 for it. It was during the winter, half the doors were broken, the windows were broken, the building was filled with pigeon poop and snow, and there was ice on the floor. I noticed that they were already behind on their taxes so I figured maybe there was a way I could get to the $180,000 that they owed as a tax bill. That was in 2010. I was in love with the building. I had to make that building mine somehow and turn it into that concert hall that I knew was supposed to be in Fort Wayne.
I started looking for ways to get the money to buy it, but I knew nobody was going to give me 180 grand for this old liability of a building. I had to figure out a way to maybe get the building for free. It was in tax sales for two years. There’s a program called the Allen County Community Development Corporation, and they take houses that have delinquent tax payments and put them on the auction block for people to purchase at a very low price, and if you can bring it up to code in 24 months, then you get to keep the property and you can live there. I thought that they might do the same thing and sell me a big, vacant theater for a dollar. I talked to them and they kept telling me “No.” They said, “We’re not in the business of taking the deeds to properties and then giving them away.” I just kept going there over, and over, and over, after 30 or 40 times they finally said, “Look, we’re NOT going to give this building to you. Why don’t you think of a fair price and come back to us.” A lightbulb went on and I thought, “All right, I think they’re going to actually do this.” I had to go figure out what a fair price was. I was thinking that the building was worth $180,000 the way it was, I just couldn’t get it.
So I slept on it that night, and when I woke up the next morning I decided that I would go back there and offer them $500. I had maybe $700 or $800 in my checking account from the money I’d made off the other shows, so I went down there that morning in my best suit and tie and said, “All right, I think $500 is a fair price, I just need to know how much it will cost for the administrative fee for the deed escrow. They laughed at me and said, “You’re just going to buy the building for $500?” I proceeded to explain every reason why I thought they should—how much it would cost the taxpayer in Allen County to pay for the demolition of that building, and how much it would cost to see it continue the destabilization of that area. The Clyde Theatre opened in 1951 as an 1800-seat movie theater. It was a mecca for entertainment and commerce at that time. In 1976 they split the theater down the middle and renamed it Quimby Twin Theatres, turning it basically into two 900-seat theaters. Then in 1993 it went completely vacant and that was because you saw the development of 10-screen movie theaters and they just couldn’t keep up with that. So ever since 1993 this massive theater stood vacant, and through time the parking lot surround it has gone into complete shambles. The other commercial spaces in the shopping center village have gone down. Nobody goes there, there’s no lighting at night, the electricity isn’t on, there are huge potholes the size of craters on the moon, the snow never gets plowed, there’s just a ton of problems. Some people would look at it as a liability, but I see it as an opportunity.
They said “OK, we’ll sell you the building for 500 bucks.” It cost me $500 plus $35 administrative cost in 2012.
RW: So, you went a little over your budget, but still did pretty well :-)
RK: I decided I would really stick my stake in Fort Wayne and raise the money necessary to make it happen. It ended up being over $5 million dollars to renovate the property.
I took a job at the Embassy Theatre in late summer of 2012 as Assistant Technical Director, and quickly turned into the full time Technical Director position, which gave me the opportunity to work with all these different touring acts, and understand what it took to make their show happen in their building, to understand how the box office works, the back and accounting work, how the promoters utilize the building, how much it costs to maintain the building, insure it, safety, HR personnel, everything you could imagine about managing a theater. I feel like throughout my life I was going to school to do this, and then I just had to go and do my residency somewhere, and I felt like I did that at the Embassy Theater.
Throughout my tenure at the Embassy, I developed this massive client and operation plan and investment packet to raise $5 million dollars in private funds for my private for-profit company. I didn’t want it to be a non-profit because I wanted to implement my vision without being bogged down by a restrictive Board of Directors or anything. I set out on the street and started selling shares of my company, and ended up going after some grants, and MSKTD & Assoc. architectural firm. We developed a really great plan for abating the building and being a commercial space. I worked with all the separate business owners at Quimby Village where the theater is located and got cooperation from everyone to turn over their interest in the 6-acre parking lot to me if I agreed to certain conditions. I’ve also raised the money to pay to have the lot redone. I won’t charge them the back pay for the asphalt. Moving forward they are going to pay a prorated share of the maintenance of the common area with insurance, lighting, and everything. We’ve been trying to get it done for 5 years. I just closed on that part about a week ago.
Meanwhile I’m just out there trying to figure out how to raise $5 million dollars and not lose control of it, or have somebody push me out and make it their own venue. I ended up raising $250,000 with a couple of different investors and a commitment from Three Rivers Federal Credit Union for $1.5 million, and then a soft commitment from the State of Indiana’s regional cities program regional development authority here in Northeast Indiana. I worked very hard to get support from the Fort Wayne city council, Allen County Council, and the Legacy Trust Committee. The Legacy Trust Committee and the Legacy Trust Finance Committee gave us $1 million, a loan that would be financed through increment tax dollars once we redevelop all this property. Even so, I was still about $1.5 million short on private funding. Everybody was pretty scared to invest in the project, because it seemed that a lot of people that have money don’t understand the entertainment industry. It’s a very conservative environment, both fiscally and politically.
