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Concert Rivals to Run Irving Plaza
By: Neil Strauss
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company  

    For more than 25 years, one of the most notorious rivalries in the music business has been between John Scher and Ron Delsener, competing concert promoters constantly sparring for rock bands and concert halls. Now, for the first time, the two will be working together long term. And not necessarily by choice.

    The rope tying them together is Irving Plaza, generally acknowledged as the best Manhattan club of its size (capacity: 900 concertgoers). On Friday, the owners of Irving Plaza, at Irving Place and 15th Street, sold the club's name and its 10-year lease to Mr. Delsener's Delsener/ Slater Enterprises in a deal that people in the concert industry estimate at more than $1 million. Along with the lease comes the partnership of Mr. Scher's Metropolitan Entertainment, which is contracted to book the club until September 1998.

    With the real estate market in Manhattan so tight, community boards increasingly resistant to neighborhood clubs, and the necessary combination of some 56 city licenses extremely difficult for concert halls to obtain, the business of rock promotion in Manhattan has changed from one of picking good bands to one of staking a claim on usable property. Typically, promoters try to maintain ladders of concert halls from small to large, so they can work with a group from its first tour all the way up to the band's triumphant arena tour.

    For years, Irving Plaza has been the first rung on this ladder. It has been a room for Jewel, the Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Prodigy and Oasis to step up, and for Eric Clapton, the Cure and Melissa Etheridge to step down and perform intimate shows. (Even Bob Dylan is said to be performing at the club in two weeks, on Dec. 8.)

    The sale of Irving Plaza is just the most recent move in a complicated game of concert hall consolidation taking place in New York and across the country. Those in the concert business say that Delsener/Slater has been looking into buying the leases of the Roxy in Manhattan and the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. In the meantime, Madison Square Garden is said to be on the verge of acquiring the lease to Radio City Music Hall. And Delsener/ Slater was itself recently bought by SFX, which is negotiating to buy several other promotion companies across the country.

    The story of Irving Plaza, however, is an example of how ruthless, competitive and topsy-turvy Manhattan's concert business can be. When Irving Plaza opened in 1992, concerts were booked and promoted by Delsener/Slater. But in 1994, Irving Plaza's owners, Bill Brusca and Andrew Rasiej, complained that the deal they had made with Mr. Delsener was giving him all the money and leaving them with all the debt. So when their contract expired that year, they negotiated a better one with Mr. Delsener's rival, Mr. Scher.

    Under the agreement with Mr. Scher's Metropolitan Entertainment, not only was Irving Plaza allowed to promote its own shows and keep all the profit (or swallow any loss), it could also claim up to a 50 percent stake in any other local Metropolitan-promted show, be it at the Hammerstein Ballroom or Madison Square Garden, by a band that originally performed at Irving Plaza.

    This deal making Irving Plaza a co-promoter of other shows was perhaps a first in the concert industry.

    At the time, the owners of Irving Plaza were determined not to work with Mr. Delsener again, while Mr. Delsener was said to have pledged to do what he could to shut down the club. Now, three years later, the two parties are doing business again. What happened?

    "The relationship is completely different now," explained Mr. Rasiej of Irving Plaza. "Previously we were co-promoting together in the room, and now I've leased the space to them and don't have any financial stake in the promotion or production of the shows themselves. I'm not susceptible to the previous inequities."

    Mitch Slater, Mr. Delsener's partner, said their company made a mistake letting the club go. "At the time," he said, "we had the Academy. If we had known that it was not going to be available to us, I don't think we would have let Irving go. We didn't know how hard it would be to find another young room." (The Academy, where Delsener/Slater used to promote shows, was taken over last year to be incorporated in the new Ford Center for the Performing Arts by the theater producer Garth Drabinsky.)

    What many in the concert industry see as the beautiful irony in this deal is the fact that beginning this week at Irving Plaza, Metropolitan will be booking the concerts while Delsener/ Slater will be promoting them.

    Also, when Delsener/Slater and Metropolitan are competing to promote a band and Metropolitan wins, Delsener/Slater now has the right to be co-promoter of the concert anyway, if the group originally played at Irving Plaza. For example, when the rock band Moe, which has performed at Irving Plaza in the past, performs at Metropolitan's Hammerstein Ballroom on Saturday, Delsener/ Slater is eligible to claim up to half the profits or loss. Mr. Slater said he intended to do this for such shows.

    For concertgoers, in the short term, all this wheeling and dealing might lead to small changes in the booking, ticket prices and club policies at Irving Plaza. But in the long term, it may lead to the creation of a rival club by Metropolitan.

    "Delsener has regained the 900-capacity club he was sorely missing," said Bob Grossweiner, the New York bureau chief of Performance, a concert-industry magazine, "and now Metropolitan is in the doghouse. They fell asleep in their own backyard, and they're going to be crying for the next five years. They don't have the club they need to break small bands and then move them on to the Hammerstein Ballroom. This is a great deal for Delsener, because Irving Plaza is a great club. Bob Dylan wanted to play there in December, no matter who the promoter was, because he liked the club."

    Mr. Scher of Metropolitan said that he had the opportunity to buy the lease, but did not because the club loses money on its concerts. "Unless they know tricks we don't know, they can't make a lot of money at Irving Plaza," he said about Delsener/ Slater. "And if they can't, I don't know what the sense of buying it is."

    Mr. Rasiej insisted he was leaving Irving Plaza not for financial reasons, but because he had accomplished his goals there and intended to move on to other projects, like presenting live concerts on the Internet. (His partner, Mr. Brusca, will remain at Irving Plaza as vice president of operations.) "I took a building that was dilapidated and falling apart and renovated it and made it self-sufficient and in the process created a positive new addition to music culture in New York," Mr. Rasiej said. "I may not have made money, but the asset is great."