Akron music fans can rejoice.
There is not one, but two new reasons, for national touring acts to stop in Akron.
As of Thursday, the Goodyear Theater and soon the adjacent and less formal Goodyear Hall, both located in the East End development, are open for concert business with a good opening weekend of shows that will ideally serve as a harbinger of many interesting musical things to come.
Denny Young, founding partner and president of the Elevation Group overseeing the renovations and booking the venues, said there are about 150 interesting musical things to come in the next year or so as the Goodyear venues establish themselves on the Northeast Ohio concert scene.
Young has a couple of decades of experience booking shows in the area during his years working at global marketing and talent managing IMG, where he met Elevation’s Group’s other main man, Steve Lindecke.
Before that, Young spent a decade at Belkin, so he is intimately familiar with the venues and the market.
Elevation Group also manages local active rockers Red Sun Rising, which scored its second No. 1 hit on the Billboard rock charts this past week and is behind the upcoming two-day LaureLive concert headlined by Grace Potter and O.A.R. on the grounds of Laurel School in Chester Township in June.
Young took me on a tour of the still-under-construction facility — actually the box office won’t quite be ready for the Pumpkins show — and both the theater and the hall, which is basically a gussied-up gymnasium, look to be good places to see a show.
The theater has that new-theater smell and has been fully renovated with all the ornate architecture given a new paint job. The first six rows of the theater are removable for those shows that require a pit.
The seats are all spiffy and new.
After standing downstairs and in the front and back of the balcony, there really doesn’t appear to be a bad seat in the house. Obviously, we’ll collectively discover the sound and mix quality of the room during the initial shows.
But it’s a brand-new sound system and a few subtle acoustic upgrades have been added to the theater so it should be good and clear.
Overall, the theater retains the look and feel of the historical building’s early 20th century design and because of its historic status and the tax breaks afforded the developers, there are some significant aspects with which they simply could not mess with.
Another interesting aspect of the new venues for folks who like to groove and eat is the partnership with Red Frog Events, which owns the Firefly Music Festival and runs concession for the Electric Forest, the popular summer music festival in Virginia.
For folks who haven’t been out to a festival in awhile, music festival cuisine has become a point of pride and nearly a scene unto itself.
“We gotta make it different. We got to make it special. We got to make people feel like there’s great value here and part of the experience and why festivals are so successful is the whole culinary aspect. And instead of being like House of Blues, where I can get a beer and pretzels, let’s have good food and different kinds of drink fare,” Young said name-checking the Cavs and the Indians at Progressive Field as places offering more than hot dogs, deep-fried things on sticks and cheap beer.
“You want people to get food here, and capture that revenue and you want people to walk away saying, ‘Amazing food, amazing experience,’ and ultimately people are coming to shows not just for the show but for the experience,” Young said.
Additionally, the hall, which holds 3,500 and beyond, is where the weirder and potentially wilder stuff will happen. Aside from some audio enhancements, it has been largely left alone.
“This is where we’re going to do alternative,” Young said. “We’re going to do active rock and young pop-country type stuff.”
The hall is also an unusually sized venue in the area, which should help attract more touring acts.
“There is no venue in Northeast Ohio with that capacity; the only other one is Jacobs Pavilion and that’s only open seasonally. So there are bands that bypass Akron, Canton and Cleveland,” Young said.
Already booked into the hall is a full-on rock show featuring 1980s Sunset Strip rockers Poison frontman Brett Michaels and Ratt along with Warrant and Firehouse in August.
“That show is going to do well,” Young said noting that the hall is also a natural setting for EDM-themed concert “events” where the high ceilings, no chairs and tough flooring allow for all kinds of fun audio and visual accoutrements. EDM stands for Electronic Dance Music.
As for this opening weekend’s shows, the Smashing Pumpkins (Billy Corgan, drummer Jimmy Chamberlain and some other people) did a brief electro-acoustic In Plainsong tour in 2015, but after good notices and ticket sales, it’s been extended twice.
The show features Corgan alone and then with the band playing an interesting cross-section of Pumpkins tunes including a Siamese Suite featuring several songs from their debut Siamese Dream as well as a duet with opener Liz Phair, making her return to active touring duty, and some surprise covers.
Akron gets the distinction of being the first show on singer/songwriter/fedora collector Gavin DeGraw’s U.S. acoustic tour, having finished a run through Europe playing platinum-selling adult-contemporary hits such as I Don’t Want To Be, Who’s Gonna Save Us and Not Over You.
Ultimately, having two more good-sized roofed venues that conveniently fill a hole in the Northeast Ohio venue market should be good for all music lovers and concert-goers and help keep artists from “skipping” us when it comes time to set the tour itinerary.
Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758. Read his blog, Sound Check Online, at www.ohio.com/blogs/sound-check, like him on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/1lNgxml and/or follow him on Twitter @malcolmabramABJ.