My First Show Back
My First Show Back: Resound Presents’ Graham Williams on Texas’ Summer Concert Boom
With the Wale shows, it was the last weekend of July. Things were just picking up, and then a week and a half, two weeks later, when we had our next round of shows, things got more intense with the COVID numbers. We had to pay more attention to things surrounding that. In May, the first shows I went to just check out — at the beginning it was weird, but by the end of the show it felt normal. It felt like every other show. At this point, I was assuming everyone was vaccinated and the Delta variant hadn’t really popped up yet. People weren’t wearing masks. Everyone was like, “We got the vaccine. Everything’s fixed.” People were just so anxious to get back to some form of normalcy, but since then I would say there’s a lot more masking. ...
My First Show Back: Mitch Blackman on Reopening Las Vegas With Blackbear
“To see people without masks inside — gambling, clubbing with the bottle service — it was like, ‘Alright. We’re back.'” For the first time in 15 months, live music is returning nationwide after the global coronavirus pandemic ravaged the industry. Billboard’s “My First Show Back” is a series dedicated to sharing stories from throughout the touring ecosystem about what’s happening now, what has been forever altered and what will never change. In this installment, ICM Partners’ Mitch Blackman talks about his client Blackbear performing at the grand opening of the new Money, Baby! club at the Virgin Hotel in Las Vegas on July 9, which fell on the first week of major events returning to Sin City. In addition, Blackman details his strategy for ...
My First Fest Back: Lollapalooza Founder Perry Farrell on ‘The Eye of the Hurricane’
I think that this moment in time is extremely important in history as the country is coming back, getting through a pandemic. We’re right on the other side of it, [but] we’re still in it and it might be another year before we’re fully away from it. It depends on our actions. And I think there was a great divide that was caused by that last president, and other people around the world, and we’re all recovering from that but we’re gaining our strength and we are mighty — and we’re going to pull this off. We’re in a very tough situation, but I love the fact that we’re actually in the eye of the hurricane and we did the right thing — and when I say we, I don’t just mean Lollapalooza. I mean the mayor, I mean the city of Chicago. We all figured it out together, “Hey, we can use this...