Eventually I met Chuck and Lisa Surack. Chuck is the president and founder of Sweetwater Sound, Inc. in Fort Wayne, and they agreed to invest $1.5 million in the project, and made this dream come true, not only for myself, but for the neighborhoods there and the entire region. When they agreed to invest that money it locked in all the other sources, and so we finally had put together the $5 million of funding. It’s been a long time coming. Chuck and Lisa later bought out the other partners. Now it is just Chuck, Lisa, and myself who are doing this.
The architectural and construction blueprints are finalized. We hope construction will start a week from now. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Chuck and Lisa. I am go grateful that I found them, and so excited about being able to open the place up. I’ve also been working with Sweetwater to book concerts at the Sweetwater Pavilion, which is a 3700 capacity outdoor covered pavilion on the Sweetwater campus. I recently announced Rusted Root with special guest Earphorik. I have been working really hard to get some acts in there. My production company, Even Keel is going to manage both venues, the outdoor Sweetwater Pavilion, and the 2000 capacity Clyde Theatre. The Clyde will function as a large or small concert hall—it’s really scalable. We’ll be able to do private events, weddings, private parties, and some really cool events outside in the 6-acre parking lot connected with what’s going on inside. Chuck and Lisa bought the 25,000 square foot bowling alley in in the adjoining commercial space at Quimby Village. I am sure some really cool stuff will happen with that in the future, but in the meantime, we’re just focusing on getting the Clyde running, and talking with agents about getting shows booked. Everything else can be redeveloped later when the time comes along.
RW: Wow. It sounds like your life is not boring. What do you do with your spare time? Do you have any hobbies?
It’s such good fortune that Chuck is on board. He seems to me like the driving force behind the whole Fort Wayne renaissance. How are you affected by “the Sweetwater Difference” (or perhaps it should be called “the Chuck Surack Difference”)? Is their emphasis on “doing the right thing” for the customer being baked into the Clyde Theatre’s DNA? It must really be raising the bar—so different, I would imagine, from some of the owners you may have met in other venues who want to make money in the short term.
RK: You have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. I think Chuck’s really good at understanding things from other people’s perspective, and understanding how someone else feels. If you know how someone feels, and you actually care about how they feel, you’re going to do the right thing, you’re going to create a good experience. It’s really so simple—do the right thing—you’ll create an environment where people are happy. He’s got over 1,200 employees, he built it all from having one employee—himself in his VW van.
Our main goal at the Clyde Theater is to create a world-class venue, with everything from the sound and lighting to parking. When you walk in the door I want people to have an amazing experience, and to take that experience home with them as memories. We want the patrons to have the best experience possible, we also want the artists and all the crew members and production people to have a great experience, too. It comes from both sides. If the Artist is happy with their experience onstage, it’s actually going to transfer to the crowd they will have a good experience, and vice versa. If the crowd is having a great experience, then the Artist is going to feed off of that energy. It’s really about the details, crossing all your T’s and dotting all of your I’s, making sure that you're considerate of others. That’s what it really is—being considerate of other people. I feel extremely humbled, grateful, and blessed to have been able to earn Chuck and Lisa’s trust, and to have them as partners.
RW: You mentioned something that is key. Most companies pay lip service to customer service these days. They say they want the customer to be happy (but maybe not too happy), but they may be doing it just for the company’s benefit. Really caring about the customer’s happiness is rare, I think—not only so that they’re happy and will want to do business with you in the future, but because you really want them to be happy. Also, Sweetwater really respects their employees and want to do the right thing by them and have them be happy. It’s a privately held company, and Chuck could cash out at any time. It seems like he stays because he’s interested in providing opportunities for his employees, customers, and soon, concert goers at the Clyde.
RK: Caring about your customers that way is really cool, it transfers into success. Again, it’s about being considerate, and putting yourself in that person’s shoes. What can I do to make this person happy? How can I make them feel comfortable? I think it’s the difference between a company like Sweetwater and a place like In and Out Burger Pro Audio, where it’s like, “OK, here you go, have fun with that!” He’s got this amazing customer service team that will work with you until your studio is running perfectly, or until your guitar amp’s running perfectly. If they have to, they'll access your computer from Sweetwater and figure out why your program isn’t working. It’s absolutely phenomenal, mind-blowing.
I have looked up to Chuck ever since I graduated from The Recording Workshop 15 years ago and found out what he was doing in Fort Wayne. To think that I am able to actually be business partners with him is the biggest blessing, it’s really cool.
RW: Why didn’t you go to him sooner when you were looking for financing? I would think he’d be the first person on your list. Did you just think you weren’t ready for it? At what point did you decide the time was right?
RK: I was not prepared to take on a partner of Chuck and Lisa’s caliber. I had a lot of work to do. I wanted to have all my T’s crossed and I’s dotted. Honestly, I was having a lot of trouble raising the money. A lot of people go to wealthy people like Chuck and ask for money, I didn’t want to do that because I have so much respect for the guy. I needed his partnership and capital as a partner just as much as I need his mentoring, I had a long way to go before I was ready to get in touch with someone like him. It was important for me to earn it. I learned a lot. I know that he found out that I was having a lot of trouble, and we finally came together and he said, “OK, what is this project all about?”
RW: It sounds like you have such a wide range of skills and could do most everything yourself. What sort of staff positions will you have? Who will take care of social media? Who will you bring on first?
