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The Business in Music

Every concert at Albuquerque's Journal Pavilion offers a hardy crew of merchandise workers the chance to gamble on a potentially big payoff — or hardly anything at all.

by DARRICK HURST

It’s six hours 'til show time, and Ricky Stiles is backstage at the Journal Pavilion doing what he does before every show — counting.

“T-shirts, sweatshirts, jackets, bracelets, CDs, they all have to be organized and accounted for,” Stiles says to his team of workers.

Photo by Darrick Hurst

The main entrance that concert goers pass through at Albuquerque's Journal Pavilion.

Stiles is the merchandise manager for Event Merchandising, Inc. at Albuquerque’s Journal Pavilion. The facility, located at the Regional Recreation Complex south of town, was completed in June 2000 and is managed and operated by SFX Entertainment as part of a public/private partnership with Bernalillo County. Stiles has been at the Pavilion managing merchandise for the musical acts that play here since it opened its doors, he said.

Here, in the midst of a sea of idling luxury tour buses parked behind the outdoor concert venue, Stiles and his crew are already hard at work unloading box after box of merchandise from a procession of far-less luxurious U-haul trucks.

“We’ve got three groups tonight [Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco and N.E.R.D],” Stiles said, “and we’ve got lots of [stuff] to sort through before we can get it out to the [merchandise] stands.”

Stiles’ crew spread out the merchandise on long tables as soon as the boxes are opened. Each shirt, jacket, or whatever else happens to come out of the tattered tour boxes must be sorted according to size, color, artwork, and style.

“The sooner we get everything organized and counted, the better,” Patrick Sandoval, one of the crew members said. “But getting the count accurate, that’s what’s really important at this stage.”

The merchandise crew has to be meticulous about monitoring its inventory numbers because those figures are crucial for determining overall sales at the end of the show, and ultimately how much each worker will be paid, Sandoval said.

“Once — it was at Ozzfest last year — a whole box of merch went missing at the end of the night, and that meant hundreds of dollars,” Sandoval said. “We’d all put in, like, 20 hours work straight that day, but only ended up getting paid about a hundred dollars for the day’s work because the missing money had to come out of our paychecks. The worst part was someone found the box a few weeks later under a table.”

Photo by Darrick Hurst

The sun sets behind the Journal Pavilion as the night's concert is about to begin.

“Yeah, that sort of mistake has a way of motivating you to pay attention to what you’re doing,” said Noreen Gurule, another crew member.

After the team spends the better part of three hours sorting and counting and recounting all of the merchandise, Stiles makes his way through the items, creating a log of the inventory. Once he is confident the numbers are accurate, Stiles divides the merchandise into four groups. Each group will go to one of the three merchandise stands around the Pavilion; the fourth group will remain backstage in the event any stand sells out of items.

“My crew is paid 10 percent of whatever the profits are,” Stiles said. “If we make good money, they get a nice chunk of change. If we make nothing, well we’re all in it together.”

The crew splits up the mountains of sweatshirts, t-shirts and other merchandise according to Stiles’ directions and then hauls the items out to stands around the Pavilion.

For these crew workers, this isn’t a job that pays well enough to be a main source of income.

“This is really just a way for me to earn a little extra cash on the side,” Justin Ruth, one of the workers said. “I work as a screen printer, mainly. This isn’t a job you should take expecting to be able to make rent — you pretty much never know how much you’re going to make at a show.”

According to the workers, the night’s concert has already sold more than 10,000 tickets, so the group is hoping for a good night’s pay.

“Maybe we’ll pull in $450 like we did at that Rob Zombie show awhile back,” worker Victoria Torres said. “That was sweet.”

When the crews arrive at their empty merchandise stands, they set to work arranging the merchandise displays, hanging the sweatshirts and posting prices on the items.

At stand No. 1, located to the right of the main stage, the crew works to arrange the items in the stands, which now seem to be nearly overflowing with the shirts. Crew member Gilbert Padilla stops and looks up at the sky.

“Looks like we might be in for some rough weather tonight,” Padilla said. “Damn, I hate bad weather in these little shacks.”

The merchandise stands are little more than shacks with countertops across the open fronts.

“I can’t believe people spend this kind of money,” said Saudika Hardy as she held up a sweatshirt with a $65 price tag attached to it. “People will show up to these shows, have no teeth in their head, but be willing to drop $400 on shirts — it’s crazy.”

As the crew assemble the stand’s display, it once again sets to counting merchandise, and a crowd of people has formed atop the hill leading into the Pavilion.

“They make the people stay up top until 6 [p.m.] now,” said Padilla. “Brace yourself for the rush when they open the flood gates.”

Indeed, when 6 p.m. comes, the crowd of people that rushes down the hill and swarms the merchandise stand could be compared to a kind of flood. Immediately, the crew is in immersed in its work, swapping cash and swiping credit cards for shirts and trinkets emblazoned with various artists’ logos or images. One item that’s shaping up to be a particularly popular item this night are white “Kanye glasses” with horizontal blinds across the eyepieces in the style of those the rapper Kanye West is wearing in a $15 promo shot hanging in the back of the stand.

“Give me the red sweatshirt,” one woman shouts at the crew. “No, no, the other one, I want the black one. XL, no, gimme a large and an extra large.”

This shouting customer is not out of the ordinary. In fact, she seems to be not unlike any number of the other demanding patrons that the crew hurriedly rushes around the stand to serve.

As the first musical group takes to the stage somewhere off to the right, the pounding of bass drowns out the loud noise of the crowd.

Over the course of the night, the crew presses on; selling item after item, until nearing the end of the concert, the stand is nearly bare. The workers even resort to pulling down the display items to sell by the end of the night.

When the concert finally wraps up near midnight, the crowd of concert goers has left, only their garbage strewn around the pavilion to show they’d been there. The merchandise crew begins arranging the few items left unsold.

“Let’s count this [stuff] and get outta here,” Hardy said. “God, I could use a beer right now.”

The workers take the remaining merchandise and money backstage to the tables and begin sorting and counting what’s collectively left from the stands. The whir of money counting machines echoes from Stiles’ office, and Stiles paces back and forth in front of his desk.

“Uh, oh, Ricky looks pissed,” Ruth said. “That can’t be good.”

Stiles tells the crew to count the merchandise again. The numbers aren’t adding up, he says.

Again, the workers count through the items, writing down the numbers on papers and handing them to Stiles. As time crawls by for the workers, it becomes apparent that their pay won’t be as good as they’d hoped.

This night is no exception. As the crew begins boxing up the remaining merchandise and loading it on U-haul trucks headed to the next tour stop in Denver, Stiles announces that the night’s profits have inexplicably come up $2,000 short.

“Guess I’ll be having a cheap beer in that case,” Hardy said.

As the clock strikes 3 a.m., the crew collects its checks — $119 each for the day’s work — and began heading home.

“Next concert man, I’ll see you there?” Padilla said to Ruth.

“Yep, I’ll be here making the big bucks and having fun,” Ruth said. “See you at the Rush show.”

Written May 1, 2008

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