Backstage Auctions’ consignor Walter O’Brien opens up about managing the careers of some of the biggest acts in heavy metal history.
By Peter Lindblad
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| Walter O'Brien |
All the stars aligned for Walter O’Brien and Concrete Management during one amazing two-week period in 1989, even though the music-industry veteran almost didn’t answer when opportunity knocked. Signing a little ol’ band from Texas
Concrete was fast on its way to becoming heavy metal kingmakers. And it all started with an impromptu trip to Texas that O’Brien had been dreading, one that friends like Derek Shulman, formerly of the U.K. progressive-rock favorites Gentle Giant and later a music industry big shot at PolyGram Records and other labels, urged him to take.
At the time, O’Brien was representing Metal Church and trying to extricate the band from Elektra Records, who wasn’t doing much for Metal Church Metal Church
“I went to him and I said I need a deal for Metal Church Dallas
True, Pantera did start out as glam-metal dandies, and they had the shiny stage clothes and teased hair to prove it. But when singer Phil Anselmo joined Pantera, a sea change occurred. Ditching the glam look, Pantera also transformed their sound into a swirling vortex of thick, aggressive, adrenaline-fueled riffs, driving bass and pummeling drums, made all the more evil by the trademark Anselmo growl. O’Brien wasn’t aware of just how much Pantera had changed.
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| Steer Horns Given to Walter from Pantera Only Texas boys would think of this and yes they wanted him to put it on the hood of his car. He didn't, but it is featured in the auction |
So O’Brien went, but only on the condition that Ross had to provide that limo and a hotel room. “And he was all excited,” said O’Brien. “I said, ‘I’m not going to like them, but for you I’ll come. And, of course, I went there and they were the most unbelievable live band I’d ever seen.”
Soon thereafter, Michael Alago, the man who signed Metallica to Elektra, knocked on O’Brien’s door with another proposition. “He was at Geffen, and he felt bad for what Elektra had done to [Metal Church ], and he said, ‘I just signed this great new New York
Though he was too wrapped up in trying to break Pantera to take over White Zombie himself, O’Brien, who recognized the band’s potential, passed them off to a man who worked for him named Andy Gould.
“He had a bunch of bands that were just going nowhere fast like Princess Pang and … two or three others, and I went, ‘Andy, listen. Geffen really wants us to manage this band, White Zombie, and the record is unbelievable, but I just don’t have time,’” explained O’Brien. “And he listened to it, and he says, ‘This is a great record. Sure I’ll do it. And that was how we picked up Pantera and White Zombie in a couple of weeks or so. It changed everything.”
And in the end, O’Brien got the last laugh after everybody, it seemed, thought he’d lost his mind in signing the two bands.
“Funny thing, everybody we knew in the business thought we were nuts,” he said. “Everybody uniformly thought these two bands are going nowhere. And they turned out to be the biggest bands we worked with ever.”
One of the biggest consignors in Backstage Auctions’ upcoming “Rock Gods ‘N Metal Monsters Auction,” scheduled for Oct. 31-Nov. 7, with a special preview slated for Sunday, Oct. 24, O’Brien has long history in heavy metal and hard rock. In his 30-plus years in the music business, O’Brien did it all, from promotion and publicity to marketing and artist management. Working at the grass-roots level and exhausting all avenues of promotion, O’Brien helped propel acts such as Anthrax, Ministry and Winger, in addition to Pantera and White Zombie, to the top of the heap.
As one might expect, O’Brien has accumulated a vast collection of music memorabilia over the years, and he’s put most of it in Backstage Auctions’ hands to sell. Cleaning house wasn’t so easy for him, though his reasons for doing it are understandable.
“When I closed the company down, I turned 50,” said O’Brien. “I retired. I figured 32 years was enough in the business. And Pantera had broken up, and then I went back to finish my journalism degree, which is what I do for a living now. And of course what happened was about three days before my final exam, Dimebag [Darrell of Pantera] got murdered. And that was a whole other … for me that was it. I always in the back of my head said, someday, Phil will get better [he’d been fighting a drug problem] and they’ll bury the hatchet. Wouldn’t it be great to go out and see those guys play live again? And of course now that’ll never happen. And I’ve just been carrying all this stuff around and collecting it since I was a kid. You just get to a point where it’s just too much. I’m moving to a different house, and I just couldn’t pack it up one more time. So it was time to downsize and go a little Zen.”
