Dom Gagliardi Presents

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.- Something was unusual about the cast of spectators present at last week’s special Town Council meeting: many of them were Jackson Hole residents under the age of 40.

The hearing, about two highly coveted retail liquor licenses, had been greatly anticipated by the group of hopeful entrepreneurs applying for the permits. Some of the Town Council members, on the other hand, might have welcomed the contest with a small measure of dread – not everyone comes out a winner. Retail liquor licenses can be a thorny issue in this community.

The most lenient of the alcohol permits, a retail liquor license allows an establishment to operate as a nightclub, a package store, or some hybrid of the two. Generally speaking, one of these permits tends to remain in an entity’s hands until it is sold for a small fortune on the open market. The most high-profile exchange of a permit occurred in the early aughts, when the owner of old Spirits of the West liquor store sold its license to Smith’s Food and Drug for a sum purported to be around $1 million.

Lately, some who belong to the under-40 population have said the retail liquor license situation in Jackson is part of a clear snap shot of the older generation’s economic hegemony.

It’s unclear whether the elected officials sensed this, but the board swiftly honed in on the proposal to turn the underused Pink Garter Theatre into a year-round venue and bar. With few delays, they issued a license to Dom Gagliardi, a Pink Garter partner and spokesman.

A moment later, as business proceeded, Gagliardi quietly slipped out of the meeting. He made a quick call on his Blackberry and then returned. Within minutes, news about the Pink Garter receiving a retail liquor license was posted to a fan page on Facebook called “Downtown Venue Campaign JH.” Nearly 800 Facebook users have mouse-clicked their support for the venue, which to date is one of the largest social networking responses for a local issue.

It had been a big week for Gagliardi, whose reach as a concert promoter is extending. A day earlier, Gagliardi’s company Poppa Presents announced that it had booked Widespread Panic, the top touring jam band out of Athens, GA, to play a Fourth of July show at the historic Spud Drive-In near Driggs, Idaho. That show will undoubtedly draw fans from across the country, especially the south, and is expected to sell out. The retail liquor license capped a triumphant week for Gagliardi, nevermind that it was only Tuesday.

West Coast roots
Dominic Gagliardi grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. The youngest of four children by a first-generation Italian-American father and a mother with California roots, Gagliardi was sent to all-boys Catholic schools. Before Gagliardi was even an adolescent, his eldest brother would ocassionally take him out cruising in his tricked-out lowrider, blasting music by 70s rock icons like Journey, and the African-American funk and R&B groups of that era.

At the age of nine, Gagliardi saw his first live concert. An uncle who managed the Frank Gehry-designed Concord Pavillion surprised the family with tickets to see the Commodores and Luther Vandross. “We sat front row, dead center, in the pit, and the Commodores were in full-blown form,” he said, describing the experience of seeing a lineup that included Lionel Richie. For Gagliardi, that would be the first live show of thousands.

“It’s the foundation for what I do,” Gagliardi told me recently at the Snake River Brew Pub.

In the early 90s, Gagliardi moved to Seattle for college. The city’s homegrown grunge music scene that defined the early 90s sound had just reached lift-off.
“The first day I got to Seattle, a girl walked up to me and handed me Nevermind,” he said of the first time he heard Nirvana’s breakthrough album, which altered the course of music. “I had no idea what was going on in that city. I just randomly picked the University of Washington and I moved to Seattle when it was hitting on its full rock‘n’roll pulse.”

But bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden had already moved beyond Seattle’s clubs, and Gagliardi realized he was five minutes too late to witness a seminal moment in rock‘n’roll history. “I definitely have a level of ‘fomo,’ which is the fear of missing out,” he said, eating a pub-style French fry. “I felt like I was playing catch up to see all these bands I wanted to see, which is why I’m so stoked to do what I’m doing with the Pink Garter.”

In case you don’t happen to follow contemporary music, many regard this to be an exciting renaissance. Online music blogs and a growing demand for festivals have resulted in a kind of music meritocracy that makes the listener feel more empowered. “Music is still going off and we have an opportunity to take these bands before they have a chance to become these big national acts, and watch them rise up,” Gagliardi said.

