| Subject: clear channel interference?????? |
Author:
wizard
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Date Posted: 17:56:26 06/16/03 Mon
In reply to:
DireWolf
's message, "BONNAROO NE CANCELLED" on 08:18:14 06/10/03 Tue
The Road to Canceled Concerts
By Stephanie McCrummen
STAFF WRITER
June 16, 2003
Andrew Dreskin sat in his Manhattan office last week, still stunned and somewhat mystified about how his planned two-day camp-over music festival got booted off Long Island. He was so sure he had his little ducks in a row.
He had stacks of letters between his company, Suffolk County and Riverhead town officials. He had a traffic plan, a medical plan, a communications plan. He had the ultracool band Radiohead, the Beastie Boys and Beck - an event of MTV proportions that would channel up to 50,000 fans into the precious pines of Calverton, possibly infuse millions of dollars into the local economy and perhaps even bestow that most elusive quality, hipness, upon the long-suffering town of Riverhead.
"There was a sense of cooperation ...," said concert promoter Dreskin, a dot.com millionaire, describing the weeks of meetings leading up to May 27, when Suffolk denied a key permit for the event. "From our point of view, not in a million years would we not get a permit. Why would we not get a permit?"
He and others speculate that politics killed the deal, and raises an eyebrow at the continual appearance of politically connected rival promoter Ron Delsener on the scene. Delsener, who opposed Field Day, is an employee of the corporate media Goliath, Clear Channel, which owns 1,200 radio stations nationwide and controls major New York area concert venues, including the state-owned Jones Beach Theater.
But county officials, some local promoters and the environmentalists who opposed Field Day said the reason was actually simple: There was just not enough time to plan. And it came down to that classic Long Island problem, traffic.
The fiasco raises the basic question of whether Long Island has lost its potential to host such rock festivals - they have boosted small-town economies in Tennessee, California and upstate - in the future. While some are optimistic, Dreskin, for one, said it doesn't look good.
"No promoter in their right mind would ever touch [the Calverton] site again, I think evidenced by the fact that Bonnaroo canceled their event," Dreskin said, referring to the music festival featuring Bob Dylan that had been planned for the Calverton site later this summer. At least, any promoter would take a hard look at what transpired, he said.
Field Day was to be held June 7-8 on the former Grumman property in Calverton, and initial agreement between Field Day and the town of Riverhead was inked Feb. 20. Meetings with various county agencies, whose approval was needed to obtain a mass gathering permit, began March 12, with at least five meetings including state, county and town police, held after that, according to Chris Kent, an attorney for Field Day.
But by May 9, things began to go sour.
The county told the town that an intermunicipal agreement was needed which, according to Police Commissioner John Gallagher, had to do with reimbursement, not the traffic and safety plan itself.
On the same day, according to Dreskin, "a politically connected adviser" he had hired told him that "until the politics get sorted out, you're not getting your police" - an allegation county officials have categorically denied. On May 22, the county attorney informed the town there was not enough time to draw up the intermunicipal agreement, and on May 27, the mass gathering permit was denied.
Gallagher dismissed the notion that politics was involved, saying that all along, he had "serious reservations" about Dreskin's traffic plan and that there was not enough time to work them out.
A subplot during these weeks was that Delsener, a dominant force in the New York market for years, was apparently waging a quiet campaign of his own to derail Field Day.
Riverhead Town Supervisor Bob Kozakiewicz said that after he signed the Dreskin deal, Delsener wrote him a letter expressing interest in striking a "long-term agreement" to produce events at the Calverton site, which Kozakiewicz rejected.
In April, Delsener called Bill Shulman, owner of the Calverton Links golf course, who said he had no idea who Delsener was and was already opposed to the festival.
"He brought out basically, that there would be a tremendous lineup of cars and traffic, that was the basic thing," said Shulman. "He was not happy, I guess, that this was going to take place. ... He spoke like for 92 percent of the time. Very fast, and very loud."
Around that time, a man who said he was from Clear Channel called the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, which was already gearing up a lawsuit to stop Field Day, and railed against the event, according to Richard Amper, the society's executive director.
Sometime in May, a letter from Delsener arrived at the office of Suffolk County Executive Robert Gaffney, according to Chief Deputy County Executive Eric Kopp. "I think it was against it," Kopp said, and referred further questions to a press officer, who was unable to locate the letter.
Clear Channel spokeswoman Pam Fallon declined to make Delsener available for comment, and Peter Scully, spokesman for Gaffney, did not return phone calls for comment.
Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of Pollstar, a concert-industry magazine based in Fresno, Calif., said "it wouldn't be unheard of" for one promoter to try to undermine another.
"Field Day had already succeeded in booking major acts," he said. "Obviously, if the show goes down in flames, those artists now have potential plays in New York." As for Long Island being a potential future venue, he said: "Everybody in the business can recognize that Field Day probably lost one million or more ... that was a disaster."
Elsewhere, "destination" music festivals are receiving a warm welcome from local governments. Events such as the Bonnaroo festival held outside Manchester, Tenn., this past weekend, and the Coachella festival in Indio, Calif., have gotten rave reviews, Bongiovanni said, even if they have generated some controversy and complaints of rowdy behavior and violence.
In upstate Bethel, site of the original Woodstock, "A Day in the Garden" music festivals held in 1998 and 1999 "generated millions," said Jonathan Drapkin, who was Sullivan County manager then, and now heads the Gerry Foundation, which owns the concert site.
"There were jobs that were created, for days if not weeks in advance, hotel stays throughout the county," he said. "As county manager, my reaction was that it was absolutely terrific."
But on Long Island, it was not to be.
John Caracciolo, president of the Morey Organization, which promotes smaller scale concerts and festivals here, said Field Day organizers should have approached the county at least a year in advance.
"It really was the lead time that killed them rather than the size of the acts and the size of the show," he said. That officials nixed it, he said, just shows "we're dotting our I's and crossing our T's." Others, though, said it only shows that local government lamely missed out on a golden opportunity.
"Neither the town nor the county went out with the attitude that, 'we have a limited amount of time, we can do it, we will do it, we must do it,'" said Phil Cardinale, a former Riverhead town board member who is running against Kozakiewicz this fall. "That is a negative on the historical record now."
Kozakiewicz said he believed the town did everything it could to make Field Day happen and declined to speculate on whether politics was involved.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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