Gary James' Interview With
John Juliano and Anne-Alise Pietruska of
Mellowship Entertainment



Mellowship Entertainment is one of the premier talent agencies and production companies in the United States. With decades of experience between them, John Juliano and Anne-Alise Pietruska are highly regarded as the best in the business. And so, we spoke with both John and Anne about booking entertainment in today's marketplace.

Q - As I understand it, Mellowship Entertainment buys talent and supplies talent for events that includes Fairs. Is that accurate?

John - That's 100% correct. We're not really managing anybody. We're not representing anybody. We're 99% talent buyers. That's what we do for Fairs, Festivals and Casinos also.

Anne - We're more venue program management. So, when we are hired for The Big E for example, we manage their full entertainment program. We're on site. We handle everything from buying the acts to producing it. We oversee the production. We don't do sound or lights or anything like that, but we work with our contractor and see it all the way through.

John - Yeah. As soon as the (tour) bus rolls into the gate, or even before it rolls into the gate at 6 o'clock in the morning, we're on the street waiting for it. We're helping get shuttled out at the end of the night, whether it's a police escort or they're on their own.

Q - That makes for a long day!

John - Yeah, it does. And you've got to wait another hour for the merch guy to settle with you. (laughs)

Q - You say you're not involved in managing an artist, but Mellowship is involved in developing emerging artists. That sounds like a manager's job to me. Do you work with the artist's manager?

John - Well, the emerging artist really is a stage of venue that Anne-Alise started back here in 2017 I think. The other two stages were pretty much "name" or prominent acts, so she developed a program where there were emerging artists with say they had 70% or 80% original music. Again, when you're a local doing a $300, $400, $500 night acts, there's only certain places that you can play. Everybody wants to hear a cover song. So, Anne said maybe there was a need to promote this a little bit more and this was a venue. I had not booked a lot of local acts. Very, very few local acts because you could see them locally at any bar or club throughout the year. Part of our format where we had a lot of free entertainment was we were booking main acts, giving them away for free. I'd say we make money on the back end. We make money on the food and the rides and alcohol. So, that paid for that. But maybe Anne can talk a little more about the emerging artists.

Anne - We did start off working with some local artists, but ultimately with the larger accounts we ended up taking on, it didn't financially make sense with the time commitment, but we do work with many regional artists in the greater Springfield area and beyond. In terms of booking, we're not representing them as agents, but as J.J. (John Juliano) mentioned, the venue at The Big E Easy stage, we developed to give regional artists pursuing original music, a platform that they might not have otherwise. Putting them in front of...

John - I think six is the highest point of a seventeen day (Fair).

Anne - Putting them in front of an audience that they might not have a chance to gain that exposure. It's rewarding to see some of those artists go on to the next level. We do, with MGM Springfield, have a large core audience that we build to that venue as well.

Q - You were able to get Lynyrd Skynyrd at The Big E. Now, if I'm in charge of The Big E, why don't I just pick up the phone and call Skynyrd's agent and book them? Can you get a better price?

John - It's not a case of getting a better deal. When you're strictly a talent buyer for a venue, that's your job pretty much all the time. When you're running a Fair or a Director of a Fair, no offense to any of those folks, but a lot of times they book acts for maybe themselves.

Anne - A lot of Fairs are run by... I say only the top Fairs have a year round staff. Most of them are volunteer based or run by a board. I don't want to diminish it in any way, but bringing in a talent buyer is crucial to having a successful entertainment program from our experience and working with other Fairs. It's all about the relationships with the agents. I've been fortunate to work with J.J. because of his longstanding relationship with the industry and his reputation and being involved in all the things that he has, the CMA, the ACM, serving as the president (of the International Entertainment Buyers Association). So, throughout all that, we have close relationships with a lot of the agencies. Yes, while someone can just pick up the phone and call, they might not get the same...

John - Response that we get maybe.

Anne - Or consideration that we do when presenting offers or trying to book artists.

John - They call us. We get calls from agents all the time 'cause they know this is our business. This is what we're looking for.

Q - Do you engage in block booking as well?

John - Not really, because that's up to bigger buyers than us. We have to work around that pretty much.

Anne - Due to the nature of the Fair industry we really don't do that. There's not many different Fairs that route with us and the you look at the competition we have in this area in general. I'm talking about the Big East specifically. We have all of these competing promoters.

John - But you think about (it), we have two of the biggest casinos in the world, Fox and the Mohegan, sixty and seventy-five miles away from us and trying to compete with that and continue to be the third or fourth largest Fair in North America.

Anne - The rating just came out yesterday, the seventh largest Fair.

John - And again Gary, as you know, ranking is based on attendance. I say it's the number one place, but it's fine, it can rank by attendance. Competition is daunting.

Anne - So, most acts we book together are one-off dates. We're lucky if we can get something routed. We've been fortunate in the past few years to get dates on Live Nation tours. Lucky it just so happened to work out that way. They were looking for a venue to pick up.

John - Right place at the right time.

Anne - Obviously it's lucrative for the Big E crowd to land on some of those dates because we're able to piggyback on Live Nation's marketing or AEG's marketing, although we haven't worked with them.

John - It could happen someday.

Anne - And be included in all those promotions of the artist as well. A lot of times with those one-off dates we don't get the promotion from the artist if they were promoted on a full tour. We've seen the downside of that, especially with younger acts that we book and those that are particularly relying on social media to engage with their audience versus an established Classic Rock act.

Q - Anne, what is your specific role at Mellowship? Is it marketing and publicity? I suppose you could almost say they are one in the same.

Anne - Yeah, it's interesting. Both J.J. and I are business partners. J.J. is always the talking guy, to pick up the phone, and I'm more behind the scenes with the marketing aspect of it. And so, I work with our clients to announce an "on sale," their promotions throughout, their ticketing and signage, branding.

Q - What does the production side of Mellowship Entertainment entail?

John - A producer entails showing up at all the gigs that we book, basically. Very rarely do we book a date where if Anne or I aren't at a date or where we're both at a date or somebody representing our company is there. We did work with a gentleman for a few years who is proud that he books dates and never goes to them and still gets paid. So, he also worked on a commission basis. We work kind of a little differently with some of our other Fairs. We work on kind of a monthly fee that they're paying us rather than commissioning each individual act. We wanted to be one part of the team, whether it was from the finance to the operation. They didn't have a talent buyer there. We were part of the team. We were kind of like outside employees almost. So, we're 24/7 with the company, just like we work there. A couple of places we go to, the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York, we live there for fifteen, sixteen days.

Q - You book the entertainment there?

John - We book the grounds attractions and all the secondary stages and a couple of the grandstand shows. We don't do the large grandstand music entertainment. It's the only thing we don't do. We do the exhibit portions and all that. It's pretty substantial.

Q - Fairs are a seasonal business, Summers and Fall. So, what do you two do to maintain the cash flow the rest of the year? Do you book theatres or colleges?

Anne - It's year round. In the circus business we own a Big Top tent. We have some Fairs starting in Spring in Florida; A lot of the Florida Fairs.

John - The next two weeks, West Palm Beach will start and the South Florida Fair. We'll go to Miami in March. So, there is plenty to do at that time and the way we structured our company, getting paid monthly from these Fairs rather than getting commissions maybe within ninety days. The booking of our business is August, September, October. It kind of keeps our cash flow going month to month. Being in the circus business has opened up some new doors for us early in the year.

Official Website: www.mellowship.com

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