‘Ron Delsener Presents’ Is a Highly Entertaining, if Smoothed-Over, History of One of the Greatest Concert Promoters of All Time: Film Review
Unless you’ve got a “Succession”-sized story of ludicrous wealth combined with horrible behavior, it can be very challenging for a documentarian to make the life of an executive seem exciting — even one as colorful as that of Ron Delsener, one of the greatest concert promoters of all time… which is what makes “Ron Delsener Presents,” a documentary on that colorful life, all the more impressive.
While the 90-odd-minute doc is a bit overlong and based largely on wealthy old music-biz veterans telling war stories from their rough-and-tumble years, director Jake Sumner uses deep research, fascinating concert and other archival footage, animation and snappy editing to create a very entertaining, if slightly smoothed-over, film that doubles as a sort of mini-history of the American concert business.
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It doesn’t hurt that some of those wealthy music-biz veterans include Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Roger Daltrey, Jon Bon Jovi, Little Steven and Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of Kiss as well as salty concert-biz impresarios like Dennis Arfa, Tom Roth, Doc McGee, along with Delsener’s wife Ellin, daughter Samantha, his business-partner sister and many others.
But of course, most of the film — which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month — revolves around the man himself, now 87. An archetypal New Yorker with the accent to prove it, Delsener was born in 1936 in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens. He became obsessed with show business as a kid and attended countless classic jazz concerts in the 1950s. He eventually worked his way into the business through the brother of a friend, who happened to be concert promoter Don Friedman. After working jazz concerts with him, they started booking shows at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens: Barbra Streisand, Harry Belafonte, Johnny Mathis … and the Beatles, on their first American tour in the summer of 1964. The doc dwells on this show for several minutes, including not only archival photos from the show and video of the crowd’s “just non-stop constant screaming” but also some photos that Delsener himself took of the group.
Talking about the show, he recalls the euphoria he and the audience felt at seeing the Beatles, and knowing, even at that age, that he’d “never feel so happy again.” Perhaps not, but he came close. He parted ways with Friedma, started his own business and hit big with a pioneering corporate-sponsored festival held during the summers at Wollman ice rink in Central Park, which was first sponsored by Reingold beer and then Schaefer in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The concerts featured top-flight talent for just $1 admission, and they became a gathering point for countless future stars; Patti Smith and Kiss’ Stanley and Simmons reminisce in the doc about the shows, which ranged from Jimi Hendrix to Led Zeppelin, Otis Redding to Ray Charles, Benny Goodman to Nina Simone and ran for several years.
However, by the end of the ‘60s Delsener found steep competition from Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, so “I said I’m gonna take rock and roll to Carnegie Hall” — and he did, booking shows by the Who, Aretha Franklin and probably most difficult of all, David Bowie. The hallowed classical-music hall’s booking agent took one look at the singer’s Ziggy Stardust outfit and said no — but Delsener managed to convince her that it was “theatrical,” Bowie performed and “knocked it dead” and the show went a long way toward establishing him in the U.S. As it does with the Beatles, the doc spends a few minutes on Bowie’s performance at there, with footage of Delsener going through the Carnegie Hall files and pulling out concert ticket and program as he tells the story.
The film continues with his triumphs throughout the following decades, including being essentially awarded exclusive rights to book New York concerts thanks to industry godfather Frank Barsalona; his ability to understand the burgeoning mass appeal of Kiss early in their career; his long home base of the Palladium — the doc dwells on the Clash’s legendary 1979 shows there — and culminates with what became at the time the biggest concert in U.S. history: Simon & Garfunkel’s reunion in Central Park in 1981.
The funniest of the film’s many amusing moments comes with a quick-cut montage of various people, including Simon, Garfunkel and Delsener, remembering how the show was originally proposed by Delsener as a Paul Simon concert that nearly everyone knew would ultimately become a reunion of the famously sparring duo; the most hilarious part is hearing Simon make the entire thing sound like it was his idea — which was precisely Delsener’s plan for getting him to do it.
The next era of the doc concerns the corporatization of the concert business, as Delsener, tired of taking all of the financial risk himself, united with the late radio mogul Bob Sillerman to create SFX, which consolidated territories over the years and essentially gave birth to the modern concert industry — and ultimately Live Nation.
Delsener and Sillerman received no small amount of criticism for the move from fans and executives who felt that it had corporatized the rock business, but it was also inevitable. “It went from being a millionaire’s business to a billionaire’s business,” Arfa says.
Yet the biggest surprise comes when, after hearing multiple people express incredulity that Delsener is still going full blast at his age, and seeing the cameras follow him from concert to concert to concert (including what seems to be the worst-dressed audience in history, confirmed when one realizes he’s at a Jimmy Buffett concert at Long Island’s Jones Beach), he says he’s retiring, which he announced last fall.
But as the doc shows, people like Delsener never really retire — in the closing moments, you see him on the phone, talking about acts he’s seen whose shows he wants to promote, and rattling cages as much as ever: “I’m tryin’ to make some money here!,” he says, even though he presumably has been more than financially secure for many decades.
Although “Ron Delsener Presents” alludes to the cut-throat nature of the concert business with more than one symbolic Mafia reference, this is a very flattering and reverent — and probably slightly watered-down — portrait of a man who is definitely one of the top three concert promoters of all time. But to speculate what he might say about it, in his deep New York-ese, “Is this a sunny-side-up movie about a tough business? No question. Is it a great show anyway? Absolutely.”
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