LAS VEGAS — The Parnelli Board of Advisors has announced that Benny Collins, production/tour manager for Michael Jackson and Journey, will receive the live event industry’s highest honor, the Parnelli Lifetime Achievement Award, at the annual gala ceremony in Las Vegas Nov. 22. Collins has also worked with the likes of David Bowie, Rolling Stones, Madonna and U2, among others.
“Benny Collins started out a humble drum tech and quickly rose through Journey at their peak and onto Michael Jackson, where he handled the King of Pop’s most audacious world tours with aplomb,” said Parnelli executive director Patrick Stansfield. “He is deserving of this honor, not only his body of work so far, but for his reputation of how he does it — always with respect and a calmness that is deservedly admired.”
Collins, who has long been known for his mantra, “If you don’t want the truth, don’t ask me,” came out of the Bay Area and took undergraduate and Masters degree courses in academic fields that would suit him well for success in the madcap world of live events: psychology, sociology and philosophy.
Early in his live entertainment career, Collins was working for Bill Graham when another industry legend, Pat Morrow, invited him to join a tour for a band starting to get some traction at the time: Journey. He started as a drum tech, but his responsibilities soon grew as he was named stage manager then, as the group reached its zenith, tour manager.
In 1985, Collins helped take Wham! to communist China — the first Western pop band to play a stadium-type concert in that country, which had finally started easing the clamp on artistic expression that had begun with Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in 1966. “We played the People’s Gym to 15,000 people, and there were four cars and three thousand bicycles in the parking lot,” Collins recalls.
Later in the 1980s, Morrow would again call Collins, this time to work for Michael Jackson. Thus began a decade with Jackson that would take Collins to the four corners of the world while placing Herculean demands on his shoulders. Friend, admirer, and another Parnelli Lifetime Achievement Honoree, Charlie Hernandez, says that there was seemingly nothing Collins couldn’t do. “He was moving these giant statues around Eastern Europe — he’s crazy!” says Hernandez. “Benny was large and in charge, and I was a young kid when I first met him — and I could see then he was a groundbreaker. There weren’t a lot of African Americans in the business back then, but Benny rose to the top quickly because he always told the truth, and he really f***ing cared. He went out of his way to be fair to everybody and earned everyone’s trust and loyalty.”
“He could take the biggest stuff anyone could throw at him,” adds Morrow. “No pretense, no bulls***, just rockin’, sockin’ professionalism. Nothing got to him, because he didn’t sweat the small stuff, and he wisely knew it was all small stuff.”
“I’m really honored, tremendously honored to receive this award,” Collins says. “When I look at the people who got this before me, people I have great affection for, I’m blown away. When Patrick Stansfield called me to tell me this, it blew my mind. You get to do what you do, and you don’t think about awards.”
Collins will be honored at the live event industry’s most prestigious gala, the Parnelli Awards, on Nov. 22, 2014, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. For more information go to www.parnelliawards.com.
