Gary James' Interview With The Founder Of Starflight Travel Company
Roy Ericson
Roy Ericson was doing something pretty unique in 1969. He was not only making travel arrangements for the equipment of the top Rock groups of the era, he was also booking their flights, hotels and everything else that went into getting a group from Point A to Point B. More than 140 Rock artists used his services. We're talking Black Sabbath, Areosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, REO Speedwagon, Peter Frampton, Ted Nugent, Jackson Browne, Thin Lizzy, and the list goes on and on. Roy Ericson is still in business and he spoke to us about the history of his company and the challenges he faces today.
Q - Roy, the last time I read anything about you was in a January 2nd, 1979 article in Circus magazine titled, "Mr. Fix It." You must remember that article.
A - Yeah. I wonder if that was a reprint of an article we did in England, But, I do remember the article specifically.
Q - So, that article first appeared in a British publication?
A - Yeah, 'cause I was doing some press over in England at that point. But, maybe not. It was a long time ago.
Q - The obvious question, now that no concerts are being booked, there's no travel arrangements that need to be made. What is your daily life like?
A - I'm taking online astronomy courses.
Q - Astronomy courses?
A - Really. That's what I'm doing.
Q - How does that generate money for your company?
A - Let's be realistic.
Q - Alright.
A - The industry that I'm in, and I bridge two industries. I bridge the hospitality industry and the entertainment industry. Both of those industries are completely in the dumpster. Nobody's making any money. I read an article this morning that there's an expectation that 33% of all hotels in this country (United States) will close if things don't get better very quickly. Daily life is very different. It's like treading water. Please understand, I'm an old guy. I've been doing this since 1969. So, I'm going into my 51st year and never would I have expected that this obviously would ever happen in my lifetime. I'm sure you haven't. Nobody I know has. We do little things. There's three of us and some of our clients are working. They're doing outdoor things. They're doing streaming stuff. I have Trey Anastasio doing eight weeks of streaming concerts from the Beacon in New York City. I was just on the phone with his road manager this morning, with the hotel that we're using. We had a band called Slightly Stupid do two shows in parking lots, one at the Ventura Fairgrounds, California and then down at the Delmar Fairgrounds. I've had Blue Oyster Cult do two outdoor shows, one in New Hampshire, one in Pennsylvania. We have people playing ping-pong doing that. We had Dave Chappelle do almost three months of outdoor shows in his hometown in Yellow Springs, Ohio. So, we're making a little bit of money, but it's nowhere near what we used to when we had a band like Phish or Weezer or many of the other larger bands we do.
Q - You were talking about statistics just a minute ago. I've heard that 90% of the independent venues, performing arts centers, will be out of business.
A - That could very well be propagated by those who want that to happen, who want that to become the narrative so they can buy out these venues. I've heard that on the inside that there are certain promoters and certain people who own venues that are licking their lips in terms of being able to buy places for pennies on the dollar. None of us have crystal balls. We don't know how long this is going to last, but we do know that we will be the last industry to come back, not the hospitality part, but the live entertainment part. I don't know how many people are going to be comfortable in an indoor arena amongst 20,000 other people who are so close that they can smell what they had for dinner. The other point is, when will the bands feel comfortable mounting a show where they have 50 or 60 people on the road. They have multiple buses. They have hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the infrastructure to put on a tour and then two weeks out, one of their guys gets sick, within three days the whole bus is out and they're all quarantining for fourteen days. The economics of that are dreadful.
Q - Here's how to prevent that type of situation: A vaccine in introduced that is safe and everyone gets the vaccine who would put them in a situation like that.
A - Yeah. That is also a therapeutic. If you get sick, you take Thera-Flu and you feel fine. You're expectations of dying or having these long term effects that are being reported all the time don't happen and you'll feel comfortable. I'm not comfortable going out. I eat outdoors every now and then, but I have not been into an indoor facility, an indoor restaurant in seven months, going on eight (months).
Q - We can only hope that this whole pandemic is over with very soon. I see venues are starting to book acts for the summer of 2021. So it looks like there's a glimmer of hope.
A - They only presuppose. For instance, when Phish officially canceled their Summer tour and their Fall tour, the exact same dates in the exact same cities were booked and held for 2021 on the assumption that it's going to happen. Weezer did the same thing. Slightly Stupid did the same thing. All of the bands that have that ability have already positioned themselves for their tours in 2021. The smaller bands, the club bands, there's no way of booking that because those clubs probably won't open.
Q - I've read that Elton John is booking concerts for 2022. So he must feel things will be back to normal then.
A - I think all of the major touring artists, the ones that have the ability to be able to play that far in advance and know their following is going to be there, already have plans for 2022. They might not actually be booked and the venues assigned, but they're talking to Live Nation. They're holding space different places. They know where they're going. The big bands are going to survive and get through this because they have the wherewithal. The little bands are hurting terribly. Not only are the musicians hurting, it's the road crew, people that do the grunt work. They're not working. They haven't worked now in seven months and many of them, many of those people may not come back to the industry.
