Monthly Archives: July 2008

In Business Q and A
John Nelson
Vice president of AEG Live
Interviewed by Richard N. Velotta / Staff Writer

In 2000 some executives with Concerts West, an offshoot of AEG, a subsidiary of the Anschutz Co., had this crazy idea that they could sign a big-name entertainer to a multiyear contract at a Las Vegas entertainment venue and that they could regularly fill the building.

Critics scoffed, but John Nelson and one of his associates, John Meglen, proved them wrong when they signed Celine Dion to perform at Caesars Palace’s then-new Colosseum and in 2003 began an unprecedented five-year run with her “A New Day …” show.

Nelson joined Concerts West – now AEG Live – in 2000 and became vice president of the company that has become a worldwide powerhouse in live entertainment with 13 regional offices and corporate ties to performance venues around the globe.

Nelson, who has a decade of experience as an entertainment producer and promoter, oversees the development of new entertainment business opportunities locally for AEG.

In Las Vegas, AEG operates the Colosseum and signed similar long-term entertainment contracts with Elton John, Bette Midler and Cher. AEG also operates The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel and will have an even greater role in the Las Vegas entertainment scene with a new 20,000-seat arena being built by Harrah’s Entertainment east of Bally’s Las Vegas and two venues at Boyd Gaming’s Echelon project.

Nelson talked with In Business Las Vegas about cutting deals with big-name entertainers and AEG’s plans:

chicagotribune.com
The wealth of hard times
Economic slump spurs riches in the arts
By Sid Smith Tribune critic
July 27, 2008

Job insecurity, high gas prices, intimations of scarcity in the American land of plenty.

So it went in 1976 when then young chanteuse Bette Midler released her third album, cheekily titled “Songs for the New Depression.” In place of her trademark Andrews Sisters and 1950s revivals, there was the gloomy “Mr. Rockefeller,” about a down-and-outer desperately trying to reach the emblematic rich man to ask for a handout, using her last dime for the call.

It’s no surprise pop singers, artists and storytellers chronicle economic downturns. Happy feet only carry you so far even in boom years—trouble is interesting, goes an old fiction-writing saw.

But there’s more to it than lucre. Artists and entertainers are sensitive souls who absorb, intuit and reflect what goes on around them. Deprivation, loss, social dislocation and poverty all inform great art and have so since time immemorial. Even those animal drawings on caves tell of a timeless need: food.

Like Midler’s collection, which also includes a bluesy ode to the alcoholic palliative, “Drinking Again,” various artists through the years, right up to recent days, have left a record of hard times, through various decades, plaintive cries for empathy and paeans to strength and forbearance.

Our problems are nothing new; they just seem new right now. We read in Job, one of the oldest and still most resonant treatments of human suffering, “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me.” And the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yeah, right.

Here’s a subjective sample of works worth checking out or revisiting.