Booking Agents and World Domination

By Peter Nevland - Mar 09 , 2009

I hate booking myself. It’s not that I’m bad at it, afraid to ask for money, or don’t know how to talk to people. Something in me wants to avoid that duty as long as I possibly can. Chalk it up to the peer rejection I dealt with as a child. Mark it down as the idealistic shortcomings of an artist who just wants to do nothing but create in their pampered little world. All I know is that I have to don an armored suit of focused, emotionless energy every time I negotiate shows or contracts for myself. I pretend not to care when they tell me it won’t work out. It’s the part of performing I wish I could avoid.

In all our touring, I constantly sought the person who could relieve me of the booking burden. “You’ll get better shows.” “You’ll get paid more money per show.” “It’ll relieve the tension that arises between you and Paul due to only one of you doing the work.” Every piece of advice from other independent artists told me the benefits of having our own dedicated booking agent. “If Jesus needed John the Baptist, you need someone to promote you,” Roy Williams told me. Where was I going to find John the Baptist? Plus, wasn’t he the weird dude that ate locusts and honey and wore a smelly camel hair coat?

I’ll never forget the day I met Ryan Barnette in the Lexington, Kentucky, airport. Everything in his confidence and attention to detail told me he was a teacher who had done things like this before. He had emailed me several weeks earlier and arranged for Paul Finley and I to fly out to Kentucky, perform for a high school during the day, and then do a community show at night. Instead of a teacher, here was this scruffy looking, 17 year-old revelation standing next to his long-haired, Star Wars-shirted friend. I could only marvel as he led us through his school, fearlessly asking teachers if we could perform for their classes, and showing no signs of disappointment for the rare ones that didn’t. He had no experience—but he had a gift.

We needed someone like that to be our agent – someone who could look an angry polar bear in the eye and offer it a breath mint before he got eaten; someone who believed in us and wouldn’t stop fighting until he’d stopped breathing; someone who could turn the words out of their mouth into solid, concrete reality. If we were ever going to climb the summit of our potential, that person wasn’t me.

The first agent I had ever tried had responded to an ad I put in a music magazine. He fit the bill as to weird looking and sounding, but set us up with crappy shows that paid him more money than us. Subsequent attempts at getting the attention of more reputable agents proved even more fruitless. If they actually answered my emails or phone calls, they would tell me that we just didn’t fit their market. “You should try someone who has connections into spoken word circles,” they would say. Ah, the huge financial draw of spoken word circles. We were going to have to find someone who wasn’t already in the music industry.

Well-meaning fans often offered to help us out with our booking. They dreamed with us about possibilities and wanted to get us on stages where the whole world could see us perform. If they quickly and consistently responded to my communication and possessed entrepreneurial talent or previous booking-related experience, I figured I could train them how to use their skills for our mutual benefit. But when I would turn over my contact list to them, they would always take a couple months to do nothing and send an apologetic email confessing how they had been paralyzed with fear. I would sigh a heavy sigh and pick up the burden again, having to work harder to make up for lost time.

Kevin didn’t impress me when I first met him at our first Soul Survivor festival. He was short, had a funny English accent and showed up everywhere. He obviously had loved our performance, but seemed to have this attitude that he deserved extra favors, backstage passes, or something free. I made sure he signed up for our free email list and talked to him like everyone else.

Over the next year, Kevin sent me an email or two. He told me he had moved to Brazil and was booking for a band named Strive. Their name and music ability left me with a vacant spot in the part of my brain that gets excited. I felt bad that Kevin had chosen a going-nowhere band. After our second Soul Survivor Festival in 2006, I got an email from Kevin telling me that he was booking a tour in Brazil for Delirious, a major Christian band. “Is this the same Kevin I remember?” I thought.

By this point I was desperate for booking help. Soul Survivor had opened up so many opportunities for us in England and the rest of the world that I couldn’t keep up with the work, much less keep writing. I remember my eruption of emotion late one night: “What has to explode for the clouds to break!!!” I yelled. “God, you’ve gotta do something, ’cause I can’t keep on like this!” I didn’t hear anything. I finished taking out my contacts and went to bed.

The next morning when I turned on my computer I saw Kevin McIntyre’s Skype status change to “online.” “I’ve got to talk to him,” I thought, and quickly phoned him over the computer. He told me that his present relationship with Strive was coming to an end, due to their unreasonable demands and lack of appeal. He had cold-called 2,000 people just to get 20 shows for them on a tour of South America. “2,000 people?!” I thought. “Anybody who calls that many people for a band he doesn’t even like that much is impressive.”

Our further conversation demonstrated to me that he believed in our potential, respected my vision, character, and business sense. It didn’t bother me that he lived in Brazil. I had just hired Dan Kingsley, from England, to design and update our website on a continual basis and asked Tom Coates, also from England, to be our Myspace promoter. The Internet had made the world a much smaller place, and Spoken Groove was becoming an international touring entity, rather than one bounded by the shores of America’s manifest destiny. Kevin was beginning to fit my criteria.

We emailed back and forth, with Kevin answering my questions faster than he said he would every time. When I asked him if he would be willing to help us out with our booking, he took time to think about it, asked his fiancée and pastor what they thought, and then responded with an enthusiastic “Yes!” He put together a proposed strategy without me formulating it for him. He started making contacts for us before we had signed a contract agreement to define our business relationship. Pretty soon, Roy Williams flew him to Austin to impress upon Kevin the opportunity that lay before him in becoming the booking agent for Spoken Groove. Roy also demonstrated his commitment to us by offering to pay Kevin’s monthly bills until money started rolling in from the shows he would book for us. All of us started making plans for world domination . . . .