RK: I can honestly do every single one of the jobs that we’re planning to fill, but there are only 40 hours in a week, and 24 hours in a day, and I need help. I think I can find people who are better than me, get out of their way, and empower them. I’m going to hire a box office manager, a marketing and programming director, and a front of house and concessions manager, and then I’m going to do the company management and be the technical director and oversee the operation.
RW: And then you’ll hire other people as you need them for the rest of the crew.
RK: We’re going to have 20 to 30 part-time personnel that come in and work the stage and venue. Even if we have nine national shows a month, there’s no reason to have all those people sitting around in between.
RW: What have your 200 volunteers done? What other sort of community support are you getting?
RK: The volunteers who worked with me over the past five years have done things like clearing away the weeds outside the building and cleaning up trash and debris. Speaking of community support, I got a grant for $52,000 to remove asbestos from the building in 2013, and then they did a big remediation for animal feces. There were pigeon feces all over the building, and that stuff’s really toxic. The volunteers helped scrub the building to make it look good for investors. I’ve had volunteers help me fix the roof. I’ve had volunteers fix huge plumbing leaks and burst pipes. I’ve done a lot of it myself. People come out and shovel the sidewalk for other business owners there. I’ve spoken in front of at least ten different neighborhood associations in Fort Wayne, and all those folks really support this project on social media and word of mouth. I get a lot of support from Young Leaders of Northeast Indiana (YLNI). They’re a really, really strong force here in Fort Wayne, a bunch of leaders under the age of 40 that work hard to push initiatives that will make Fort Wayne a better place. They want to make it a tourist destination among other things.
RW: What else is going on?
RK: There’s a $300 million-dollar redevelopment happening at the General Electric Campus—1.2 million square feet of commercial buildings and over 30 acres of property, a big project with beautiful, historic, 19th and 20th century buildings. It’s going to be turned into retail, residential, and entertainment space. There’s the baseball diamond downtown that’s helping create some buzz, and the Riverfront development. I think Fort Wayne is a very safe place, and a good place to raise a family, and has a lower cost of living. It’s all making the community be a place where people want to live.
RW: You mentioned that you didn’t get a good payback from those concerts you organized before you got your facility. How is operating your own venue going to make it more profitable, so that you can keep the operation going and pay yourself for your efforts?
RK: We’ll be able to retain the profits from the concession sales, renting out the venue, and cash from ticket sales. We’re the promoters for some of these shows, so we’ll be able to keep those fees as well.
RW: What’s the advantage of a standing facility? Is it mostly a matter of fitting more people in, or is it also a sign that people wouldn’t sit down for your kind of high-energy music, so why bother with chairs?
RK: Both of those. We can sell more tickets per square foot, and furthermore artists that play really loud, heavy, explosive music don’t typically choose to perform in very nice ornate theaters like the Embassy, because seats get broken, all of that nice plaster gets broken, and the venue kind of gets trashed. The Clyde has all concrete floors, a big wood dance floor that can get scrubbed down and sanitized after a show. People who go to a big rock show, even a country show, or electronic dance show don’t want to sit down in their seats, they want to get up and move around. In a high-energy show what a lot of artists really want is for the audience to be standing up with their fists in the air. It feeds their performance and might even make them play better.
RW: Are you concerned about hearing conservation, about the music being too loud? Would you consider surrounding the audience with speakers so that you don’t have to crank the mains up so high in the front? Would you consider having some sort of SPL measuring system to keep it from injuring the audience? To me that sounds like “doing the right thing”. Have you seen the sound system in Millennium Park in Chicago with 52 loudspeakers hung over the audience from a lattice so they don’t have to blast it from the front?
RK: I have seen that. It’s pretty neat. For this particular venue, we’re going to go with a very high-quality manufacturer and the newer systems that you can push a little harder giving you a little higher dB but the quality stays home and doesn’t distort. I think that distortion is almost worse than the high dB. There will be limiters built into the amplifiers that power the loudspeakers. I’m an audio engineer. Chuck’s an audio engineer. A lot of people who work at Sweetwater are audio engineers. I think there are probably more audio engineers per capital living here than anywhere else.
RW: It must be a dream-come-true to get to build a facility to your specifications. What level of quality are you trying to achieve with the lights and sound?
RK: We want to have a world-class venue with one of the best light and sound systems. When a national act is on tour, I’d like to have them walk into our building and not have to load all their production equipment off the truck, or even have them just show up and not to have to bring all that equipment at all. The stage is going to a width and depth that is standard for the largest national touring acts. There are specific sizes that a lot of set pieces are made out of. We’re going to have world-class dressing room space, and a very comfortable, intimate experience for the artist, so that when they show up it will feel like they are at home. My goal is to have the best equipment on the planet. That’s another advantage of being partners with Chuck and Sweetwater. I have a pretty good feeling that when we get to that point it’s going to help tremendously. Chuck does nothing but the best. Everything that he does is world class, and I expect nothing less for the Clyde Theatre.
RW: How many shows do you estimate you need to make a profit? Is the goal to have the fewest possible dark days?
