How Danny Zelisko's 50 years of promoting concerts in Phoenix started with firing Journey

Danny Zelisko was about to go on sale with his first concert — Herbie Hancock and Weather Report on April 8, 1974, at the venue that inspired him to move to Phoenix to launch a career as a concert promoter, the historic Celebrity Theatre — when the booking agent called to say he had to move the date.

He hadn’t realized when he booked the show that Phoenix was so close to Tempe and he had another act, Deep Purple, playing Big Surf that same night.

“I said, ‘Well, what do they have to do with each other? One's a jazz guy. The other’s an English rock band,’” Zelisko recalls.

“He said, ‘Who plays Herbie Hancock?’ I said ‘KDKB.’ ‘Who plays Deep Purple?’ ‘KDKB.’” He said, ‘Would you go to both shows?’ ‘Yeah.’ He goes, ‘Case closed twice.’”

The Hancock date — without Weather Report — was rescheduled for Phoenix Symphony Hall in late June.

Learning the ropes the hard way: 'I had to fire Journey'

That's how Mahavishnu Orchestra at Tucson Music Hall on June 2, 1974, came to be Zelisko's first concert with Sundown Productions.

He was 19 and still learning the ropes, as he discovered after adding Journey, then a new band out of San Francisco, to the bill.

“I didn’t realize that I had to ask the headliner if this was OK,” he recalls. “I thought it was my show and I could do whatever the hell I wanted. It turns out you pretty much can, but you have to show courtesy. And respect.”

That meant another phone call, this time from the guy who managed Mahavishnu Orchestra.

As Zelisko, who lives in Paradise Valley with Leslie, his wife of 24 years, recalls the conversation, “He goes, ‘Did you really book Journey to open for us?' I said, 'Yeah. Great, huh?' He goes, 'I love Journey. Fire them.’”

The manager explained that Mahavishnu was touring with 23 members.

“I said, ‘So? Just move the stuff,’” Zelisko says.

“He goes, 'Once we set all that up, it ain't getting moved. We're gonna play three and a half hours.' I said 'What?! I didn't know that.' He said, 'Well, if you had called to say, “Hey, I'd like to put Journey on as support for Mahavishnu. Is that OK?” I would’ve told you “No.” And I’m telling you “No.’

"So I had to fire Journey.’”

Danny Zelisko celebrates 50 years of concerts with a memorabilia exhibit

Fifty years later, Zelisko plans to celebrate the golden anniversary of the concert that started it all with a memorabilia exhibit (posters, tickets, photographs and other artifacts from his collection) at Walter Studios in Phoenix from Monday to Wednesday, June 3-5.

“I've been holding on to a lot of really cool relics from over the years,” Zelisko says.

“The stuff we're putting up is some of the best I have, a nice cross section of things that I think people will enjoy. And I hope they'll come down. It’s, like, four or five hours a night. And I'll be there to talk about any of this stuff that people want to talk about. Or we can just hang out.”

Danny Zelisko on moving to Phoenix: 'I knew I wanted to be part of it'

Zelisko grew up in Chicago, where he fell hard for the Beatles when he heard “Please Please Me” at the record store. He was 8. By the end of grade school, he was playing drums and singing in a band.

Zelisko fell in love with Phoenix over Easter break during his senior year of high school.

“I loved the Celebrity Theatre and the music the DJs were playing on KDKB, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it,” he says.

He didn’t see the sense in attempting to do what he wanted to do in Chicago.

“I'm just a 17-year-old kid going, 'How in the hell am I gonna get my foot in the door in Chicago? There's already several big promoters in that market,’” he recalls.

“It would have been very, very difficult to get off the ground. And I didn't want to duplicate their efforts by just trying to horn in.”

That’s not the only reason he chose Phoenix.

“I didn’t like snow and freezing,” he says.