Q - William Morris laid off forty to fifty percent of their agents.
A - Right, and so did Paradigm lay off a huge chunk. Without question they have no income.
Q - Were you one of the first guys to get involved in making travel arrangements for Rock groups?
A - One of the first three. There was an agency in London. I've not been able to remember the name of that agency for thirty years, but there was an agency in Los Angeles called Journeys Far And Near. I remember that because it was such an unusual name, and then me. That was 1969. My first client was Fleetwood Mac in a very early lineup, long before Lindsey (Buckingham) and the "Rhiannon" days. Them, within a couple of years there were a whole bunch of more in London, a few in New York and a whole bunch more in Los Angeles. Most of those companies are gone a long, long time ago or got eaten up by other agencies. Then in the '80s and '90s there was an explosion and there were hundreds of agencies that do what I do. We'd go every year to a face to face meeting where we'd meet at hotels and we hang with our fellow travel agents, vendors and friends and there's just been a plethora of them.
Q - Do you remember the first concert you went to?
A - It might have been Richie Havens. I was a folkie in those days. It might have been Peter, Paul And Mary. I really think it was Richie Havens, back in New York City in the Bleecker Street days.
Q - You got a job as a manager at Ryder Truck Rentals in New York. I take it you were pretty good at fixing vehicles. Is that how you got the name "Mr. Fix It"?
A - No. I think that it was that I was pretty good at logistically fixing things, getting people to where they needed to go. The long story short is: One day I get a phone call from the local office that there was a road manager that wanted to talk to me. I went from my office down to the garage and I met with a guy by the name of Dinky Dawson, who was not only Fleetwood Mac's sound manager, but he was also their road managers. We at Ryder also had the Ryder One Way business. So, we had locations all over the country and we had trucks everywhere. What Dinky wanted to do was to figure out how we could pre-assign trucks to him in various cities across the country based on his flight schedule. In those days, in the early days of Rock 'n' Roll, there were no massive trucks going with a million pounds of gear. They basically flew everything. A small amount of gear. They got it off the airplane and they put it in a truck and they drove to the venue. That's the way it worked. So, we worked out a schedule. I think in my second meeting with them I asked him "Who does your travel? How do you arrange all of this?" He said be basically bought all of his airline tickets in England, which is the way it worked in those days. They had something called the Visit USA Fare. He would go back to the Holiday Inn or 57th Street and make reservations in hotels for the rest of the tour. I had a friend who was a travel agent, so I called him up and said, "Is there something we can do here to maybe make some money and help those people out?" He said, "Sure." I went back to Dinky and we kind of did a deal. He would tell me what his motel needs were and I did a commission split with my friend. At some point in time I realized that I could make more money out of that than I could make off my salary and I left and started this business.
Q - It must have been a very stressful job working with all of these different personalities. This wasn't a 9 to 5 job, was it? You took the problems you had home with you. How did you avoid getting ulcers?
A - In the early days, even still today, yeah, it's not a 9 to 5 job. It's a 7 day week. You're available 24/7. You have to have the kind of temperament where it really doesn't bother you. I've had many people working for me over the years that couldn't cut it. They couldn't deal with the pressure of taking the business home with them. They couldn't deal with the midnight phone calls and the bus breakdowns and the drunken tour managers who used to call at 3 in the morning when an artist asked them a question and they didn't have the answer. But, I guess it was a labor of love. I still enjoy it. I still enjoy the contact with people and I still enjoy solving problems. Something comes up, you have to deal with it. And believe me, even after 51 years there are still things that'll come up that I haven't have before, especially living with COVID and the way airlines have changed things in February and March (2020) and they continue to evolve. So, it's kind of a learning situation every day.
Q - How reliable were the services that you dealt with? I'm talking the hotels, the restaurants, the planes. Maybe the room wasn't ready when it was supposed to be. Maybe a flight was canceled. Did you run into those kinds of things?
A - Sure. Basically when we first started we were training the hotel industry about our industry, about the needs of the touring artist. I have to imagine I was the first one who created a hotel rider for bands where I basically laid out all the things that we required and asked them to read it and acknowledge it. That went a long way with what we call the Rooming List. At the very beginning I think the hotel industry really embraced us. They were very excited about having stars and musicians. They heard them on the radio and now they were in their hotel. They actually gave us preferential rates. They bent over backwards to make things happen and things did happen, both positively and negatively. There was a period of time, in the '80s especially, when bands had really bad reputations about throwing TVs into swimming pools and tearing up rooms. Those things really did happen. You'd have a hotel that no longer would want artists and if that particular GM (General Manager) or a particular Director Of Sales went to a different hotel, he took along that baggage with him and he wasn't necessarily happy with you. There was a time in the late '80s I would say where hotels would actually pass on the business. That's gone right now. Hotels are pre-coded. Hotels are very interested in having our business, so much in fact that they pay thousands of dollars to go to this meeting, Tour Connection. They're the vendors and we're the buyers. They're there to meet and greet us and chat us up about their property and there are specific people in the sales office who work in the entertainment market. That's how wide spread it is.