O’Brien’s loss could be your gain. A previous auction sold all of O’Brien’s Beatles items and material he’d gathered while working with Peter Gabriel and Genesis. Talking about what he consigned for the metal auction, O’Brien said, “Of course there’s a lot of Pantera stuff – special items and things the band gave me, or things the promoters gave. There’s a jacket that’s a beautiful leather jacket that was custom made. There are maybe 16 of them in the world – a beautiful embroidered leather jacket from a tour, that kind of stuff. There’s laminates and tour passes, just backstage stuff.”
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| Fully Signed by Pantera Members - Dimebag Designed Guitar This super rare and unique rock relic is featured in the auction. |
The highlight, according to O’Brien, is something he is very fond of – a Washburn Dimeslime guitar, autographed by all four members of Pantera, with a Dimebag Darrell crybaby and a special Dimebag guitar strap and picks. “I think it was [from] '98, the peak of everybody being happy,” said O’Brien. “They autographed it with a big, thick Sharpie, so it still looks great and of course it’s been protected ever since.”
Parting with it is tough, but it had to be done. “I just got to the point where I thought, I’ve had the pleasure of owning it for a long time,” said O’Brien. “Somebody out there would love to have it.”
There is more … lots more, including a Cheap Trick tour program signed by Robin Zander and Rick Nielsen. “Cheap Trick is one of my all-time favorite bands, and I got to meet them in Japan
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| White Zombie RIAA Astro-Creep 2x Platinum featured in auction along with other RIAA Awards |
But that’s exactly what collectors will be doing in this auction, which includes loads of vinyl from O’Brien’s collection, including test pressings, and more autographed items, plus many Pantera and White Zombie gold and platinum records from around the world – all trophies of a highly successful career that began way back in the early 1970s.
From 1973 to 1975, O’Brien worked in radio promotion and publicity for Jem Records, Inc. He then moved on to ATV/Pye Records before becoming label manager at Passport Records. In March 1978, O’Brien helped run the artist management company Hit and Run Music, aka Run It Music, where he worked with Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and Rod Argent. After a short stint as label manager at Hannibal Records, O’Brien founded Relativity/Important Records as a domestic label for a music importer.
While with Relativity/Important, O’Brien greased the wheels to get The Cure’s classic single “Let’s Go to Bed” released while the gloomy, darkly pop Romantics were between labels. He also founded Combat Records and helped get Megaforce Records – the label that served as the first home of Anthrax and Metallica – up and running. But bigger and better things were soon to come, and they arrived via Concrete Marketing and Concrete Management.
It all started with a long-shot by the name of Grim Reaper, an ominous U.K. America England
A special project, Grim Reaper didn’t come ready made for stardom. Instead of rock god looks, they had complex musicianship and Grim Reaper, though melodic, could sometimes be a challenging, but ultimately rewarding, listen. Knowing MTV wasn’t in the cards for Grim Reaper, O’Brien didn’t have pie-in-the-sky dreams for the group. So he had to think outside the box to do what he could for them.
“We knew we weren’t going to get radio play,” said O’Brien. “So we did every possible grassroots thing we could think of, because I had a past in independent record companies. So I knew how to promote at a grassroots level, and that involves doing everything you can – every show you can get your hands on, every in-store appearance in any store that’ll have you, every interview on a radio station you can get, all the signed posters, the signed record jackets … just everything.”
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| Walter's Grim Reaper Passes featured in auction. |
One man who shouldn’t be forgotten in all this is Bob Chiappardi, O’Brien’s partner in Concrete Marketing and Concrete Management. When he and O’Brien first met, Chiappardi wasn’t exactly on the fast track to upper management at Arista Records.
“I had already been in the music business for like 16 or 17 years, and I was hanging out with a friend of mine who did publicity at Arista Records, and Bob was some kid working in the mailroom in Arista’s publicity department,” recalled O’Brien. “I would sit down and wait for my friend to leave work, and we’d end up sitting around talking. And I liked him, and he liked me, and he just kept pressuring me to start a management company together. In my head I was saying, to be totally honest – not that he doesn’t know already – ‘I don’t want to do that,’ because I knew that I had almost 20 years of experience on this guy.”
But Chiappardi was persistent. All the while, O’Brien was in the process of leaving Relativity/Important Records and doing computer training work. “I was training and installing electronic mail systems, if you can believe it, in 1983 and 1984 for the music industry, the international departments,” said O’Brien.
But then along came Grim Reaper, and all the drama that can play on tour. Out on the road, one of the crew for the band overdosed on heroin. “I fired him,” said O’Brien. “He didn’t overdose and die. But that’s when we found out what he was doing, and I said, ‘I don’t work with junkies.’”
