THE BUDWEISER SUPERFEST AND THE STORY OF BLACK MUSIC BY SHELDON TAYLOR PT 5: SHOW TIME!
While the Budweiser Super Fest was cementing itself as a preeminent summer tour package, the music business was rebounding from an industry recession. In December '84 Billboard ("The Challenge of Change In The Record Industry") tracked its return to solvency, citing the shedding of 70s financial excess, renewed consumer spending and emerging technology as reasons for the fiscal turnaround.
The emerging music video medium was also an industry change agent. While short-sighted label ambition, budgetary constraints and network politics delayed R&B's full expansion into this area, writer Alexis Petredis cited the MTV years as a career boom for 80s pop and rock acts like Hall and Oates. The "genre-resistant" duo's five consecutive platinum albums, #1
singles and "relentless succession" of hits sustained their career durability ("racking up millions of streams and still
playing arenas.") four decades after after their peak.
Billboard cited 1983 as the industry's transitional year due to the mega-success of Michael Jackson's Thriller album that lifted the music business out of the depths of recession. Flying below the radar, Black music's transition occurred a year earlier. Enter '82---the final year where R&B would truly revolve around its own orbit and enjoy a surge
in record sales and chart success mostly propelled by core audiences
that were the music's total life force.
"Earth Wind and Fire dominated their era with spectacular concert events but Michael Jackson did his throughout the multimedia age through people's TV sets."---Philip Bailey (2014)
Stevie Wonder's That Girl parked at #1 for nearly five weeks. With #1 hits Early In The Morning and Outstanding and the #2 You Dropped A Bomb On Me dominating radio, a million-plus consumers bought Gap Band IV making it the only R&B platinum album of 1982. It hugged the #1 spot for five weeks. Aretha Franklin's gold-selling Jump To It came behind it and shot to #1 for seven straight weeks while the Jump To It single stayed there for an entire month.
Flaunting many moods of Black Star Power, a series of soaring ballads, techno-funk, slick uptempos and quirky one-offs would all trade places at the top spot. By the end of '82, a crop of new albums released in rapid succession---Lionel Richie, Midnight Love, 1999, and Thriller set R&B on a commercial course correction. The Great Black Pop Takeover was in effect. Music videos would advance this movement but for now---live performances remained Black music's main visibility outlet.
ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE
St. Louis American writer Victoria Ryan Bailey was there too. In 2005 ("Wonderlove for Busch"), she recalls being mesmerized by a marathon Stevie Wonder Super Fest performance---"for the next four hours, I stood five feet away from Wonderlove and 12 feet away from Stevie Wonder as he sang every song he'd ever recorded." Dedicating part of his show to hometown hero (and recently deceased) Donny Hathaway, Wonder ran through his entire catalogue---rocking the crowd from midnight to the early AM hours. Anxious parents concerned for their children's safety---the tragic Atlanta Child Murders had wound down just ten months earlier----were comforted by St. Louis radio and TV announcers:
"No, your children aren't missing. They're still at the concert."
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| Superfest tour director Victor Julien, Smokey Robinson and Rick James |
Rick James---one of the tour's hottest acts---provided the Super Fest with some of its wildest moments. Superfest PR man Davis captured a few moments in his memoir. Just before showtime with a crowd of 50,000 fans waiting, James demanded $25,000 on top of his scheduled contractual fee. Budweiser tour mangers reluctantly coughed up Rick's fee. Another time---prior to a suprise Super Fest appearance with Smokey Robinson---Rick broke away from his VIP escorts and led excited fans on a wild chase through the arena. During Superfest '83, James flexed his star power to close out the show.
Competition was high. Performers pulled out all stops, bringing out guest performers onstage to join them. Closing acts like Stevie Wonder
and Maze featuring Frankie Beverly had bragging rights on the strength of their
crowd participation mastery, it wasn't uncommon for them hit the stage at four
o'clock in the morning. Funk bands Zapp
and Lakeside dazzled the crowd with their showmanship.
Rick was upstaged nightly by crowd favorite Lakeside. After the band rebuffed his request to change their lineup order and tone down their
set---Rick threatened to send his Buffalo crew on stage during the Lakeside's performance to handle things. Just as the crew prepared to take the stage,
they were headed off by the Atlanta police----avoiding a similar onstage skirmish between New Edition and Guy's road crews during a North Carolina Super Fest show in 1989. On the next tour stop, New Edition production manager Ronald Byrd shot Guy security man Anthony
Bee in the lobby of a Pittsburgh hotel.
