Sonoma’s Jerry Seltzer has the ticket to success

TIM CURLEY 

INDEX-TRIBUNE CORRESPONDENT | August 27, 2018, 8:31PM 

| Updated 6 hours ago.

Way back in 1976, Fleetwood Mac played a tremendous show at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. It marked the public debut of a new addition to the band, the duo of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Fans heard “Landslide” for the first time that night. Tickets were $5. Two tickets, $10.

Now that Lindsey Buckingham is gone, and the oft-out, oft-in-again Nicks is back, fans have a chance to see them in November at the Oracle Arena in Oakland. Two tickets for pretty good seats at the Sunday night show will run you $552.45.

How did this happen? It’s more than simple inflation: According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, your $10 in 1976 is now worth $44.29. So, again, why are concert tickets so expensive? Well, things have changed. People aren’t buying records like they used to, and touring is the primary income source for bands these days.

And then, of course, there was Jerry Seltzer.

Jerry Seltzer, 86, has lived in Sonoma Valley for 25 years. And he’s a man with keen insight into – and his finger prints all over – the reason your 2018 Fleetwood Mac tickets will lend whole new meaning to the chorus, “yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.”

After a long and storied career as the commissioner of Roller Derby, promoting the sport his father created in 1935, Seltzer moved from roller skates into the ticketing business. He launched the BASS (Bay Area Seating Service) ticket agency in the early 1970s. From 1983 until 1993, Seltzer was the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Ticketmaster. Locally, he co-founded the Sonoma Valley Film Festival, now the Sonoma International Film Festival (SIFF).

Legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen used to use the term “ducat” when referring to tickets. Seltzer, who knew Caen, knows a thing or two about ducats. “The ticket business was 30 years of my life,” Seltzer said.

“Ticketing is the key to any event.” Still, Seltzer believes today’s ticket-selling and buying process “is so subverted now.”

As the owner of the San Francisco Bay Bombers roller derby team, he had an inside track to promoting the other events held at the Cow Palace. There, he met the Beatles, as he handled the ticket sales to their show at the famed arena on Aug. 19, 1964. (That concert was the opening night of the Beatles’ first-ever concert tour of North America.)

Seltzer recalled the early days of home-grown rock ‘n’ roll in San Francisco, and a young Bill Graham, the late concert promoter who died in 1991 when his helicopter crashed into an electric tower above Highway 37 near Sonoma Creek. Graham’s concert promotion company, Bill Graham Presents, was just getting going in the 1960s, and Seltzer wanted a piece of the action. Seltzer met with Graham at his office in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District. Graham said to Seltzer, “Give me your best honest con.” And that Seltzer did.

Until that time, the promoter kept the value of the ticket price, minus about 25 cents. Seltzer proposed a deal to Graham, which would give him exclusive rights to sell Bill Graham Presents tickets. It gave Graham the entire value of the ticket, and introduced a 25-cent “service charge” to the customer – meaning more money to the promoter, and a new service-charge revenue stream to everybody else, and the creation of a lucrative incentive for ticket-selling businesses everywhere.

The deal changed the face of ticketing in North America. Promoting tickets sales increased attendance. It brought more money to the artist, the event promoter and the ticket seller.

Seltzer also recognized the potential of smaller events. He cut a deal with nightclub owner David Allen of the Boarding House in San Francisco to presell tickets to his events. What had been a “walk-up” event became a pre-sale ticketed event. BASS sold tickets to events at the Boarding House headlined by Dolly Parton, Neil Young, Steve Martin and Bob Marley, to name but a few. Seltzer shook all their hands, too.

Soon all concert venues were selling tickets in advance. But the pre-sale ticket, sold in advance, created another problem, one that is still with us today: Scalping. 

Seltzer has no shortage of stories about Bill Graham’s hatred of scalpers, and his efforts to thwart their attempts at reselling tickets. Graham would approach the people selling tickets outside a sold-out Grateful Dead show at Winterland and ask them to “…name two Dead songs.” If they could not, they were given the bum’s rush. 

Computerized tickets sales helped Seltzer begin to understand the buying habits and tendencies of concert goers. He noticed that most ticket sales occurred in the few days just before an event. One concert, by a young Willie Nelson, was booked into the Oakland Arena. Ticket sales seemed strong, and Seltzer convinced the promoter to move the show from the relatively small, 4,500-seat arena to the Oakland Coliseum, now Oracle Arena, of 14,000 seats. Bingo. Sold-out show, and several thousand extra fans saw Willie early on.

Seltzer supervised tickets sales to the Band’s legendary “Last Waltz” farewell concert on Thanksgiving Day, 1976. He worked with Steve Wozniak on the US Festival, held on Labor Day weekend in 1982. The last day of the US Festival opened with “Breakfast with The Grateful Dead,” and it closed with Fleetwood Mac – that same Fleetwood Mac playing in Oakland in November. 

They will bring with them massive sound gear, state-of-the-art video equipment, stage hands and film crews, and more guitars than you could play in a week. 

Why have tickets gotten so expensive? That’s a simple question with a complicated answer. As Fleetwood Mac and Jerry Seltzer can attest: Yesterday’s gone.