'We tried to find the good music': How one woman helped put KDKB on the map in the '70s

How Danny Zelisko became the Southwest's go-to guy for concerts

Zelisko moved to Phoenix in 1973 and hit some speed bumps early on, burning through 11 grand of borrowed money on his first three concerts and filing for bankruptcy in 1975, which meant the end of Sundown.

By 1976, he’d found work at a waterbed store and was promoting concerts on the side when he got a call from Bill Graham's people asking for help with a concert at ASU's Sun Devil Stadium for the filming of "A Star is Born."

They wanted Zelisko's advice on a headlining artist that would pack a stadium for Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand’s concert scenes. That's how Peter Frampton came to top a bill that also featured Santana, Graham Central Station, Montrose and the L.A. Jets.

That same year, he launched Evening Star Productions and started booking concerts at a Tempe club called Dooley’s, hosting early Phoenix dates by countless legends of the punk and New Wave era, from Elvis Costello to Devo, Blondie, Talking Heads, Joe Jackson, the Ramones and the Police.

Two years later, he was doing well enough to try a bigger room and booked his first concert at Veterans Memorial Coliseum while moving into other markets — Albuquerque and Las Vegas.

By 1990, Evening Star was booking shows at Desert Sky Pavilion (now Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre) and brought Paul McCartney to Sun Devil Stadium.

'It was our Fillmore': Metro Phoenix had never seen a club quite like Dooley's in Tempe

Danny Zelisko on life at Live Nation: 'I was probably a pain in the ass'

In 2001, Zelisko sold his company to SFX, staying on as president of the corporation’s Southwest office.

“House of Blues and SFX were two giant concert concerns that came out of nowhere and started offering promoters big money to buy their business and become part of a huge conglomerate,” Zelisko says.

Then SFX sold everything to Clear Channel Communications, a radio broadcaster that spun off in 2005 into another company, Live Nation, where Zelisko served as president and chairman of Live Nation Southwest until Valentines Day 2011 when he stepped down.

“I guess I was probably a pain in the ass for a good deal of that time,” Zelisko says. “Because I wanted to book my John Prine shows. I wanted to book nightclubs. I wanted to break new acts in addition to doing the groups that we had made big acts.

"But they didn't want that at the time from us. And the displeasure for me kind of grew.”

He’s always looked at promotion as more than a business.

“It's a way of life,” he says. “A vocation.”

Starting over with Danny Zelisko Presents, independent again at last

By the time he left Live Nation, he was thinking it was time to walk away from that vocation.

Then, he got a call from Jackson Browne and Alice Cooper asking him to help them put a benefit together for the Fund for Civility, Respect and Understanding in the wake of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's shooting that left six people dead in Tucson.

That concert at Tucson Arena on March 10, 2011, was the first show for Danny Zelisko Presents, his return to the world of independent promotion.

“It was scary at first, jumping back into this business,” he says.

“And to this day, it's next to impossible for me to work with any of those artists that are still around that I worked with back then if they're at an arena level, because these giant corporations have the means to say, 'Here's whatever you need to agree to do a tour for us. We want all 40 cities.”

That’s how Danny Zelisko Presents has come to focus on shows that, as he puts it, are “a little bit more boutique but still fantastic artists in intimate surroundings where you can actually see them instead of a dot somewhere on an arena stage.”

He’s still booking an average of 150 shows a year at venues closer to the size of Zelisko’s beloved Celebrity Theatre and Talking Stick Resort, in addition to midsize venues across the country, including Chicago.

“As long as I continue to enjoy the music and the people making it, I’ll keep doing it,” Zelisko says. “It’s fun, it’s rewarding, it’s profitable. Usually.

"It's been a fast ride, though. Fifty years? I can't believe it. I really can't. It sounds so huge. I mean, who can do anything for 50 years? All I can say is it beats the hell out of working.”

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @EdMasley and facebook.com/ed.masley

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: The Ramones to the Police: Danny Zelisko booked them all in Phoenix