A lot of young people choose a career while in college, but not quite as passionately and purposefully as Ali Harnell did.
She vividly recalls the moment in time the light dawned. Her freshman year in college, she traveled to New York with her new best friend, Genessa Krasnow, Harnell to see her grandparents, Krasnow to visit her uncle. “We get to her uncle’s house and it’s this insane mansion in Gramercy Park and we walk in and there are gold records all over the wall and an incredible music library. I’m like, ‘what does your uncle do?’ She said, ‘he’s the president of Electra Records,’ and I said, ‘What is that? I’m doing that.’”
She had always loved music, but said she never realized there was a music business as a youngster. She didn’t know about concert promoters and record producers. Today, she is one of the best of them as SVP, AEG Live Nashville, which led to her selection as a Venues Today 2016 Woman of Influence.
She has morphed from rock-and-roll promoter to promoting and managing country acts. “Then I started doing tours, Keith Urban back in the day, Sugarland, Hunter Hayes, Little Big Town. Now I work closely with Chris Stapleton.”
On the side, she is managing a power pop band — The Shadowboxers. “Justin Timberlake is obsessed with them and signed them to a production deal, and he’ll make a record with them and we’ll shop it and it’s off to the race,” Harnell said.
She is also very involved with Country to Country, a music festival in the UK and other territories, as one of the curators for talent. It has grown from two nights just in London to three nights in London and festivals in Dublin, Glasgow, Stockholm and Oslo.
Ask Harnell her ultimate goal and she’ll tell you: “I’m doing what I want to do. I love being a promoter and developing artists and
helping this pop act is really rewarding. I’m exactly where I want to be.”
Her secret sauce is luck. “I had these crazy opportunity moments, like my mom having a relationship with Feld Entertainment. Not everybody gets that. My mom could make a call and there I was on an airplane to Minneapolis. And I had the courage to do it. I was 18 years old, got on an airplane, just trusted the universe. Luck, courage and hard work. I’ve worked really hard for really long.”
Harnell has been focused for a really long also. Later, in her 40s, she discovered balance. “I’ve always put my son (Eli) first and everyone knows that and I make no bones about it. I take him to school and pick him up every day. If I’m on the road he comes with me.”
She has a good track record for picking winners in the music world, but the biggest lesson along the way is learning there is a difference between wonders of the minute and clients you want to invest in longterm. “Do you believe in their music/art and how are they as people and who is their team?” she asks herself. “You get a bad manager or a toxic person on the team and the whole thing can turn to shit really fast.”
Her journey to promoter really started with that moment in New York City as a college freshman. “It was a little bit lust, a little bit nepotism,” she said, because after learning there was a music business she called her mother, who worked in the TV industry. Feld Entertainment was one of her clients. “She called her contact at Feld in 1986-87 and the next thing I knew I was on an airplane to St. Paul and was an intern for two weeks at Riverfest in Minneapolis. I was an unpaid production secretary. They sat me in a trailer, but I met everybody.”
The trucks would pull into the festival grounds and Harnell was their first point of contact. She would direct them to hotels, hand out meal tickets for the crew, generally keep things clicking. One of the people she met was Peyton Wilson who worked for Dave Williams and Jack Boyle of Cellar Door Concerts. She was headed back to school in Washington and the next thing she knew she was a runner for Cellar Door, the major concert promoter in that region at the time. Again, she was a jack of all trades, from selling tickets at the box office at the Bayou Club to acting as hospitality coordinator putting the carrots and Ranch dressing in the dressing room.
She worked her way through college doing any kind of music or concert job she could do, a highlight being the chance to be production assistant in Tokyo with the Rolling Stones Steel crew. “It was a big deal and made me think my shit didn’t stink and I was the biggest deal in the world,” Harnell said.
So after college, she moved to New York to conquer the music world. “I thought I’m going to get a job and I’m going to run a record company and I’m going to be a big deal.”
It was 1990. There was a massive recession and every label was firing 300 people a day. But she was super motivated and, once again, lucky. She was hired by William Morris Agency as a floater.
“I was upset because they’d never put me in the music department. Every day it was ‘you’re going to film today, literary today, commercial casting today.’ I would do my job and, at night, I would go down to the music department. Those were the days of Johnny Podell, Jonathan Devine, Cara Lewis, Toby Ludwig, Steve Martin. I’d go down at 6, when I could punch out, and help anyone I could.”
Then college best friend Krasnow, who was working for Rob Light at CAA in L.A., called and said, “There’s a promoter in New York City named Ron Delsener and there is an assistant position becoming available. Get your resume over there right now.” Of course, Harnell called the William Morris Agency courier to deliver her resume to Delsener. After being nailed by HR for using the agency dime to look for another job, she headed out to meet with Melissa Miller (Ormond), who was working for Delsener and they hired her.
“That was 25 years ago and I never looked back. I found my niche. I was off to the races. And I was really good at it,” Harnell said. Others heartily agree.
“To me, Ali is one of the best promoters in the country. She reminds me so much of me,” said the ever-modest Louis Messina, TMG/AEG Live, for or with whom Harnell has worked for 22 years.
“She has passion, drive and dedication both to business and family,” Messina added.
“Ali is always the spotlight in the room.”
And she’s direct. Ron Delsener, who is now with Live Nation, puts it this way: “Ali wasn’t afraid to talk to anyone. She’s a tough ballsy chick. She could teach the world.”
She joined Messina in Nashville in 1996, which is another legendary story in her tale of networking.
“Bob Roux had heard of me through Buck Williams, and Buck knew I was seeing Darin Murphy. Darin was at William Morris Nashville and we had been commuting for about a year and a half,” Harnell said, of her future husband (now ex) and father of Eli. Roux turned her on to Messina, of Pace Concerts at the time, who was looking for someone to book the soon-to-open, now closed Starwood Amphitheater in Nashville.
However, Harnell did not want to risk losing what she had in hopes of getting a new job, and concert promotion is a small, small world. Messina was headed to Camden, N.J., to open an amphitheater there and since Delsener and his partner, Mitch Slater, had not RSVP’d, he told Harnell to meet him there for an interview. She told an elaborate fib and took the train to Camden.
As Messina recalls it, they were sitting on a bench and he spotted Delsener 15 feet away. They kept shuffling to dodge the competing promoters and Messina and Harnell negotiated the deal that night. “Then I had to go back to New York and tell Mitch and Ron that I was leaving and moving to Nashville. Ron said, ‘You’ll never get a good plate of pasta down there.’”
She reminisced with Delsener about those days at his 80th birthday last month. She teased that she could have sued him 20 times over for the work environment common to the 90s. “It was a Nazi state. You were a slave 20 hours a day,” Harnell said. He would pack her backpack with flyers and say don’t come back until you’ve handed out the flyers and made contact with five retailers who can help us on the street level.
But it was all lessons learned for Harnell. It helped get her where she wanted to be. Now she is the promoter in charge and her style is somewhat different.
“Human resources wouldn’t love this but it is my mantra: Get your shit done and go have a life,” Harnell said of her management style. “You are here because you are trusted and hopefully you understand what you are to accomplish each day, sell tickets and represent us and our clients the best that we can, and then go have a life. Have a balance, so you come in and you’re psyched to be here and you feel rewarded. If you’ve gotten everything done and it’s 2 on a Friday, go, and if you haven’t, sit there until 8 at night and figure it out.”
It’s still such a 24-7 business, you’re never done, she knows. “We’re all going to die with our in-boxes full.”
Interviewed for this story: Ali Harnell, (615) 320-7250; Louis Messina, (512) 7211-2450; Ron Delsener, (917) 421-5120