Gary’s Gospel

Spend enough time with Gary Witt, and life starts to resemble a cable TV drama written by Aaron Sorkin. Think of it as “The Newsroom” meets Almost Famous. Like “Newsroom” fiery protagonist Will McAvoy, Witt is a man driven by firmly held principles and a healthy ego, and his story is distinguished by a mix of unfettered idealism and unprecedented success.

For the past decade, it has been Witt’s mission to build the Pabst and Riverside theaters, as well as Turner Hall, into the finest music venues in Milwaukee. In 2002, Witt took over as executive director of the Pabst Theater Foundation, which manages the Downtown theaters, and the numbers speak to the job he’s done: About 400,000 people attend around 450 events held at Pabst venues every year, generating $10 million in revenue in 2011. That’s up from $308,000 in 2001, the year before Witt took over.

But for Witt, putting on concerts is about more than just show business.

“We’re not just booking shows. We’re helping to change a city,” Witt says while taking a load off inside the Riverside’s artists’ lounge on a sweltering midsummer afternoon. At his side is Sam, a 5-year-old pitbull mix that hangs out regularly at the Pabst venues, benefiting from an “open dog” policy that several other staff members also take advantage of. The area has a rec room feel, with walls lined with old-school arcade games and stacks of vinyl records. Like the 53-year-old Witt – whose jeans, untucked shirt and casual black jacket garb is more fitting for a coffee shop regular than the head of a major arts organization – this section of the Riverside seems a lot younger than it actually is.

The artists’ lounge once looked “like a lunchroom in a school,” Witt says, mentioning atmosphere-killing white floors and white drop ceilings. That was before he ordered renovations and hired a battery of staff members – including a sous chef, a pastry chef and a barista – whose job it is to pamper the entertainers for the handful of hours they spend in this space before and after concerts.

While many venue operators might see this hospitality as a means to an end – keeping the talent happy, so the money keeps rolling in – Witt talks about it in uniquely moral terms. It is part of his vision of the Pabst venues as sacred places Where Things Are Done The Right Way. Witt has a gospel, and it’s rooted in comfort. If you build a comfortable place, people will come. “Our belief creates our moral compass for how we do our business,” he says. “This is more like an evangelical movement than a job.”

An evangelical movement? For a bunch of music venues? Is this guy for real? People have been asking that question about Gary Witt for years, going back to when the Chicago-area native was picked to run the Pabst in spite of a resume that included jobs at various jazz record labels but no experience overseeing a theater. (Witt is also a musician who once played drums in a rock group called Decadence, which might be the most simultaneously awesome and terrible band name ever.) At the time, local philanthropist Michael Cudahy had just set up the nonprofit Pabst Theater Foundation and purchased the Pabst from the city for $1. The venue had a decidedly unhip reputation as the place you went to see A Christmas Carol every December; it was no more associated with rock ’n’ roll than Bob Hope. Cudahy chose Witt based on a three-hour interview and a gut feeling that he could change that perception, but in the early years, there were plenty of doubters as the Pabst struggled to establish a new identity as a viable place for concerts.

From the beginning, Witt says his goal was bigger than just selling tickets. He wanted to foster a community of loyal customers around this entertainment scene that would look to the Pabst and its sister venues as beacons of a newer, younger Milwaukee – not just for Milwaukeeans, but also for people outside the city. This is another core tenet of Gary’s gospel: Finding ways to attract fresh blood to the city is vital for Milwaukee’s future, and he sees the Pabst venues as an integral part of that.

Witt applied this vision of a more youthful city to his own staff, flushing out the old and adding employees fresh out of college whose lack of experience he regarded as a plus. The idea was for the Pabst to be an atypical Milwaukee theater, a place run by music fans and marketed as a showcase for cool bands that might not come here otherwise.

“If we would’ve started this thing and looked at how everybody else promoted shows, we would’ve made none of the decisions we made,” Witt says. “We didn’t know what the rules were, so therefore, we were unafraid to break them. We did these things because we thought it was the best way to do it. Not with an eye toward short-term success, but an eye toward building a long-term business.”