RK: We want to maintain a work/life balance for the employees. If you have an event every night for a week straight, that is not a good balance. We would sometimes have events at the Embassy Theater where as Technical Director, I would show up at 7:00 in the morning and leave at 2:00 in the morning the next day. There is a very strong balance to be had at a venue, and if we get to the point where we can have it booked every night for a week, then we can have a large rotating staff, that’s fine, and that’s the goal, to end up with a venue that’s booked all the time, but I don’t want to grow too fast, or take off too big. I believe in taking incremental steps. I think it would be great to have a recording studio down the line and be able to record and release audio and video, so we could do something like Austin City Limits in Fort Wayne, but at the beginning it’s first things first. We’re going to start with incremental steps and grow into becoming a place where national touring acts always want to stop.
RW: So, you think with three to five shows a month you can be profitable.
RK: Yes, absolutely.
RW: There are a lot of big cities fairly close together in the Midwest. Do bands like to come through here and play?
RK: People love touring in the Midwest. We don’t have the oceans and mountains, but maybe audiences are more interested because they get bored. The audiences in the Midwest are generous, maybe a little more excited sometimes because we don’t have all the offerings like they do on the East and West coasts. Maybe we’re a little more eager, thankful, and appreciative of artists that come through and bring their awesome stage show and music. During our harder winters, people want to be indoors in concert halls listening to music. On the other hand, some bands don’t want to tour here where it might be snowing. In the winter, they’d rather get booked in the South. A city like Fort Wayne has a ton of musicians, a ton of talent, people in multiple bands, lots of good venues. The routing is very nice. From Fort Wayne, Indiana you’re about three hours from Chicago, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, Cleveland, Dayton, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Madison (4 hours), we’re right in the middle of the “Circle of Cities”. Interstate 69 goes straight from Indianapolis to Grand Rapids, I80 runs from Cleveland to Chicago. We’re positioned in a great place.
RW: What will you do for merchandise sales? Do you have a place set aside, will you take a cut?
RK: There will be a place in the main lobby. We will take a percentage, that’s standard, but we’re not going to gouge the musicians. We want to treat artists well. Chuck and I are both musicians.
RW: You’re such an easy person to interview. I open up the gate, and off you go. You must have told your story hundreds of times in the last five years from all those pitches, and now you’ve got the narrative clear in your mind, or maybe it’s just another sign of the kind of organized mind that could put all this together.
Best of luck with everything, and I’m looking forward to getting up there to catch one of your first shows. Thank you for sharing your remarkable story, and best of luck as you move through the construction phase. I’m looking forward to catching one of your early shows, and in the meantime, we’ll be up to the Sweetwater Pavilion to hear what you put together there.
RK: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.
©2017 Rick Kinney and Robert Willey
When we talked, he had just finished the deal on $5 million in funding to renovate the Clyde Theatre in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and will be starting construction any day.
RW: Could you tell us about how you got started playing music, and how it led to the restoring of the Clyde Theatre?
RK: I grew up in New Haven, right outside of Fort Wayne. We had moved out from Los Angeles when I was five years old. I was actually born in Hollywood, believe it or not. I started playing drums when I was seven and started playing gigs when I was thirteen, and through that I started promoting our band here in Fort Wayne. We would trade shows with other bands. We would promote bands from Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, and we would play shows for them. It was a way for us to get exposure in their market, kind of a trade system. From that I learned how to promote shows in Fort Wayne and about live music in general. I ended up touring with Moser Woods, which is the band I still play in today, in fact, I just got done with a rehearsal. I’m still doing that.
I’ve always been promoting shows because I’m a musician. It started out as trying to get our bands on other bills with other artists. When I was 13 years old, I got ahold of my friend’s parents’ copying machine and we put fliers on a sheet, made as many copies as we could, and cut them apart with scissors, and then went to carnivals and festivals to pass out fliers to our shows. That’s how I became a promoter, that was the beginning of it. Street level promotion at its finest, literally walk up to anybody who had two legs and say “Come hear us play.” That’s how I started promoting, then that turned into me getting our band into other markets like Indianapolis.
When I was 17 we started doing show trades with other bands, so we would bring them from Chicago to Fort Wayne. We would promote these shows really hard on co-bills, and in turn they would promote shows for us in all these other markets. Then we’d go play shows with them, we’d gain fans in these other markets, that was the trade thing that we’d do. That led to promoting even bigger shows. I realized that I had a lot of experience in different facets of the industry. I still promote shows for Moser Woods in Fort Wayne. It’s just a thing I do for fun, but we do still manage make a little bit of money from it.
I started wanting to go to more concerts and realized that a lot of the bands that I wanted to see didn’t play in Fort Wayne. They played in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, Indianapolis, St. Louis. When we got old enough to drive, my friend and I would pack up my car and we’d go to Chicago or whatever city where the bands were playing that we wanted to see. I think the reason that they were there and not in Fort Wayne was because we didn’t have the right venue. Those other cities had big old theaters with the seats removed, that had been turned into 1500 capacity concert halls. I still to this day drive out of town to see concerts in other cities. I’ve been to hundreds of concerts—national, local, regional, all over the Midwest including Fort Wayne. The reason I travel all over the Midwest isn’t because I want to drive three hours, it’s because the acts that I want to see don’t come to Fort Wayne. One of the reasons why that is we don’t have the right size venue. We don’t have a standing room venue in Fort Wayne with the right capacity. I’ll get back to why that’s going to change in a minute.
