The First Fleet in Iowa Concerts
The green room is trashed. Peanut butter is caked on the floor, while empty beer cans and cases of energy drinks are scattered around the room. Cups of liquor are still sitting on the floor. A computer chair is in the shower. As Sam Summers makes his way through the wreckage and sits down on one of the couches, a dried pickle rests near his foot. He explains that no one has cleaned things up yet in the basement of People’s Court.
“Alesana played here last night,” he announces, pointing to the table of food supplies containing bread, mustard and other condiments. The smell of open jars of peanut butter and jelly looms throughout the room. Summers struggles to prop open the cooler with a water bottle he picks up from the floor. “I don’t know how to turn on the A/C,” he laughs. Despite the mess, Summers is more concerned with not being able to get more followers for the Twitter account for First Fleet, his company that is responsible for bringing most of the big concerts to Des Moines, and the approaching first NFL game.
“I do a fantasy league,” he says in a joking manner, “I’m really excited about football season. That’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks. My team is the Giants.”
He parks his white Jetta outside the downtown building in the loading zone with his blinkers on. His iPod has been playing Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, who he booked a week prior and calls “really real music.” Cars continuously fly by on the busy Des Moines street outside. Posters for Summers’ upcoming shows fill the front window. Usually people come here to go to People’s Court on the third floor. Few people ever take the stairs at the front door to the basement, where his office is located down the hall from the green rooms.
If one were to peer into his office, he would notice it has two rooms. Both contain desks and bare white walls, but one room is full of copiers and printers he uses for his posters, placed around an old wooden pillar that gives away the true age of the building. A small cooler, mostly filled with Bud Light, is placed next to a couch in one room. Unlike the hallways, which contain boarded up doors and pipes hanging overhead, his office is finished and clean.
The Iowa music empire he’s built has humble beginnings… with Fall Out Boy.
First Fleet was originally the name Summers envisioned for a hardcore band he wanted to start; now the name represents what his company has come to represent. “It’s like a strong first push, bringing something that I didn’t have when I was a kid, and I wanted to be the first one to bring the shows.” In high school he often drove long distances to see the bands he liked. He would drive to Iowa City and Minneapolis on school nights, getting home at 5:00 a.m. and having to get up for school at 6, under the guise that he had been working on a school project. “I hope kids don’t take it for granted, but ultimately they probably will because they’re born into always having shows come to town.”
Summers says he spent his “important years” living in Urbandale and going to Johnston High School. Academically, he did what he had to in order to achieve a B average. “I was more into skateboarding and hanging out with my friends,” he says. “It wasn’t until college that I really started to focus. And it wasn’t really until probably my junior year in high school that I even cared about girls.”
Summers attended numerous concerts and took every shop class he could in high school. The first concert he can remember going to was Rancid and AFI at First Avenue in Minneapolis shortly after he got his Monte Carlo at age 16.
“The first thing I did was set up this show for a hardcore band called Figure Four and put my friend’s band, Too Pure To Die, on it to open at the Botanical Center in Des Moines.” There was once a room with an 80-person capacity that the Botanical Center let people rent to set up local shows. “I think about 90 kids showed up.” His junior year he set up another show there with different bands from his high school, attracting more than 300 people.
Some months later, a hardcore band he liked named Keepsake was playing in Iowa City with a new band from Chicago serving as its opening act: Fall Out Boy. He and his friends checked them out online and became obsessed with what they heard.
“They only had two songs posted, and it was before Take This To Your Grave album,” he says. “We were like ‘Man this band is amazing!’ It was like heavier parts mixed with pop-punk stuff and we were really into blink-182 at the time.”
Summers recalls that he and his two friends were the only people watching them at the show but they sang along to every song. “They just went crazy for like three people and the passion was really in it.”
Afterwards he approached bassist Pete Wentz and talked to him about the show. In the process they exchanged e-mails in order for Sam to set up a show for them in Des Moines. Soon after, they played at the Vaudeville Mews with another friend’s band, The Lifestyle, opening. “Somewhere in the process [Fall Out Boy] picked up a booking agent, so that was my first agent I got to deal with.”
The band and their crew stayed with Summers that night. “Their guitarist Joe Trohman got in a fight with their tour manager and almost quit the band. He got really upset,” he recalls. “The tour manager was gone after that but at least I can say Fall Out Boy almost broke up at my house before they even got started!”
“There’s a lot of nice trees on that campus,” he says of his alma matter, Iowa State University. The 2006 graduate reveals taking a botany class made him appreciate those kinds of things, as it still does when he returns to run the shows he books at the M-Shop.
During his time in college he majored in economics and marketing, after first enrolling as an engineer. He describes his collegiate days being full of playing video games, eating Pizza Pit and hanging with friends. “I was just booking shows to make money to buy fun stuff during college and never really thought about doing it full time.” He debated between heading to Los Angeles for design school or moving on to study law.
“The reasons I was looking at law school weren’t the right reasons. I don’t think you should be focused on money when you’re looking at your profession—it should be something you really like to do,” he says. “I decided I was going to do whatever I had to do to make booking concerts a reality because that’s what I loved to do. What that meant was working another job while I could get on my feet after college.”