This is precisely the sort of talk that drives Witt’s detractors crazy, the incessant suggestion that he’s right and they’re wrong. A 2007 Milwaukee Magazine story about the shifting of the local music scene’s tectonic plates was full of critics chiding Witt for his uppity attitude in a business not exactly known for high-minded and pious characters. “He’s a brat with his hands in Michael Cudahy’s pockets,” said an anonymous source. “Do a show with your own money sometime,” snickered another. The most telling put-down from Witt’s shadowy hecklers described him as “this new guy stirring up a lot of shit.” Even Witt would probably agree with that one. Only now, after 10 years, Witt is the new establishment. And he thinks Milwaukee – not just the entertainment scene but the city overall – is a lot better off for buying into the gospel he preaches.

Even if Gary Witt likes to say that the Pabst is more than just a music venue, make no mistake, it happens to be a very nice music venue. From plush red seats to the ornate beauty of the ceiling looking down from a hundred feet above, the Pabst is a local jewel that even Witt’s staunchest foes have to appreciate. The Riverside and Turner Hall have their charms as well, but there’s no mistaking who is Diana Ross in this trio of Downtown theaters.

As the building’s custodian, Witt obsesses over the dozens, if not hundreds, of details that go into creating a perfect night at the Pabst. In the lobby, he makes sure to use only the ring lights, never the chandelier lights, because otherwise it looks like you’re “walking into the Spanish Inquisition.” He worries about staffing the right number of bartenders and whether patrons will find their favorite brand of beer among the two dozen choices – way more than most concert venues – chilling in the fridge and on tap. While the rest of the world sleeps, Witt has nightmares about not having enough signage advertising upcoming concerts.

“If everybody had that level of obsession, we’d probably go insane here,” he says. “I do take this stuff really, really, really personally.”

Appearances are very important to Witt. Marketing is one of his specialties, and he’s worked as hard to present the just-right image of the Pabst to the outside world as he has making it look spiffy inside. When he took over, he says, he burned photos of the Pabst where the theater was empty “because that’s not what we’re selling. We were trying to change the perception of this place where it was always being used.”

The photos plastered on the Pabst’s website reflect Witt’s preferred perception. He makes a point of having his house photographers emphasize the crowd. They always look ecstatic, with arms raised in exultation toward a stage bathed in bright white lights. The message is not subtle: The Pabst is presented as a place of communion, where concerts take on a momentous, even mythic, air.

The results of Witt’s nonstop mental self-torture haven’t gone unappreciated. When Mark Keefe arrived in Milwaukee two and a half years ago to work as program director at Radio Milwaukee, he immediately regarded the Pabst venues as the opposite of many of the lousy music clubs he encountered in other cities.

“They treat their audience as guests, not as criminals,” he says. “You don’t have to go through airport security to get into venues. They act like they’re genuinely glad that you’re there.”

One of the biggest cheerleaders for the Pabst on a national level is Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who singled out Witt and assistant director Matt Beringer in a 2011 Rolling Stone interview about the country’s best concert promoters.

“They are simply the best at everything,” Vernon said via email. “That does not feel like an exaggeration to say. Their model is a model that could be superseded into any model, profit vs. non-profit, venue or small business, and it would be successful.”

The Pabst estimates its average patron attends 10 to 12 shows a year, and getting that typical Pabst customer to return again and again is a primary goal driving Witt’s obsessive attention to detail. Before he started working there, Andrew Nelson was one of those rabid Pabst fans, first visiting in 2005 for a concert by indie-rock band Bright Eyes. He immediately became “totally obsessed with the theater.”

“I remember just being floored by how beautiful it was and the juxtaposition of [Bright Eyes singer] Conor Oberst just thrashing away on stage,” he says. Nelson eventually joined the Pabst’s promotional street team and rose through the ranks over the course of five years to become the public relations director.

Nelson, 28, is typical for a Pabst staffer. He’s young, deeply into music and unafraid to work long hours. And he buys into Witt’s vision of the venues as community-builders. “I feel like the work we’re doing here indirectly and directly helps the city of Milwaukee,” he says. “I don’t feel like it’s just a concert venue.”

The idea that working for the Pabst is some kind of higher calling helps to power Witt’s employees through an ungodly schedule. For Ryan Matteson, who was on staff from 2008 to 2011, a normal day of work entailed arriving at the office by 7 or 8 a.m., working until dinnertime at 6 or 7 p.m., and then coming back to the theater for a show that might not wrap until midnight. That was four or five days a week, every week, month after month.

