Rob Bennett promoted concerts in the corridor between Windsor and Montreal for more than 40 years.Courtesy of the Family
Though he graduated from the University of Toronto in 1974, before the decade was over Rob Bennett found himself back on campus. He had started a concert promotion company that specialized in presenting shows with the Students’ Administrative Council (SAC) at stately Convocation Hall. His office was makeshift, he had no staff, and his messy desk was piled with papers, telephones, Pepsi cans, and a pencil sharpener that was literally old school.
He and the SAC were constantly at odds with university administrators, who allowed Joan Baez shows but forbade rock concerts in the fragile, domed rotunda. In order to get around the stuffy restrictions, Mr. Bennett and the students resorted to subtle subterfuge – reggae acts were presented as “Jamaican folk” – to bring in the hip artists of the day.
It was a relief, then, when a senior university official asked Mr. Bennett for a pair of tickets to a concert by blues-rocker George Thorogood. Her niece was a fan. Eager to ingratiate himself with the school administration, Mr. Bennett supplied the free seats. He felt it best not to mention that the guitarist’s band was called the Delaware Destroyers.
The plan seemed to work. Mr. Thorogood boogied his way through One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer and more, and the niece reported back to her very important aunt the next day that the show was grand. Then she let it slip that the rambunctious Delawarian had duckwalked atop the hall’s historic pipe organ.
“That got us into a lot of trouble with the administration,” said Philip De Groot, a member of the SAC executive at the time. “We lost the use of the hall briefly, but Rob managed to calm their feathers. If it hadn’t been for him, we might have lost the trust of the school and never be allowed to put on shows in the hall again.”
Mr. Bennett continued to promote concerts at Convocation Hall and increasingly elsewhere, until a year ago, when he brought jazz guitarist Pat Metheny to Meridian Hall. By that time he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He died at home in Caledon, Ont., on March 14. He was 71.
For more than 40 years, Mr. Bennett promoted carefully curated concerts in Toronto and up and down the corridor from Windsor to Montreal. He lived a dream, presenting the artists he loved to listen to himself: Bonnie Raitt, Jesse Cook, Harry Chapin, Peter Tosh, Van Morrison, Dire Straits, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, John Prine and many more.
A promoter with great taste in music and even greater taste in wine, Mr. Bennett built an authentic rapport with artists. “They trusted him, and genuinely liked him,” music publicist Richard Flohil said.
Mr. Bennett had a reputation for making payments to artists that were accurate to the last penny, with accounting that was comprehensible and transparent.
“The term promoter usually conjures up tone-deaf pirates, but Rob, when he extended his hand, it was to put something in your pocket, not pick it out,” singer-songwriter Tom Waits told The Globe and Mail.
Concert promoter Rob Bennett is pictured at the University of Toronto's Convocation Hall. He graduated from the university in 1974, but returned before the decade was out after starting a concert promotion company that specialized in presenting shows at the venue with the university's Students’ Administrative Council.Philip De Groot/Courtesy of family
His formal career began in 1975 when he was hired by Bernie Fiedler (who owned the Riverboat coffee house in Yorkville) and Bernie Finkelstein (who owned True North Records and managed Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan) to help run their concert business.
“He quickly latched onto what the promoter had to do, from buying advertising to making sure the coffee was hot in the dressing room,” Mr. Finkelstein said. “It wasn’t long before he was basically running that division for us. He did everything right. The dressing rooms were clean, the sound checks happened on time, and the tickets were all sold. And when they weren’t all sold, you knew he did everything he could to sell them.”
Mr. Bennett was known to be brash but fun, with insistent notions on how to promote concerts. It would rub him wrong, for example, when Mr. Finkelstein supplied free tickets to record companies to make sure they treated his artist clients well. “That’s not our business,” Mr. Finkelstein recalled Mr. Bennett as telling him. “Our business is selling tickets to kids.”
In 1978, Mr. Bennett formed his own concert promotion business, RBI Productions. Its first presentation was a sold-out appearance by American comedian Martin Mull at Toronto’s Massey Hall that year.
The SAC had seeded RBI Productions with more than $10,000 to start booking concerts at Convocation Hall; in return, they received much needed integrity and expertise.
“I was a botany student,” Mr. De Groot said. “We were kids who didn’t really know what we were doing, and the previous promoters we worked with would get us in trouble. With Rob things went smoothly, and when they didn’t, he took care of it.”
Presumably Mr. Bennett took care of it when, shortly after the Thorogood debacle, Peter Tosh played Convocation Hall. The Jamaican reggae star and marijuana-smoking proponent was on his Legalize It tour. Because the hall was made of wood, smoking was absolutely not allowed. Unfortunately, a newspaper review of the concert featured Mr. Tosh onstage with a large, lit spliff.
Mr. Bennett’s career turned corporate in 1991 when he joined MCA Concerts as vice-president of national touring. Touring with Mr. Bennett, a notoriously poor driver, was an adventure.
