“It doesn’t hurt to ask.” Taken literally, this well-known phrase implies we should always ask for what we want. However, if you’re a professional and/or over the age of seven, you should know that if you ask the wrong way, it could damage your reputation and limit your ability to ever ask the same question again.
As professionals in the entertainment biz, we attend some of the most amazing events in the world. We can easily take them for granted because they are just part of our daily duties. And we can easily forget that the vast majority of the population would love to tromp around the concrete floors of world-renowned venues in our shoes on any given day. All too often, that desire manifests itself in the form of the dreaded random ticket request. We have all been on both sides of the ticket request. Sometimes they come from someone that you feel is deserving of a comp. But more often, the requests come from someone who has no idea what it means to ask for a free ticket to your sold out L.A. Forum show on Memorial Day weekend.
On Giving…
Chad Olech, FOH engineer/production manager for Fall Out Boy, outlined how he handles the full spectrum of comp ticket requests. “If you’re truly a friend, there is no bad or good way to ask. I will do whatever I can to help out a friend. Depending on how close we are, I will get you seats or a pass. If you’re a fellow crewmember and I know you well enough, I will just give you a working pass and let you know the places that are off-limits. If you’re a crew guy that I don’t know, I will either get you seats or give you a VIP pass and escort you to FOH to watch the show. The part that is always a pain in the ass for me is when its a friend of a friend or, even worse, when someone gets my number or email that I don’t know from a friend of a friend. Then it gets bit more dicey as to how far I will push to get them something.”
…And Receiving
Here’s my story (a great example) of how I went about getting free tickets to a show the right way.
I recently took my wife to go see Pearl Jam in Quebec City. This was a bucket list show for her. I toured with Pearl Jam back in 2005 as a dimmer tech. I met my wife in 2006, and she had to hear several stories about how great it was for some of my other friends to come and sit stage right and watch her favorite band up close. We waited a while to see if they would come to Vegas, but alas, the Pacific Northwestern band has no plans of coming to the blazing desert anytime soon. Therefore, I knew that we were going to have to travel a bit to go see the show. I still had the contact info on several people who work for the Jam, even though I had lost touch with most of them over the years. For example, even though LD Kille Knobel and I toured together eleven years ago, we have only seen each other once since then, and that was on a gig. So we are not so close that I can just shoot a quick text “Coming to your show in QC, I need four VIP passes for me and my friends.” Instead, I reached out to Liz Burns-Good, the production manager, and offered to trade tickets to one of my shows in return for some working passes to Pearl Jam. She was extremely polite and said that, since the guest list in Quebec was minimal, she could offer up four working passes. Those passes were like gold to my wife and made for a night that she will never forget. When we arrived at the show, we brought a bottle of vodka for Liz for the passes and a bottle of wine for Kille for allowing us to loiter in her FOH kingdom. Everyone in my party was respectful, and no one asked for more than what we had already been given.
The Wrong Way to Ask
That is the professional way to ask for comp tickets. Now here are a few ways to not ask for comp tickets, or “How to make enemies in the live event business and tarnish your reputation.”
With indifference. Don’t pretend that you don’t care to see the show. If this is not a show that you are excited to see, then I am not excited to ask the PM to go out of their way to arrange any special accommodations for you. If I have a day off and I want to see you, we will make arrangements to hang out. If I don’t have a day off in your town then I will arrange for you to get passes to come down early enough to do lunch or meet up after the show. If you actually want to see the show, then just say so. It will make me feel better to know that I am going above and beyond to help out a person who is going to appreciate the gift that they have been given.
Invoking a charity. Do not ask me to donate tickets to your charity. Getting an artist to donate tickets to a charity requires approvals from levels much higher than I am willing to climb to. And most artists are very particular about which charities they donate to, and I can tell from here yours does not qualify. Mindi Pelletier, tour manager for Dixie Chicks, said “I think the biggest problem with comp ticket request is that everyone assumes we have them. In this day and age of the big promoters, we rarely have tickets to give away.”
Friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend. It is hard enough to approve tickets for friends. No one is willing to put his or her name on the line for your long lost cousin from Lincoln, Nebraska, who is a mega-fan. They are more of a liability than a guest, and you don’t want to do a show worrying about how this unknown quantity might be behaving in the VIP section.
Bald-faced lie. Do not lie in order to get comp tickets. You will only make things extremely awkward for yourself and whomever you have invited along with you. “The worst requests come from the con artists who say they need something for a charity, but when you do a bit of checking, it turns out either there isn’t such a charity, or the charity has no idea who they are,” Olech says.
Not taking “No” for an answer. If you ask me once and I say that there are no passes available, do not ask again. I heard you the first time — you are seeking free tickets. I get it. If something changes and magical monkeys deliver free passes, I’ll likely alert you about them in a timely manner. Or I’ll just remember you were annoying.
No show/no call. Under no circumstances should you ever ask for someone to get you passes, then decide later to blow off the show and leave them at will call. That takes money out of the artist’s pocket and ensures you will never get another comp from me ever. If I get a trashing from the tour manager because of something your guest did, I will never forgive nor forget.
Always remember: You’re asking to come to someone’s work. With that in mind, I often imagine the day when I flip the tables and visit someone at their work. I see myself strutting down to their office at the DMV and start asking for “that solid” about getting a free car registration or say, “Can I make myself a fake drivers license? It’s for charity.” I’d be kicked out of there quicker than a Fireball-filled frat boy at an Enya concert.
They don’t call this “show fun,” they call it “show business.” So it could hurt to ask, especially if you’re working your way in and/or up. At the end of the day, we all just want to work with likeable people, and how we interact with current or potential colleagues will be remembered more than anything on a resume.
There is one last iron-clad unwritten rule when it comes to comp tickets requests:
Never ask for more than four.
Chris Lose is a lighting director, content designer and programmer with Las Vegas-based Q3 Las Vegas. Reach him at www.q3lv.com.