“In order to book shows, I worked at Prairie Meadows Casino from 2:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. and I would sleep maybe four or five hours a day because I’d be booking shows during the day. If I had a show I’d miss out on more sleep.” This carried on until it caused a breakdown where he realized he hated working as a blackjack dealer. “Staying up until 10:00 a.m. watching people lose money and having people blow smoke in my face was real demeaning.” Now he laughs about the experience and one of the greatest “I quit” lines ever to be used.
“I called in one day and said ‘I’m not going to make it in today or ever again,’” he says with a big chuckle. But then the reality set in further. “I don’t have a job, I live on my own, I have school loans to pay back—I had cut back on shows after a losing run where I lost $16,000 in the span of three months by attempting to reach into the Omaha market.” It caused him to call off all shows for a little while and to apply online for jobs at Wells Fargo.
Summers credits his job at Wells Fargo for getting him back on track. He got along with the other employees because he’s a self-proclaimed smart-ass. Eventually he began booking shows once again, scheduling them using his Blackberry at work.
“I would walk around the pond during my breaks and call agents back and confirm shows,” Summers recalls. This time he would be more focused on what was making him money. “I never had any trouble doing what I did best in Des Moines; I just had to be wise about what I did.”
Today when he does shows in other cities he teams with partners who have deeper pockets. He was once told by Steve White, who has been in the business for 25 years, “It’s better to have half of something than all of nothing.” This is what drives him to split earnings and to stay loyal with friends who need jobs and other partners such as IowaTix, who charge much less than Ticketmaster.
Eventually he got to a point where he had made as much money in six months of booking shows as he did during an entire year at Wells Fargo. With no vacation time left and a large amount of shows coming up, he made the decision to take on First Fleet full-time.
Summers is dressed in a light blue American Apparel t-shirt and dark Wrangler jeans. His hair is shaggy, styled by a brush and without product, and stubble covers his face—but he’s dressed for work. “A lot of times people are surprised when they first meet me because I’m just this kid, but they know I’m for real,” he says. Many of the people he deals with are twice his age.
This has been his biggest obstacle in gaining respect from agents, which he likens to an exclusive club. The market of concerts is a backwards market where promoters must convince the agents and record labels to sell them the bands’ shows. But once you’re in, you’re in. “I used to have to solicit all the agents and ask them. Now they get ahold of me.”
First Fleet’s reputation has grown to attract larger tour packages. He primarily booked shows at the House of Bricks in the past, and though he still books there, today he sets up concerts from People’s Court and the M-Shop to the Surf Ballroom, and even larger venues such as Stephens Auditorium and the Simon Estes Amphitheater. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of his success is that he has somewhat lost his ability to give opening slots to locals.
“At the beginning I was soliciting, saying, ‘I see you have an off date here, can I fill it with a Des Moines show and I’ll put two locals on it?’” Going from primarily booking the bands he was interested in versus the acts that play now, he can’t always find spots for his favorite Iowa bands. At the same time, he feels many locals don’t do their part or take initiative today. “I want your band to develop, but I also want you to help contribute and bring people out. I really want bands to understand that. I mean, bands can book their own shows too. And they can all come and pass out fliers at my shows.”
Another change he endured was going from being a part of the “straightedge” movement, refraining from alcohol throughout high school and college, to making the decision to drink only a year ago. “I felt like I was missing a part of life. It wasn’t getting me any points by not drinking these days.” Summers explains there wasn’t a temptation in school because “no one could make me drink. It was a good thing for me then.”
Running his own business has given him the opportunity to make his own schedule, though he still gets up between 6:30 and 8:00 in the morning. He’s taken trips to visit friends living in South Korea and has met many bands. In September he went to Britney Spears’ concert and the Iowa vs. Iowa State football game for free through his Ticketmaster connections. Hugh Jackman flew a private jet in to one of his shows recently to see Kevin Costner & the Modern West. He’s been audited, but keeps very tight books on everything, emphasizing that he’s “an extremely cautious person.”
“I’ve got health insurance, got retirement savings…I mean, those were two of the first things I did,” he says. When he started, he always kept realistic goals. “The cool thing about booking shows is there’s always another level.”
He hires some of the people he knows well to help him at shows; running the door, fetching food for bands, loading equipment, etc., but pays them well and only hires people he knows he can trust.
“One of my top things is loyalty and helping my people out. It’s awesome that I’m able to help some of my friends.” He only recently started letting Jordan Peterson from Too Pure To Die run some shows because he has been on the road playing with them for seven years. He still likes being there to run the shows, but isn’t one to attract recognition. “I just want kids to appreciate the shows coming their way.”
“Booking is the last thing I’ll give up, because that’s my money.”
Despite success, he does caution that booking is volatile and he needs something to keep him going. He’s begun investing in IRAs and says his next step is real estate. “Honestly, I want to buy a farm. I think it’s something I could do while still booking shows—I love working myself as hard as I can.”
