Rock Promoter Silva Is Really on a Roll

SAN DIEGO —  In the nine years Bill Silva has been promoting rock concerts in San Diego, he’s always dreamed of one day producing a major national tour. He’s finally seeing his dream realized--sort of.

Silva is, indeed, producing a major national tour: a two-month, 35-date road trip that began last Thursday at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, before a crowd of 3,500. But, instead of some popular rock ‘n’ roll band playing rad music on guitars, keyboards and drums, the star of the Swatch Impact Tour is a troupe of eight athletes performing rad stunts on skateboards, bikes and roller skates.

The team consists of professional skateboarders Jeff Phillips, Joe Johnson, Mark (Gator) Anthony, Chris Miller and Kevin Staab; freestyle bicyclists Ron Wilkerson and Brian Blyther; and vertical roller-skater Jimi Scott.

“It’s really not all that different from a typical rock ‘n’ roll tour,” Silva said. “We’re traveling together on tour buses, we’re working with local concert promoters in each city on the tour, and we’re putting up huge video screens above the stage so everyone can have a close-up view of the action.”

There are other similarities, as well. Most of the venues at which the eight daredevils will thrash away the night on a 13-ton steel jump ramp are multithousand-seaters normally reserved for rock concerts. Among them are the Mecca Arena in Milwaukee, the Poplar Creek Amphitheater in Chicago and the San Diego Sports Arena, where the athletes will be Oct. 2.

Bookings are handled by New York’s International Talent Group, the same agency that represents such rock ‘n’ roll heavyweights as Pink Floyd, David Bowie and Depeche Mode.

Silva’s production manager has, in the past, gone on the road with Dokken and Night Ranger; his tour manager with the Doobie Brothers and Huey Lewis and the News.

And the audience, judging from the first four dates, consists primarily of teen-agers--the same crowd that attends rock concerts.

“Over the last few years, action sports, particularly skateboarding, has become the latest rage,” Silva said. “For a lot of kids, these athletes are heroes, much like rock stars. After watching the first four shows, I can understand why. These guys are simply amazing; every time I go out there, I get turned on. They’re the best at what they do, just as Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend are the best at what they do.

“And whenever you watch a great professional put on a consummate performance, you can’t help but be thrilled.”

The Swatch Impact Tour, Silva said, is an outgrowth of the action-sports management company he founded a year ago in an attempt to branch out from promoting concerts in San Diego.

“The more we got into the management thing, the more clients we signed up, the more we realized there were limited means to promote these athletes’ careers,” Silva said. “There were a couple of skateboarding magazines, a couple of bike magazines and maybe five contests a year, not counting occasional in-store appearances by top professional riders co-sponsored by manufacturers and individual retailers.”

As a result, Silva said, “We came up with the concept of putting on a demonstration-exhibition tour that would bring these athletes to retail stores around the country, not just to one or two stores in one or two cities.

“But as we got further into the project, as we started to feel the strength of skateboard and freestyle bike sales, we realized there was a much bigger audience out there than we had initially thought. So we decided to design something a lot larger in scope, something more along the lines of a rock ‘n’ roll type of tour.”

So far, the Swatch Impact Tour--financed by Silva at a cost of $1.2 million--has done fairly well. Attendance has ranged from 3,500 in Indianapolis to nearly 10,000 in Detroit last week.

“We started off a little slow, but I think that in time the momentum will build,” Silva said. “This kind of tour has never been attempted before, and another thing is that we’re finding the demographics are somewhat younger than for rock concerts.

“So we need to educate the public as to the concept, and then, since many of these kids have never even been to a concert or any other arena event, we need to convince them--and their parents--to come out.”

The difficulty, Silva said, will be to get each promoter, in each city, to change his customary advertising approach. Radio, TV and newspaper ads might work fine for rock concerts, he said, but to reach a younger audience, “you need to try something else.”

“So far, 70% of our sales have been through word of mouth, unlike rock concerts, where it only accounts for 20%,” Silva said. “And the best way for promoters to get the kids talking about this tour is to work closely with local retailers that sell skateboards and bikes, and to put up flyers and posters on junior high campuses and other places where the kids hang out. It’s going to take a lot of leg work, but in the long run, I think it will be successful.”

Silva said that even if this year’s inaugural tour doesn’t live up to his initial expections, there’s always next year.

“Things can only get better,” he said. “Every kid who comes out this time will bring along five of his friends next time. This is the kind of tour that is incrementally, geometrically going to explode.”