A painful personal experience earlier in life had taught him that it was impossible to trust drug addicts, but his crew of three people was now down to two. “And then Bob jumped and said, ‘I’ll come out on the road with you for a week,’” said O’Brien. “I’ll cover until you get somebody out here. I got somebody out there, and then all of a sudden, the band asked me to manage them. And Bob said, ‘Well, who’s going to be in New York
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| Concrete Management...in the beginning. |
Steadily, Concrete built its client roster, with O’Brien taking on Metal Church at the behest of Alago, who was working for Elektra, the label that had planned to put out Metal Church
“We worked on all the preparation for Winger’s debut record,” said O’Brien. “What we used to say at the time was we took ‘em from nothing to like two million.”
Winger’s partnership with Concrete only lasted through the band’s first record, but that didn’t stop Concrete from steaming ahead. Going strong for years, Concrete really took off when Pantera and White Zombie came along. By the late ‘80s, Concrete was a well-oiled marketing and management machine. Word of mouth had gotten around, and in good time, some of the biggest bands in hard rock and heavy metal came knocking on Concrete’s door.
“Yeah, it was just ridiculous,” said O’Brien. “First, we did all the marketing, and the marketing company went through the roof. Then we started Foundations Forum, the big heavy-metal convention down in L.A.
It wasn’t just O’Brien who thought the idea of a heavy-metal convention was strange. “The funniest thing was, one day I was having lunch with an old friend of mine out in L.A. L.A. L.A.
“So we sit down. It’s me, Don and Robin Quivers, and she’s very nice and very sweet, and she says, ‘Before we start, you know how we always think that L.A.
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| Foundations, first heavy metal trade publication to be featured in the auction. |
Perhaps the most ingenious marking tool Concrete came up with was Concrete Corner. Started in 1992, Concrete Corner was a unique retail program for heavy metal and alternative/hard rock promotion and distribution that set up its own section in independent record stores and a few chains. It made use of special point-of-purchase displays, in-store play, pricing strategies and a monthly sampler CD, plus a free magazine titled “Concrete Corner” – all designed to showcase new releases so they didn’t become lost in the crowd, so to speak.
“We were getting paid by people – record labels, managers, whatever – to promote their records in the retail environment,” said O’Brien. “And anything we could do to have those records stand out, we wanted to do. So we came up with this plan to put a whole separate display case in the corner, which also gave Concrete a name to the kids, because the kids didn’t know who Concrete was. But then they got to know us because of the Concrete Corner, so that helped our own credibility in the marketplace, but it also gave us another product to sell to stay in business because a lot of people, especially with independent records … you know, just like in the supermarket business, the little tiny products, and little tiny companies, vendors, whatever you want to call them, can’t get shelf space. Well, in the record store, it was the same thing. We have all the superstars and the Top 100, and the Columbia Records and Capitol Records … we don’t have room for Shrapnel and Metal Blade, and all the other little tiny things. Well, this gave those labels and bands and groups another way to get seen without being buried in the M section or the Q section, or the Metal section of the rack.”
In return, stores got stuff like free records and tickets to concerts. “They were encouraged to give up that placement, which took up a little piece of their real estate,” said O’Brien. “It worked for them too, because those things started to sell. At the beginning at least, when people saw something on the Concrete Corner rack, they said, ‘That’s probably a good record’ – as opposed to the 40 metal records that came out that month that were sitting in the bins. These, they figured, they wouldn’t put it up there if it wasn’t better than most.”
And there was more associated with Concrete Corner, including listening parties and midnight sales for newly released product, the first being a Metallica box set, that were promoted through mailings to Concrete fans. Discounts were offered, raffles were held, free stuff was given away and there were bonus disc giveaways in which a disc of extra tracks was shrink wrapped to a new record from the Concrete stable. The first of these was a compilation disc attached to Korn’s Follow the Leader, which featured tracks from other Korn-approved artists like Kid Rock, Orgy, Limp Bizkit and Powerman 5000. Add to that a program called RetailVision, which offered videos of the latest hits in Alternative, Rap, Hard Rock and Pop.
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| Walter O'Brien's collection of passes which will all be featured in the auction. |
O’Brien stayed with Concrete Marketing until 1991, when he and Chiappardi amicably split, which left O’Brien staying with Concrete Management, Inc. The list of acts O’Brien has worked with over the years through Concrete boggles the mind. There’s Limp Bizkit, Aerosmith, Korn, Marilyn Manson, Alice
Now, O’Brien works as a staff writer and photographer for the Courier News newspaper in New Jersey
The Rock Gods 'n Metal Monsters Auction
October 31 - November 7th
Registration is Now Open: VIP ACCESS (There is no registration fee)
The Rock Gods 'n Metal Monsters Auction
October 31 - November 7th
Registration is Now Open: VIP ACCESS (There is no registration fee)