The other side of what I do is audio engineering. I went to The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, Ohio when I was 20 years old, and it was a phenomenal experience. There are people who went on from there to make huge Grammy Award-wining albums. It’s unbelievable. I graduated in 2001, and started working in some recording studios in Fort Wayne, and then some small clubs as a sound engineer. Then I got a job with Markey’s Audiovisual, worked for them full time for about 8 years, and ended up traveling all over the United States doing everything including rigging, lighting, driving a truck, someone who maintaining equipment, and working a lot of shows.
Around 2009 or so I quit my full time job there and started working freelance, as an audio engineer, rigging engineer, lighting engineer, ended up getting into management and tour production, and tour management, and at the same time kept promoting shows here in Fort Wayne. I figured out that I needed to do something with all the different skill sets and turn it into something that would actually be profitable. I was promoting all these shows in Fort Wayne with bands from out of town, it seemed like everyone was having a good time, but I was putting all the energy into it and really wasn't making a lot of money. The clubs were making money, the artists were making money, everybody was having a good time, but I wasn’t reaping a whole lot of rewards.
At that point I decided to step it up a little bit and try to find my own venue and fulfill my dream of giving Fort Wayne, Indiana that big standing room concert hall. I started looking around and realized that there weren’t a whole lot of venues that were empty, and so I decided I would just rent a venue myself and see if I could sell tickets in order to test the market. I rented the Foellinger Theatre in 2010, and hosted a big classic rock concert, teamed up with the local rock radio station WXKE Rock 104 and Whatzup magazine. I promoted it pretty hard at street level and handed out over 5,000 fliers with my little street team and sold a lot of tickets. The company that was doing the catering there made a ton of money, the venue made a ton of money, the artists made money, I made a little bit of money but didn’t hardly get paid for my time. So I realized that I either had to sell more tickets or get my own venue.
The next year I did same thing, and sold twice as many tickets and everybody made a lot more money, but me. I realized that I had to own the refreshments, the venue, the production, and wanted to put the whole thing together myself. I kept thinking that what we needed in Fort Wayne was a large 2000 capacity standing hall.
Somebody was giving away a free grand piano on Craigslist. I drove up to Kendallville, Indiana to pick it up and had it professionally moved into my house, then I asked the guy who was moving it for me who could tune it, and he gave me a number of a guy named Larry Merriman. He came over and told me that the piano was too old to be retuned and needed to be restrung. Not only did he restring pianos, he also restored them. We became friends he decided to take me under his wing as his protogé. I started that in 2009 and worked with him through 2011 while I was searching for a venue. He asked me if I’d ever heard of the Clyde Theatre. I said “No” and he took me out but it didn’t look that great from the front. We drove around to the back, and when I saw that 48 feet tall roofline I said to myself “I know exactly what’s underneath that roof, and I know what should be happening with that building.”
That afternoon I looked up the tax information and who paid the last taxes on the building, the next day I did a walk through and they said they were asking $380,000 for it. It was during the winter, half the doors were broken, the windows were broken, the building was filled with pigeon poop and snow, and there was ice on the floor. I noticed that they were already behind on their taxes so I figured maybe there was a way I could get to the $180,000 that they owed as a tax bill. That was in 2010. I was in love with the building. I had to make that building mine somehow and turn it into that concert hall that I knew was supposed to be in Fort Wayne.
I started looking for ways to get the money to buy it, but I knew nobody was going to give me 180 grand for this old liability of a building. I had to figure out a way to maybe get the building for free. It was in tax sales for two years. There’s a program called the Allen County Community Development Corporation, and they take houses that have delinquent tax payments and put them on the auction block for people to purchase at a very low price, and if you can bring it up to code in 24 months, then you get to keep the property and you can live there. I thought that they might do the same thing and sell me a big, vacant theater for a dollar. I talked to them and they kept telling me “No.” They said, “We’re not in the business of taking the deeds to properties and then giving them away.” I just kept going there over, and over, and over, after 30 or 40 times they finally said, “Look, we’re NOT going to give this building to you. Why don’t you think of a fair price and come back to us.” A lightbulb went on and I thought, “All right, I think they’re going to actually do this.” I had to go figure out what a fair price was. I was thinking that the building was worth $180,000 the way it was, I just couldn’t get it.
So I slept on it that night, and when I woke up the next morning I decided that I would go back there and offer them $500. I had maybe $700 or $800 in my checking account from the money I’d made off the other shows, so I went down there that morning in my best suit and tie and said, “All right, I think $500 is a fair price, I just need to know how much it will cost for the administrative fee for the deed escrow. They laughed at me and said, “You’re just going to buy the building for $500?” I proceeded to explain every reason why I thought they should—how much it would cost the taxpayer in Allen County to pay for the demolition of that building, and how much it would cost to see it continue the destabilization of that area. The Clyde Theatre opened in 1951 as an 1800-seat movie theater. It was a mecca for entertainment and commerce at that time. In 1976 they split the theater down the middle and renamed it Quimby Twin Theatres, turning it basically into two 900-seat theaters. Then in 1993 it went completely vacant and that was because you saw the development of 10-screen movie theaters and they just couldn’t keep up with that. So ever since 1993 this massive theater stood vacant, and through time the parking lot surround it has gone into complete shambles. The other commercial spaces in the shopping center village have gone down. Nobody goes there, there’s no lighting at night, the electricity isn’t on, there are huge potholes the size of craters on the moon, the snow never gets plowed, there’s just a ton of problems. Some people would look at it as a liability, but I see it as an opportunity.