“It sounds unbearable, but everyone was pretty dialed into it,” says Matteson, who attributes the staff’s work ethic to Witt’s example. “There wasn’t a night where he wasn’t there before me and left after me. He doesn’t expect anything that he doesn’t expect from himself. He doesn’t bark orders and then leave for the weekend. If he was going to every show, I felt like I owed that much as well.”

Matteson, who now resides in Austin, Texas, and works for an artist management firm, had little prior experience when he was hired. Neither did Nelson nor Beringer, Witt’s right-hand man and the person he calls his “single most important hire.”

When Beringer, 32, came on board in the spring of 2004, he had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where he booked rock and comedy concerts, most
notably Dave Chappelle for a sold-out show at the school’s sports center right as “Chappelle’s Show” was becoming a cultural phenomenon. Going into the interview with Witt, Beringer was nervous that his lack of know-how in the performing arts (and his preference for indie rock and comedy shows) would hurt him. What Beringer didn’t know was that he was exactly the kind of young, hungry outsider that Witt was looking for. Rather than pick from the carousel of administrators moving from one Milwaukee arts organization to the next, Witt wanted somebody with fresh ideas and a willingness to try something new in the Milwaukee market.

“He gave me the freedom to try stuff,” Beringer says. “In those days, we weren’t afraid to make a mistake or two. He was like, ‘How do we blow this up?’”

Early on, Witt also focused on circumventing Milwaukee’s staid traditional media – which mostly ignored local music that wasn’t connected to Summerfest – and exploring newer, more youth-friendly channels online. Over time, the Pabst’s email list would soar to more than 120,000 subscribers, and its Facebook and Twitter pages would easily outpace those of other area arts groups.

Paul Miller, a founder of Alterra Coffee and an early Witt ally, says Witt was ahead of the curve locally when it came to using the Internet to forge connections with patrons. Miller recalls a time when Witt noted “how print was going to fall away and the rise of social media. To me, it was all news. I was not familiar at all. We’re probably still behind in that world.”

Miller thinks Witt’s interest in social media circles back to his preference for youth and new ideas over experience and how things have “always” been done in Milwaukee.

“I think he has great faith in young people,” Miller says. “And I think he has great faith in the city to be a great city. What was missing is the venues that he created.”

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Witt’s tendency to proselytize – not just on music venues or the Milwaukee arts scene or social media, but on any subject he has an opinion about – doesn’t always attract admirers.

Sometimes it engenders the opposite reaction. He’s been described as blunt, opinionated and (less charitably) arrogant. In a 2010 interview with the Milwaukee Business Journal, he played into that image by boasting that if the Pabst “were a sports team I would not want to play against us, we would crush you.” Quotes like that have hardly endeared him to his rivals, nor has his eagerness to share his winning strategies with others.

Ryan Schleicher, the promotions director for Milwaukee nonprofit radio station WMSE, recalls bumping into Witt once Downtown and getting some unsolicited advice. “He asked what I was working on, and then proceeded to tell me how to do it better,” Schleicher says. “That’s classic Gary.”

Schleicher, for one, likes Witt’s candid approach. “If you’re serious about changing things, you can’t be worried about pissing people off from time to time. You can’t be worried about bruising egos when egos need bruising.”

But not everyone is as open to criticism, and Witt knows that he’s rubbed some people the wrong way. “I have this fixation or illness where I have a hard time driving past a gas station and not quickly thinking of ways that it could be better,” he admits.

Witt’s aggressiveness goes back to his childhood in Hanover Park, Ill. He was a confident, pushy kid with (he believes now) an undiagnosed case of ADD that made him unnaturally fixated on his interests. In the second grade, Witt’s older brother started taking drum lessons, but little Gary soon took a shine to the drum kit, and his dominant personality allowed him to usurp the new instrument from his sibling. For the next several years, the drums “just became my obsession,” he says. Witt even built a stage in the basement, and he pored over his favorite records to learn the drum parts. He was particularly a fan of Yes’ Bill Bruford and played his second solo record, 1979’s One Of A Kind, over and over again to master the incredible piccolo-sounding rim shot Bruford tapped out of his snare.