“Every morning on the road to the next show, Rob would drive with a coffee, a cigarette and a pen, calling the ticket sellers in the next city for sales updates,” recalled Lindsay Ewing, his former assistant. “Off the top of his head, he’d be rhyming off the code numbers for each individual show. I would spend most of the time yanking on the wheel to keep us from veering into oncoming traffic.”
Despite being a devoted Pepsi drinker – “He was constantly driving waitresses crazy asking for it when Coke was all that was on offer,” said his wife, Mary Wheelwright – Mr. Bennett had a love and sommelier’s knowledge of fine wine.
In 1995, Van Halen played Toronto’s Molson Amphitheatre. Though Mr. Bennett wasn’t promoting the show personally, he took it upon himself to adjust the wine list requested by the band’s singer, Sammy Hagar. After the concert, Mr. Hagar phoned Mr. Bennett to thank him.
“Sammy quickly realized Rob had more knowledge about wine than he did himself,” Mr. Ewing said. “They ended up becoming buddies.”
In 2006, he returned to RBI Productions, once again working as an independent promoter in mid-size venues such as Massey Hall with niche artists including singer-songwriter Gillian Welch, flamenco guitarist Ottmar Liebert, Cape Verde’s Cesaria Evora and Canada’s Loreena McKennitt.
“The world wants to find the next Nirvana, but there’s always a place for artists like Loreena,” concert promoter Elliott Lefko said. “There’s always a place for them, whether they draw 700 or 1,700. And that’s what Rob represented.”
Robert Stanley Douglas Bennett was born Nov. 9, 1951, in Toronto. He was adopted as an infant by Norman Bennett, an engineer, and Glenna Bennett (née Church), a schoolteacher.
As a child, he played goalie on a local hockey team. His next-door neighbour was Bob Goldham, a former National Hockey League defenceman with a number of teams including the Detroit Red Wings. Whenever the superstar Gordie Howe visited Toronto to play the Maple Leafs, he would dine with the Goldhams, who would invite Rob over for dinner and to take shots from Mr. Howe on the backyard rink.
Mr. Bennett with Canadian guitarist Jesse Cook.Courtesy of family
When Mr. Bennett was a teenager, his friends didn’t believe the story about his boyhood interactions with the hockey icon. One evening, he and his friends happened to pass Mr. Howe in a subway station heading to Maple Leaf Gardens. His chums gave Rob a hard time, saying, “Hey, there’s your friend, Rob.” Hearing that, the hockey great turned around and greeted young Mr. Bennett enthusiastically, even though he hadn’t seen him for a number of years.
“Rob got to introduce him to his friends and keep his reputation,” his wife said. “He always said it was one of the classiest moves he’d ever seen anyone do, and that he admired Gordie Howe even more because of it.”
He attended Earl Haig Secondary School, where he was president of the student council in his final year, in 1971. “I believe, from his stories, that he also pushed just about every envelope he could find while at high school and some of his teachers weren’t sorry to see the last of him,” his wife said.
While earning a degree in political science at the U of T’s Victoria College, he ran an acoustic music club, Beavers, where artists such as Dan Hill would play. He also had a campus radio show and was the music critic for The Varsity newspaper.
In 1975, a writing job lined up at The Globe and Mail fell through a week before his graduation. With $40 to his name, he managed to keep afloat with disc jockey gigs and by giving tours at the Molson brewery.
A concert career that began in earnest in 1975 was filled by colourful interactions with some of world’s most celebrated artists. He had a stint as Bruce Cockburn’s tour manager in 1977. In 1996, he dined with a touring Bruce Springsteen and ended up throwing snowballs with him on Montreal’s Mount Royal.
In 1984, he promoted a pair of peculiar shows by the pianist Fats Domino at Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre (now known as Meridian Hall). The Blueberry Hill singer had a variety of requests and insistences, all dealt with by the promoter, who among other things was responsible for providing hotel rooms.
“I got a call from the hotel manager at the old Westbury Hotel on Yonge Street,” Mr. Bennett recalled in a 2017 interview with The Globe and Mail. “Fats was upset that his suite was on the same floor the band was staying. The hotel manager was very apologetic. ‘We have a Mr. Domino,’ he told me, trying to be polite and proper, ‘and he’s complaining that he’s supposed to have the best suite in the house.’
“I said that Fats did have a nice suite, but the manager told me that ‘Mr. Domino was pretty adamant that he should not be on the same floor as the band.’ There was a better suite on another floor, and I was calculating how much more it was going to cost me. The manager told me he understood my predicament and let me have the better suite for the same rate.”
On stage, the performer refused to play until the building’s air conditioner was turned off. “Fats was an odd duck, I tell you,” Mr. Bennett said. “It was all very strange.”
Strange or not, Mr. Bennett fixed what needed fixing. It is the business side of show business, and he took care of it better than most.
Mr. Bennett leaves his wife, Mary Wheelwright; sister, Debbie Love; stepchildren, Robin Gerand and Will Blackwell; stepgrandson, Duncan Gerand.
Brad Wheeler