They said “OK, we’ll sell you the building for 500 bucks.” It cost me $500 plus $35 administrative cost in 2012.
RW: So, you went a little over your budget, but still did pretty well :-)
RK: I decided I would really stick my stake in Fort Wayne and raise the money necessary to make it happen. It ended up being over $5 million dollars to renovate the property.
I took a job at the Embassy Theatre in late summer of 2012 as Assistant Technical Director, and quickly turned into the full time Technical Director position, which gave me the opportunity to work with all these different touring acts, and understand what it took to make their show happen in their building, to understand how the box office works, the back and accounting work, how the promoters utilize the building, how much it costs to maintain the building, insure it, safety, HR personnel, everything you could imagine about managing a theater. I feel like throughout my life I was going to school to do this, and then I just had to go and do my residency somewhere, and I felt like I did that at the Embassy Theater.
Throughout my tenure at the Embassy, I developed this massive client and operation plan and investment packet to raise $5 million dollars in private funds for my private for-profit company. I didn’t want it to be a non-profit because I wanted to implement my vision without being bogged down by a restrictive Board of Directors or anything. I set out on the street and started selling shares of my company, and ended up going after some grants, and MSKTD & Assoc. architectural firm. We developed a really great plan for abating the building and being a commercial space. I worked with all the separate business owners at Quimby Village where the theater is located and got cooperation from everyone to turn over their interest in the 6-acre parking lot to me if I agreed to certain conditions. I’ve also raised the money to pay to have the lot redone. I won’t charge them the back pay for the asphalt. Moving forward they are going to pay a prorated share of the maintenance of the common area with insurance, lighting, and everything. We’ve been trying to get it done for 5 years. I just closed on that part about a week ago.
Meanwhile I’m just out there trying to figure out how to raise $5 million dollars and not lose control of it, or have somebody push me out and make it their own venue. I ended up raising $250,000 with a couple of different investors and a commitment from Three Rivers Federal Credit Union for $1.5 million, and then a soft commitment from the State of Indiana’s regional cities program regional development authority here in Northeast Indiana. I worked very hard to get support from the Fort Wayne city council, Allen County Council, and the Legacy Trust Committee. The Legacy Trust Committee and the Legacy Trust Finance Committee gave us $1 million, a loan that would be financed through increment tax dollars once we redevelop all this property. Even so, I was still about $1.5 million short on private funding. Everybody was pretty scared to invest in the project, because it seemed that a lot of people that have money don’t understand the entertainment industry. It’s a very conservative environment, both fiscally and politically.
Eventually I met Chuck and Lisa Surack. Chuck is the president and founder of Sweetwater Sound, Inc. in Fort Wayne, and they agreed to invest $1.5 million in the project, and made this dream come true, not only for myself, but for the neighborhoods there and the entire region. When they agreed to invest that money it locked in all the other sources, and so we finally had put together the $5 million of funding. It’s been a long time coming. Chuck and Lisa later bought out the other partners. Now it is just Chuck, Lisa, and myself who are doing this.
The architectural and construction blueprints are finalized. We hope construction will start a week from now. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Chuck and Lisa. I am go grateful that I found them, and so excited about being able to open the place up. I’ve also been working with Sweetwater to book concerts at the Sweetwater Pavilion, which is a 3700 capacity outdoor covered pavilion on the Sweetwater campus. I recently announced Rusted Root with special guest Earphorik. I have been working really hard to get some acts in there. My production company, Even Keel is going to manage both venues, the outdoor Sweetwater Pavilion, and the 2000 capacity Clyde Theatre. The Clyde will function as a large or small concert hall—it’s really scalable. We’ll be able to do private events, weddings, private parties, and some really cool events outside in the 6-acre parking lot connected with what’s going on inside. Chuck and Lisa bought the 25,000 square foot bowling alley in in the adjoining commercial space at Quimby Village. I am sure some really cool stuff will happen with that in the future, but in the meantime, we’re just focusing on getting the Clyde running, and talking with agents about getting shows booked. Everything else can be redeveloped later when the time comes along.
RW: Wow. It sounds like your life is not boring. What do you do with your spare time? Do you have any hobbies?
It’s such good fortune that Chuck is on board. He seems to me like the driving force behind the whole Fort Wayne renaissance. How are you affected by “the Sweetwater Difference” (or perhaps it should be called “the Chuck Surack Difference”)? Is their emphasis on “doing the right thing” for the customer being baked into the Clyde Theatre’s DNA? It must really be raising the bar—so different, I would imagine, from some of the owners you may have met in other venues who want to make money in the short term.
RK: You have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. I think Chuck’s really good at understanding things from other people’s perspective, and understanding how someone else feels. If you know how someone feels, and you actually care about how they feel, you’re going to do the right thing, you’re going to create a good experience. It’s really so simple—do the right thing—you’ll create an environment where people are happy. He’s got over 1,200 employees, he built it all from having one employee—himself in his VW van.
