Live Performance: Touring Can Make You Crazy. Are Your Grandparents Driving Up Ticket Prices?

Abstract

Everything was wrong about the ill-fated Winter Dance Party. First, rock and roll was in a slump. Elvis was in the Army, Jerry Lee Lewis had married his 13-year-old second cousin and the resultant scandal nosedived his career, and Congress was getting concerned about payola among rock and roll radio stations. Though Alan Freed had helped pioneer the format for rock and roll shows of the 1950s, by 1959, the national economy was slowing down from the post-World War II boom, and rock and roll shows were trying to shore up profitability in a time of falling revenues. The only way to do this was to cut costs. One way the company that organized the Winter Dance Party, General Artists Corporation (GAC), cut costs was by contracting the tour buses with the lowest bidder in Chicago. Unfortunately, going with the lowest cost bidder is not always the best policy if standards are not upheld. The buses were not prepared for weather in winter in the Midwest where temperatures were sometimes 25° below zero during the tour.