Q - I recall in 1981 when The Rolling Stones were in Syracuse, New York to play the Carrier Dome, one television station broadcast the hotel where they were staying. Well, the next thing you know people start showing up in the lobby, hoping to get a glimpse of the band. And you don't know who could be waiting in that lobby.
A - Let's be realistic. There are lots of negatives of having an act that large in your hotel, but overall in the industry, hotels have embraced our business. American, United and Delta have special desks that we work with. It's called the Entertainment/Sports Production Desk. They deal with us in that segment. They want our business.
Q - Don't a lot of the big name acts charter a plane for their tour?
A - Yeah, but the number of big names acts that charter is a very, very small percentage compared with the number of artists that actually charter buses. With the airlines you still have to get from home to the beginning city. You still have to get from the ending city to home. There are bands that will fly their crews on very long runs, a thousand miles or more. They don't want to be in a bus for that many hours if their budgets will hold that. So there's plenty of airline revenue.
Q - Were you a personal manager of any Rock groups?
A - Yes. I managed a group called Tuff Darts and I managed Desmond Child and Rouge back in the late '70s, mid to late '70s.
Q - I take it you didn't like personal management.
A - I think at that particular point in my life I probably would have gone full time into management had those artists been able to break and sustain that business, but they didn't.
Q - You were an on site commander at Watkins Glen Rock Festival in 1973. What does that mean?
A - I was responsible for all of the logistics for the Summer Jam. I brought in all of the supplies. I dealt with the doctors. I dealt with the procurement of medical equipment. I was the guy who called and spoke to the Lt. Governor of the State Of New York. When I told him this thing was going to become a disaster unless they brought in supplies, they helicoptered in supplies. It was an interesting weekend. (laughs)
Q - They had something like 600,000 people at that festival, didn't they?
A - I don't even remember what the numbers were. They were far beyond what we expected to begin with. I was involved with getting the hotel rooms for the three acts (The Allman Brothers Band, The Grateful Dead and The Band), hotel rooms for the staff. Those were all part of my purview in that. I've actually done three other shows at that same venue for Phish.
Q - What I also found in that article on you in Circus magazine is groups would ask you to procure women for them. That's kind of a strange request you wouldn't expect a travel agent to get.
A - Yeah. You have to understand the context of the times, okay? We were talking about the mid to late '70s. That was probably more tongue-in-cheek, from me to the interviewer. There were lots of interesting requests in those days. Managers would do all kinds of silly things to put a smile on the band's faces. I became very friendly with bands. I spent days and days on the road with Yes, days and days on the road with Black Sabbath. I flew in their chartered jets, hung out with them, both business wise and personally. I spent weekends with them and vacations with them. So, my services were beyond the normal travel agency on all levels. And yes, I passed on that because I thought that was both funny and going far beyond my scope. But I also was asked quite honestly by a client at one point in time to go into the t-shirt business with him back in the early '70s. And like an idiot, I said to him, "No. I'm not interested in the rag trade." What an idiot I was because the merchandising business went absolutely ballistic in the '70s.
Q - I'm surprised you didn't see the value in merchandising. It's not that there wasn't a precedent. Look at The Beatles' merchandising.
A - Yeah. It probably was the wrong decision, but then again hindsight is always 20/20. I was in the middle of growing a business. I was working seven days a week, 84 hour stretches. Hiring people, putting out tours. At that particular point it was hard to see the forest for the trees. To be honest with you, it didn't really seem like a great idea at the time simply because I liked what I was doing and I didn't have the time to branch off into it.
Q - Roy, we can only hope that things get back to normal soon for your business and the entertainment business. I also hope that people realize how important everyone is.
A - Yeah. We are so interconnected. And again, how do we bring this business out of this crisis where hotels might not be available because they no longer exist, where venues are closed, where road crew guys are doing completely other jobs in other industries. The only people, strangely enough, who I think probably have fared pretty well in this business, under the circumstances are bus drivers because they're drivers. I know that a lot of the drivers that I come in contact with drive big rigs because there's lots of need for transporting goods. So those guys are working, but their bosses, the ones who own the buses, are sitting with these half-million dollar rolling palaces that are gathering dust in their yards. That's a big problem too. Will those buses survive? And will they be out there to service the client next year in 2021? We don't know that yet.
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