Our main goal at the Clyde Theater is to create a world-class venue, with everything from the sound and lighting to parking. When you walk in the door I want people to have an amazing experience, and to take that experience home with them as memories. We want the patrons to have the best experience possible, we also want the artists and all the crew members and production people to have a great experience, too. It comes from both sides. If the Artist is happy with their experience onstage, it’s actually going to transfer to the crowd they will have a good experience, and vice versa. If the crowd is having a great experience, then the Artist is going to feed off of that energy. It’s really about the details, crossing all your T’s and dotting all of your I’s, making sure that you're considerate of others. That’s what it really is—being considerate of other people. I feel extremely humbled, grateful, and blessed to have been able to earn Chuck and Lisa’s trust, and to have them as partners.
RW: You mentioned something that is key. Most companies pay lip service to customer service these days. They say they want the customer to be happy (but maybe not too happy), but they may be doing it just for the company’s benefit. Really caring about the customer’s happiness is rare, I think—not only so that they’re happy and will want to do business with you in the future, but because you really want them to be happy. Also, Sweetwater really respects their employees and want to do the right thing by them and have them be happy. It’s a privately held company, and Chuck could cash out at any time. It seems like he stays because he’s interested in providing opportunities for his employees, customers, and soon, concert goers at the Clyde.
RK: Caring about your customers that way is really cool, it transfers into success. Again, it’s about being considerate, and putting yourself in that person’s shoes. What can I do to make this person happy? How can I make them feel comfortable? I think it’s the difference between a company like Sweetwater and a place like In and Out Burger Pro Audio, where it’s like, “OK, here you go, have fun with that!” He’s got this amazing customer service team that will work with you until your studio is running perfectly, or until your guitar amp’s running perfectly. If they have to, they'll access your computer from Sweetwater and figure out why your program isn’t working. It’s absolutely phenomenal, mind-blowing.
I have looked up to Chuck ever since I graduated from The Recording Workshop 15 years ago and found out what he was doing in Fort Wayne. To think that I am able to actually be business partners with him is the biggest blessing, it’s really cool.
RW: Why didn’t you go to him sooner when you were looking for financing? I would think he’d be the first person on your list. Did you just think you weren’t ready for it? At what point did you decide the time was right?
RK: I was not prepared to take on a partner of Chuck and Lisa’s caliber. I had a lot of work to do. I wanted to have all my T’s crossed and I’s dotted. Honestly, I was having a lot of trouble raising the money. A lot of people go to wealthy people like Chuck and ask for money, I didn’t want to do that because I have so much respect for the guy. I needed his partnership and capital as a partner just as much as I need his mentoring, I had a long way to go before I was ready to get in touch with someone like him. It was important for me to earn it. I learned a lot. I know that he found out that I was having a lot of trouble, and we finally came together and he said, “OK, what is this project all about?”
RW: It sounds like you have such a wide range of skills and could do most everything yourself. What sort of staff positions will you have? Who will take care of social media? Who will you bring on first?
RK: I can honestly do every single one of the jobs that we’re planning to fill, but there are only 40 hours in a week, and 24 hours in a day, and I need help. I think I can find people who are better than me, get out of their way, and empower them. I’m going to hire a box office manager, a marketing and programming director, and a front of house and concessions manager, and then I’m going to do the company management and be the technical director and oversee the operation.
RW: And then you’ll hire other people as you need them for the rest of the crew.
RK: We’re going to have 20 to 30 part-time personnel that come in and work the stage and venue. Even if we have nine national shows a month, there’s no reason to have all those people sitting around in between.
RW: What have your 200 volunteers done? What other sort of community support are you getting?
RK: The volunteers who worked with me over the past five years have done things like clearing away the weeds outside the building and cleaning up trash and debris. Speaking of community support, I got a grant for $52,000 to remove asbestos from the building in 2013, and then they did a big remediation for animal feces. There were pigeon feces all over the building, and that stuff’s really toxic. The volunteers helped scrub the building to make it look good for investors. I’ve had volunteers help me fix the roof. I’ve had volunteers fix huge plumbing leaks and burst pipes. I’ve done a lot of it myself. People come out and shovel the sidewalk for other business owners there. I’ve spoken in front of at least ten different neighborhood associations in Fort Wayne, and all those folks really support this project on social media and word of mouth. I get a lot of support from Young Leaders of Northeast Indiana (YLNI). They’re a really, really strong force here in Fort Wayne, a bunch of leaders under the age of 40 that work hard to push initiatives that will make Fort Wayne a better place. They want to make it a tourist destination among other things.
RW: What else is going on?
RK: There’s a $300 million-dollar redevelopment happening at the General Electric Campus—1.2 million square feet of commercial buildings and over 30 acres of property, a big project with beautiful, historic, 19th and 20th century buildings. It’s going to be turned into retail, residential, and entertainment space. There’s the baseball diamond downtown that’s helping create some buzz, and the Riverfront development. I think Fort Wayne is a very safe place, and a good place to raise a family, and has a lower cost of living. It’s all making the community be a place where people want to live.
RW: You mentioned that you didn’t get a good payback from those concerts you organized before you got your facility. How is operating your own venue going to make it more profitable, so that you can keep the operation going and pay yourself for your efforts?
RK: We’ll be able to retain the profits from the concession sales, renting out the venue, and cash from ticket sales. We’re the promoters for some of these shows, so we’ll be able to keep those fees as well.
