Jimmy Koplik To Be Featured On Promoter 101 Storytellers Tonight
(CelebrityAccess) — Jimmy Koplik, the legendary New England concert promoter and President of Live Nation Connecticut-Upstate New York will be featured on the inaugural episode of Promoter 101 Storytellers, a brand-new series from the creative minds behind Promoter 101.
The series will feature host Dan Steinberg sitting down for one-on-one interviews with some of the biggest names in the live touring industry on Clubhouse, the new audio-only social media collaboration platform.
For music fans in the northeast, Jimmy Koplik should need no introduction and if you’ve been to a major show in the region, there’s a good chance he played a role in making it happen.
Koplik started his career in the late 1960s, when he was a student at Ohio State University and brought the band Steppenwolf to the school for a show.
After college, he continued promoting shows through his company Jim Koplik Presents in Ohio, but soon relocated to New England after realizing the concert market in Connecticut was underserved.
“There were no big-time promoters in Connecticut, so I went to the agencies and said I’d like to move my agency from Columbus to Connecticut and that’s what I did,” Koplik told Fox 61 News in a 2017 interview.
While there was no large-scale competition in Connecticut at the time, that doesn’t mean that things were easy for Koplik in his early years and he lost access to a major Connecticut venue in 1976 after a biker gangs clashed with police during a Grateful Dead concert there, leading to lean times.
In an interview with local radio station WPLR, Koplik explained how he and his business partner Shelly Finkle were forced to start booking smaller venues and began losing “50 to 100 grand a night” on shows.
“I had piles of credit cards…I would take money off the credit cards, you know, cash advances,” he told WPLR. “I would run to the bank…say ‘I need 2,000 dollars off this credit card’; they’d give me 2,000 dollars. I’d go back to the Coliseum and then give the band 2,000 dollars.”
However, by the 1980s, things were looking up and he expanded his business to become the leading concert promoter in the market.
Today, he promotes about 150 shows a year, including at major regional venues such as the Xfinity Theatre in Hartford and the Oakdale Theatre and he shows no sign of slowing down.
“I love to work every day and I love the people I’m surrounded by,” said Koplik told Fox in 2017.
The show goes live Tuesday evening starting at 9:30 PM EST on Clubhouse.
For more information, check here: https://joinclubhouse.com/event/PYBLRQKw
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