A guru appears
Gagliardi may have just missed out on the days when Seattle’s top grunge bands performed in the intimacy of a local venue, but he’s had other brushes with the stuff of legend. During one memorable concert near the close of an earlier chapter in rock history, he encountered the man who would later become his guru.
“I think I was 17, and Guns N’ Roses and Skid Row were about to play a big show at Shorline Amphitheatre when I scored some last-minute tickets,” he said. Local TV news stations had been airing reports all day that the authorities were concerned fans might get out of control at a hard rock concert co-billed by two of that era’s most wildly provocative bands. “There was all this concern about all the craziness that was supposed to happen at that show,” Gagliardi said.

Before headliner Guns N’ Roses took the stage, the legendary promoter Bill Graham appeared at the microphone. At 60, Graham had seen rock music evolve from the 1960s, when he was instrumental at Woodstock and forming long relationships with psychadelic bands, including the Grateful Dead. Now he would address a generation of rock fans who worshiped decadent hair bands whose members commonly wore makeup. (Though, considering Graham escaped Nazi Germany and lost most of his family during the Holocaust, this probably wasn’t that big of a deal to him.)
“Bill Graham got on stage and said to the crowd, ‘You guys know what you’re doing, have a good time,’” Gagliardi recalled. A possibly ugly scene had been avoided “just by Bill Graham making his presence felt.”

Graham stepped off the stage and headed straight down a center aisle, passing near Gagliardi’s seat. “I stepped out into the aisle and said, ‘Mr. Graham,’ and shook his hand.” It was 1991. Graham would soon after die in a helicopter crash while leaving another concert. (Ironically, Graham and two others were killed following a Huey Lewis and the News concert at Concord Amphitheatre, where Gagliardi had seen his first show.)

Though he now considers the encounter a significant moment in his life, Gagliardi for a time put it out of his mind. He wouldn’t remember that moment until he moved to Jackson Hole, in late 1996, sometime after he began booking bands for the Mangy Moose. While reading a collaborative biography about Graham composed of freestanding quotes, titled Bill Graham: My Life Inside Rock and Out, it all came back to him. “I realized how important that dude was to, like, the entire music industry,” Gagliardi said.

The book has become a bible to him. When we met, he brought along his worn copy, one part of which is held together by a binder clip, while a crumpled back section suggests part of the book has gotten wet. It appears the book has been consulted many times over the years. “Bill Graham looked at everything in the terms of a fan,” Gagliardi said, “he looked at a show in the way that you want to experience it.”

But when Gagliardi moved to the valley, in late 1996, he assumed it would mean giving up world-class live music. That attitude changed one winter several years ago, when a banner powder day concluded with a sold-out show at the Mangy Moose with legendary funk and soul jazz saxophonist Maceo Parker.
“For me, it was like I left cities to move to the mountains,” he said, “and it dawned on me that we can have both – the mountains and the music.”

And so Dom Gagliardi found his calling as a music promoter.  Over the years, he moved on from the Mangy Moose and, more recently, Front Street, the formation with which he brought in many of the hip- hop acts that have ever performed in Jackson Hole.

Nothing happens overnight
In the last three or four years, Gagliardi, along with a cast of partners and associates too large and convoluted to make it into this story, has staged bigger and bigger shows. The bands that have played the first three Jackson Hole Music Fests – Spearhead, Ozomatli and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, which often command top billing at music festivals – appeared to be inspired by spirited Jackson Hole audiences, despite cold weather and, occasionally, snow. “The community here loves this lifestyle and those bands could feel it,” Gagliardi said.

Widespread Panic is just one of a handful of acts set to play the bucolic Spud Drive-In this summer, but it’s the one that promises to be the next show to put the Jackson Hole area on the destination concert map. Panic at the Spud may test how well Gagliardi can apply another rule he picked up from Bill Graham: “A promoter’s role is being that bridge between the performers and the audience.”

Meanwhile, the Pink Garter needs some work. Gagliardi and his partners have plans to build a new glass-enclosed barroom called The Rose in a room currently used to store hunting trophies that are going neglected. The Pink Garter is just a part of the exciting little world of live music and culture Gagliardi is working to construct around himself. It’s all he can do to keep himself planted in one place.
“I’d be on the road tomorrow [traveling to a concert] if I could,” he said. “Why get on the road now?” JHW

Photo by Cameron R. Neilson
Dom Gagliardi

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