RW: What’s the advantage of a standing facility? Is it mostly a matter of fitting more people in, or is it also a sign that people wouldn’t sit down for your kind of high-energy music, so why bother with chairs?
RK: Both of those. We can sell more tickets per square foot, and furthermore artists that play really loud, heavy, explosive music don’t typically choose to perform in very nice ornate theaters like the Embassy, because seats get broken, all of that nice plaster gets broken, and the venue kind of gets trashed. The Clyde has all concrete floors, a big wood dance floor that can get scrubbed down and sanitized after a show. People who go to a big rock show, even a country show, or electronic dance show don’t want to sit down in their seats, they want to get up and move around. In a high-energy show what a lot of artists really want is for the audience to be standing up with their fists in the air. It feeds their performance and might even make them play better.
RW: Are you concerned about hearing conservation, about the music being too loud? Would you consider surrounding the audience with speakers so that you don’t have to crank the mains up so high in the front? Would you consider having some sort of SPL measuring system to keep it from injuring the audience? To me that sounds like “doing the right thing”. Have you seen the sound system in Millennium Park in Chicago with 52 loudspeakers hung over the audience from a lattice so they don’t have to blast it from the front?
RK: I have seen that. It’s pretty neat. For this particular venue, we’re going to go with a very high-quality manufacturer and the newer systems that you can push a little harder giving you a little higher dB but the quality stays home and doesn’t distort. I think that distortion is almost worse than the high dB. There will be limiters built into the amplifiers that power the loudspeakers. I’m an audio engineer. Chuck’s an audio engineer. A lot of people who work at Sweetwater are audio engineers. I think there are probably more audio engineers per capital living here than anywhere else.
RW: It must be a dream-come-true to get to build a facility to your specifications. What level of quality are you trying to achieve with the lights and sound?
RK: We want to have a world-class venue with one of the best light and sound systems. When a national act is on tour, I’d like to have them walk into our building and not have to load all their production equipment off the truck, or even have them just show up and not to have to bring all that equipment at all. The stage is going to a width and depth that is standard for the largest national touring acts. There are specific sizes that a lot of set pieces are made out of. We’re going to have world-class dressing room space, and a very comfortable, intimate experience for the artist, so that when they show up it will feel like they are at home. My goal is to have the best equipment on the planet. That’s another advantage of being partners with Chuck and Sweetwater. I have a pretty good feeling that when we get to that point it’s going to help tremendously. Chuck does nothing but the best. Everything that he does is world class, and I expect nothing less for the Clyde Theatre.
RW: How many shows do you estimate you need to make a profit? Is the goal to have the fewest possible dark days?
RK: We want to maintain a work/life balance for the employees. If you have an event every night for a week straight, that is not a good balance. We would sometimes have events at the Embassy Theater where as Technical Director, I would show up at 7:00 in the morning and leave at 2:00 in the morning the next day. There is a very strong balance to be had at a venue, and if we get to the point where we can have it booked every night for a week, then we can have a large rotating staff, that’s fine, and that’s the goal, to end up with a venue that’s booked all the time, but I don’t want to grow too fast, or take off too big. I believe in taking incremental steps. I think it would be great to have a recording studio down the line and be able to record and release audio and video, so we could do something like Austin City Limits in Fort Wayne, but at the beginning it’s first things first. We’re going to start with incremental steps and grow into becoming a place where national touring acts always want to stop.
RW: So, you think with three to five shows a month you can be profitable.
RK: Yes, absolutely.
RW: There are a lot of big cities fairly close together in the Midwest. Do bands like to come through here and play?
RK: People love touring in the Midwest. We don’t have the oceans and mountains, but maybe audiences are more interested because they get bored. The audiences in the Midwest are generous, maybe a little more excited sometimes because we don’t have all the offerings like they do on the East and West coasts. Maybe we’re a little more eager, thankful, and appreciative of artists that come through and bring their awesome stage show and music. During our harder winters, people want to be indoors in concert halls listening to music. On the other hand, some bands don’t want to tour here where it might be snowing. In the winter, they’d rather get booked in the South. A city like Fort Wayne has a ton of musicians, a ton of talent, people in multiple bands, lots of good venues. The routing is very nice. From Fort Wayne, Indiana you’re about three hours from Chicago, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, Cleveland, Dayton, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Madison (4 hours), we’re right in the middle of the “Circle of Cities”. Interstate 69 goes straight from Indianapolis to Grand Rapids, I80 runs from Cleveland to Chicago. We’re positioned in a great place.
RW: What will you do for merchandise sales? Do you have a place set aside, will you take a cut?
RK: There will be a place in the main lobby. We will take a percentage, that’s standard, but we’re not going to gouge the musicians. We want to treat artists well. Chuck and I are both musicians.
RW: You’re such an easy person to interview. I open up the gate, and off you go. You must have told your story hundreds of times in the last five years from all those pitches, and now you’ve got the narrative clear in your mind, or maybe it’s just another sign of the kind of organized mind that could put all this together.
Best of luck with everything, and I’m looking forward to getting up there to catch one of your first shows. Thank you for sharing your remarkable story, and best of luck as you move through the construction phase. I’m looking forward to catching one of your early shows, and in the meantime, we’ll be up to the Sweetwater Pavilion to hear what you put together there.
RK: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.
©2017 Rick Kinney and Robert Willey