GORILLA MARKETING MAKES GUSTER FEEL LESS THAN FESTIVE ABOUT ROCKFEST

By Greg Kot, Tribune rock critic.
Published in the Chicago Tribune: Monday, July 31, 2000

Blame the guys in the gorilla masks.

The quote from the promoter declaring the concert "a national platform for corporate sponsors to market their products" didn't sit right with Guster singer Ryan Miller. The video screen the size of a five-story high-rise behind the stage that broadcast TV commercials made him feel even worse. But it was the simian-faced fellas firing a car manufacturer's T-shirts into the crowd that convinced Miller that he and his band had made a terrible mistake when they agreed to perform at the Hard Rock Cafe Rockfest, which took place July 22 at the Chicago Motor Speedway in Cicero.

"Something snapped," Miller says, and he took every opportunity during Guster's 40-minute set to jab at what he saw as corporate sponsorship run amok. He mispronounced the name of the $6 million festival's primary sponsor, Oldsmobile Alero, and he mockingly shouted the car manufacturer's slogan. When it was over, angry promoters refused to pay the band the remaining half of its $10,000 performance fee; Guster retaliated by detailing the day's events on its Web site and turning its defiance into a national cause celebre; and both sides ended up calling each other hypocrites.

"If you want to be indie-rock cool, then you shouldn't accept a check for $5,000 to play a festival called `Hard Rock Cafe Rockfest brought to you by Oldsmobile,'" said Michele Bernstein, the Hard Rock executive who booked Guster and 11 other bands on the festival, including Metallica, Kid Rock and Stone Temple Pilots.

"When their video airs on MTV, there are commercials on before and after," said Chris Tomasso, executive producer of Rockfest. "Maybe they should boycott MTV as well."

Guster found it preposterous that they were penalized for tweaking an overly zealous corporate sponsor while one of the festival's other performers, Kid Rock, was paid in full for an act that included bikini-clad go-go dancers and a lengthy homage to kinky sex. "Kid Rock talks about that stuff and they said, `Great job, you spoke to your demographic, here's your money,'" Miller says. "I mispronounce the name of a car, call everyone's attention to how we are being marketed, and they tell us, `There is no way we are paying you.'"

At a time when corporate sponsorship has become the norm at major rock events, and rock performers both new and old routinely license their songs to advertisers, Guster's combative comments at Rockfest have momentarily jostled a culture that has grown numb to how completely the relationship between art and commerce has been corrupted.

But the Guster-Rockfest standoff isn't simply a case of a rebellious rock 'n' roll David taking on the big bad corporate Goliath. Guster has a recording contract with Sire Records, which is owned by Time-Warner, and has a song-publishing deal with another corporate behemoth, Universal-Polygram. The Boston trio has played many previous corporate-sponsored festivals without once raising a fuss, and it is considering accepting a corporate sponsorship to help it defray the costs of a fall tour.

"We played a free corporate-sponsored show in Nashville recently, and we were subjected to an AT&T banner across the stage the whole time," Miller says. "But we played to 5,000 people, which is five times as many as we normally would reach in Nashville, and that was OK with us. My royalty checks are signed by one of the biggest corporations in the world. This is not a tear-down-the-industry trip I am on. I'm not fighting the system because I'm part of the system."

It's not the concept of a sponsor marketing its product that concerns Miller, it's the intelligence -- or lack of -- with which it is executed.

He cited Volkswagen commercials incorporating rock songs such as Trio's "Da-Da-Da" as an example of marketing "that doesn't insult my intelligence. They're speaking my language. But we have to play music right after a bunch of guys in red jump suits wearing monkey masks hawk T-shirts? That is just dumb, asinine. Between that and the commercials on the big screen, it was the most over-the-top, aggressive sponsorship I'd ever seen. I wanted to tell Oldsmobile, `Market if you like, but not like that.'"

To Bernstein, Guster's impromptu comments skewering Oldsmobile from the stage were nothing short of a self-serving betrayal. Even Miller acknowledges that Bernstein fought to get the band on the Rockfest bill and then wouldn't budge when music executives tried to force Guster to play earlier in the day to a smaller crowd to accommodate a hotter, up-and-coming band, Nine Days.

The night before the show, at the Hard Rock Cafe on Ontario Street, Miller and Bernstein exchanged pleasantries at a party welcoming the bands. "For three hours the band was rubbing shoulders with the very people they attacked on stage the next day," Bernstein said.

Bernstein said she would have tried to work something out if the band had come to her before taking the stage. . Miller regrets "putting Michele in the middle of this," but insists "we did the right thing."

"I'm glad we spoke up," he said. "We're just a wimpy college band and we're part of the system. But the scale balancing art and commerce has been tipped too far. The attitude once was that even a sign by a tour sponsor was something to get outraged about. Now the attitude of many sponsors is, `We're going to get away with as much as we can, and they can do whatever they want before the band gets on stage: Blast commercials, hawk T-shirts, have guys wear monkey suits.' And as companies consolidate further, they will gain even more power."

Indeed, SFX controls most of the concert business in North America, and even veteran, best-selling bands such as REM are not immune to its marketing efforts. Before the Georgia band took the stage last year at the SFX-controlled New World Music Theatre, airline commercials blared from the giant video screens flanking the stage. REM manager Bertis Downs was outraged when contacted about the commericals, saying the band wasn't informed ahead of time.

Rockfest promoters acknowledge they didn't tell Guster the specifics of Oldsmobile's marketing efforts ahead of time either. "What's conveyed in advance is the sponsor tie-ins," Bernstein said. As for the possibility that a man in a monkey suit may be hawking T-shirts to Guster's fans minutes before the band performs, Tomasso said Miller and his bandmates had two clear options: "Play the show and we pay you, don't play the show and we don't."

In this case, Guster played but still didn't get paid.

"I'm not going to pay somebody to offend me," Tomasso said. "It's called morals."

In the Guster-Rockfest feud, however, the moral high ground can't be legitimately claimed by either party.

"Nobody is faultless here," Miller said. "We willingly played an event that was essentially about luring people to an arena with a hot bunch of bands and then showing them commercials. I'm not going to be roped into doing that anymore. All this has forced us to think about how we're contributing to the problem."

In a culture that almost takes for granted the pervasive role that multinational corporations play in almost everyone's life, that might be considered a small victory.