Ironically, Byrd was part of James' road crew six years earlier and was a key figure involved in the Lakeside
beef.
"We don't have a hell of a chance of booking the Rolling Stones or Queen but any of them can swoop down and get Luther Vandross and Rick James"----Billboard (December 4, 1982)
In '82, Black promoters and their adversaries were still locked in conflict over concert bookings. Gold and platinum-selling Black acts leveraged lucrative relationships with white managers and promotional firms to handle their entire tours. Jesse Jackson launched the National Association of Black Promoters levying boycotts of corporate sponsors Coca-Cola and Anheuser-Bush in attempts to balance the scales.
Writer Nelson George branded these disputes as "the concert issue that wouldn't go away."
Promoter Michael Rosenberg produced the Super Fest during its early years. On certain dates he shared the wealth pairing up with Black promoters. Working with Black tour directors, marketing, PR and logistics teams who kept things rolling behind the scenes, Billboard and local press reported that under Rosenberg's leadership, Super Fest '82 generated $5.6 billion dollars in revenue and drew 350,000 concertgoers. Due to boycott pressures, Anheuser-Busch hired Al Haymon to run the tour in '84.
Starting out promoting jazz acts in college, Haymon had graduated to producing concerts of top-flight Black entertainers of the 70s and 80s. In his book I Got Your Back: A Father and Son Keep It Real About Love, Fatherhood , Family and Friendship---Eddie Levert credits himself and the OJays for breaking Haymon into the business:
"We were the first to let guys like them promote one tour from one part of the country to the other. Back in the 70s and early 80s, Black performers were getting paid ten to fifteen thousand a night. We stood up and made the pay twenty thousand then twenty fie thousand a night. Then after we got to a certain point---we said Mr. Promoter, give us eighty percent of the concert sales. You're gonna take twenty."
Wielding great power, partner Davis remembers Haymon's eyes remained on the bottom line. Never hesitating to cut an act if tickets sales were slow---when Teena Marie and the O'Jays were on the brink of being cut from Super Fest '85's lineup due to low ticket sales---a shook Levert called up Al Haymon to ensure he'd go on. Haymon's business acumen led to Dallas and Houston sellout Super Fest shows grossing a combined half-million dollars. In 1985, Haymon signed a long-term pact to run the tour.
By the 1990s, the Super Fest's popularity was waning. As the festival limped into its second decade, future lineups polarized and underwhelmed audiences. Younger artists lacked the stage presence of older acts. The spontaneous live instrumentation and stellar showmanship captivating earlier Superfest crowds was fading. Rap acts were now on the bill. Luring in tougher crowds, it created a new energy eroding the Super Fest's family-friendly atmosphere.
Audience stamina had also diminished. They no longer made the six-to-eight hour pilgrimages to Super Fest shows. Even sure-fire acts like Maze featuring Frankie Beverly and Patti LaBelle couldn't stop crowds from heading to the exits earlier and earlier. Attendance shrank. The tour moved from huge arenas to smaller venues. The Budweiser brand lost its luster. Import beers like Heniken were becoming popular with consumers. Adult audiences and veteran acts migrated over to the Essence Music Festival.
In 1994, The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported that "the Superfest is perfectly pleasant, but hardly the
premiere R&B showcase it used to be. The recent summer tour is
largely insignificant, running mainly on memories of banner season."
Wearing of dealing with contemporary acts, Haymon ended the Super Fest in 1999. After finding greater success in the boxing world, he revived the Super Fest in 2010 while introducing the long-running Summer Block Party spin-off a year later.
Woodstock, Monterey, and Lollapolloza are the stuff of legend.1972's Wattstax and the seminal Rock the Bells festival were immortalized in documentaries. In days, the Summer of Soul unearth 1969's Harlem Cultural Festival. South By Southwest is a regional institution.The ever-popular Essence Music Fest is now in its 26th year. There's Bonnaroo, Coachella, Made in America, The Roots Picnic plus retooled templates like D-Nice's Club Quarantine series and Verzuz.
Today the Budweiser Super Fest resides in historical and contemporary shadows. Its musical platform and reach---duplicated, refined and extended. There were many magical moments but '82 was the Super Fest's sweet spot when it provided the soundtrack for one nation under a groove.
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