The first thing you notice about Monty Jones Jr. is his hat.
The father of two has a hat for every occasion — cowboy hats, fedoras, baseball caps and even an aluminum Heineken number that means it’s time to party. It’s a point of pride for the 34-year-old, who always dresses to impress and takes risks head-on.
After all, he knows it’s okay to make a mistake here and there. Just learn from it.
And more importantly, Jones points out, learn from other people’s mistakes. That was his mindset going into Augusta, Ga., when he was rehired by Global Spectrum to manage the city-owned Augusta Entertainment Complex.
It was a new beginning for Jones who left behind a life he had started to build in Chicago. And it was a new life for the complex, whose Bell Auditorium and James Brown Arena had been concert-starved for two decades.
For some reason, the local county authority that managed the building had lost some of its Southern charm — board meetings had become so heated an armed guard was brought in to keep the peace. The 2008 signing with Global Spectrum was a new beginning for the building. Jones, brought on to dazzle the board and convince them to go with private management, knew he had to immediately start filling the event calendar.
“We reached out to promoters who hadn’t played the building in 20 years,” said Jones, “and we got Allen Corbett at AEG Live in Columbia to bring us an Avenged Sevenfold show with Buckcherry and Shinedown. It was a sign to the community that we were serious about bringing concerts to town.”
It was a message that became increasingly important since the building’s two tenants — an Arena Football League team and a minor league hockey club — went bankrupt about one month after Global Spectrum took over.
“It wasn’t our fault and we knew it meant we had more dates to work with, but it was a tough way to start in Augusta,” Jones said. “It made our Avenged Sevenfold date more important than ever.”
Show night came and, as Corbett and Jones were in the back handling settlement, Jones heard a loud noise. So loud, it overpowered the headlining act.
“At first I thought maybe it was part of the show, and then within seconds, I heard over the radio ‘the hockey buzzer is going off!”
Jones scrambled, Avenged Sevenfold cracked a few jokes about the deafening buzzer, and before long the buzzer was turned off.
“To this day, we still check that hockey buzzer before every single concert,” joked Jones. And the city of Augusta — they gave him a free pass. After all, in his first year at the building, revenues jumped 47 percent and expenses dropped 38 percent. Under his five-year run, he’s shattered gross records with Elton John and introduced the Harlem Globetrotters, who have had a record five consecutive runs of year-over-year growth in Augusta.
And while he’s won over many in the city, he’s also been able to win over his wife Yoshioka to the Southern lifestyle and the extreme heat of Augusta, which Jones said is the most humid city in the South. Yoshioka is a California-native more comfortable in the big city — Jones met her in Chicago when he was managing the Emil Jones Convocation Center. It was a brief stint in a career that included runs at the Aiken (S.C.) Convocation Center and the Carolina Cobras, an AFL team that gave him his first shot after graduating from N.C. State with a degree in Sports Management.
“I absolutely loved it and was their director of operations for two years,” when the team played at the Raleigh (N.C.) Entertainment and Sports Arena (now the PNC Arena), he said. “But one day, the general manager called the staff together, told us a new minority owner had purchased part of the team and was relieving everyone of their duties,” Jones said.
It was a brutal awakening for an optimistic and outgoing guy like Jones, but after several months of searching, Jones was back on the market juggling two job offers. One was a Gameday Operations position with the Cleveland Browns, the other an Event Services job for the Global Spectrum-managed Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, S.C. — a short drive from his hometown, Princeville, N.C.
“I knew that with Global Spectrum, I would find stability and a company that I could grow with, so I took the job and it’s been a great run,” he said. “And it’s been a great place to raise a family.”