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Hard Rock Cafe ROCKFEST
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Blame the guys in the gorilla masks. The quote from the promoter declaring the concert "a national platform for corporate sponsors to market their products" didn't sit right with Guster singer Ryan Miller. The video screen the size of a five-story high-rise behind the stage that broadcast TV commercials made him feel even worse. But it was the simian-faced fellas firing a car manufacturer's T-shirts into the crowd that convinced Miller that he and his band had made a terrible mistake when they agreed to perform at the Hard Rock Cafe Rockfest, which took place July 22 at the Chicago Motor Speedway in Cicero. "If you want to be indie-rock cool, then you shouldn't accept a check for $5,000 to play a festival called `Hard Rock Café Rockfest brought to you by Oldsmobile,'" said Michele Bernstein, the Hard Rock executive who booked Guster and 11 other bands on the festival, including Metallica, Kid Rock and Stone Temple Pilots. "When their video airs on MTV, there are commercials on before and after," said Chris Tomasso, executive producer of Rockfest. "Maybe they should boycott MTV as well." Guster found it preposterous that they were penalized for tweaking an overly zealous corporate sponsor while one of the festival's other performers, Kid Rock, was paid in full for an act that included bikini-clad go-go dancers and a lengthy homage to kinky sex. "Kid Rock talks about that stuff and they said, `Great job, you spoke to your demographic, here's your money,'" Miller says. "I mispronounce the name of a car, call everyone's attention to how we are being marketed, and they tell us, `There is no way we are paying you.'" Rockfest promoters acknowledge they didn't tell Guster the specifics of Oldsmobile's marketing efforts ahead of time either. "What's conveyed in advance is the sponsor tie-ins," Bernstein said. As for the possibility that a man in a monkey suit may be hawking T-shirts to Guster's fans minutes before the band performs, Tomasso said Miller and his band mates had two clear options: "Play the show and we pay you, don't play the show and we don't." In this case, Guster played but still didn't get paid. "I'm not going to pay somebody to offend me," Tomasso said. "It's called morals." "Nobody is faultless here," Miller said. "We willingly played an event that was essentially about luring people to an arena with a hot bunch of bands and then showing them commercials. I'm not going to be roped into doing that anymore. All this has forced us to think about how we're contributing to the problem." |