Eventually, Witt’s musical studiousness brought him to the aforementioned Decadence, which is how he met his wife, Susan. (She did the art for one of the group’s album covers.) These days, however, he hardly plays the drums at all. “I have a really hard time doing things casually,” he says. “When I was a drummer, I really committed to it insanely, at a really high level. I just have a hard time thinking about doing it for fun.”

Contrary to appearances, Beringer thinks Witt has mellowed a little in the time he’s known him. Witt certainly strikes a laid-back, Zen-like figure. He’s a low-talker, occasionally speaking so softly that it can be difficult to hear him. But there’s always a steady undercurrent of assertiveness to his words, reflecting the quiet assurance of a man who’s convinced that he’s right on most things, most of the time.

“I definitely think I’ve mellowed, but there was some method to my madness in the beginning,” Witt says in reference to the early days in the mid-2000s, when he and Beringer were among a skeleton crew of theater employees. “No one really gave us any opportunity or chance to succeed, nor did they give us the time of day. In order to get paid attention to, to get our fair share, a lot of more aggressive behavior had to take place. And sometimes I definitely liked it a lot.”

Naysayers were constant. Many of the artists the Pabst brought in were young up-and-comers who were unproven in the market. “We were roundly told that it wasn’t going to work,” Beringer says. So when a show would sell out, it “would resonate with us for months.”

David Byrne, Bright Eyes and Rufus Wainwright were among the Pabst’s early successes, pointing the way toward the indie-rock and singer-songwriter fare the venues are now most associated with. In 2006, they took a risk on Belle & Sebastian, a respected indie-pop group that routinely packed theaters in Chicago and Minneapolis but skipped Milwaukee. Critics scoffed that a band local radio never played would stiff the gig, but when that show also sold out, Witt and Beringer knew they finally had momentum on their side.

In retrospect, the early triumphs at the Pabst don’t seem all that daring, though that speaks to how much expectations have changed in the years since. “It’s funny how the paradigm shifts,” Beringer says. “Compared to Mark Russell, Bright Eyes is a pretty edgy show.”

“In summer, my game goes down a bit.” Back in the Riverside’s eighth-floor artists’ lounge, Witt is trying to explain away a so-so round of Silver Strike Bowling, one of the arcade games that’s made available for guests. He instead starts in on a game that he’s clearly a master of: name-dropping. Along with being a music-industry professional, Witt is also a big-time music fan, and working for the Pabst Theater Foundation puts him in regular contact with his heroes. He’s quite skilled at working in oh-so-casual references to famous people he’s hung out with over the years. There was the time he chatted about Dylan records with Elvis Costello. The time he forked over several hundred dollars for the specific brand of wine that Robert Plant likes. The most heartwarming story has to be one about Bill Cosby calling Witt’s mother when she was battling leukemia and chatting her up for 15 minutes. (She is currently in remission.)

Then there was the time Witt bowled a few games of Silver Strike with Paul Simon, who performed at the Riverside in 2011. “One of the cool moments of my life,” Witt says. “He was really good, but he was more into the music.” (Paul’s record of choice that day was Roy Orbison’s Greatest Hits.)

In conversations like these, Witt appears committed to being a music industry lifer. But recently, he’s been dipping his toe into nonmusical endeavors. The Pabst has hosted a series of town hall-style big ideas forums with Historic Milwaukee. They feature the city’s most forward-thinking movers and shakers discussing strategies for raising Milwaukee’s national profile. Witt got more directly involved in civic matters in the summer of 2011, when he believed that local conservative talk radio hijacked the conversation on the controversial streetcar project. He sent out an email to the Pabst subscriber list outlining the facts and figures of the proposal and encouraged people to contact Common Council members. Although Witt says he took a “we report, you decide” approach, there’s no question that he thinks the streetcar is a good thing for Downtown, or that he sees the issue as being part of a larger narrative of young Milwaukee wresting away control of the city’s future from the old, established, conservative guard. (Extra emphasis on the word old.)

“I think the Pabst, for the future, can play a role, at the very least, in helping to give people a voice,” Witt says. “Our database is important. We’ve developed a community, and I think we have a responsibility as stakeholders in Downtown to have people weigh in on those topics. People use Downtown differently than older people understand. Younger people come Downtown two or three days a week and maybe go to two or three different places, and that means necessarily not taking your car.”

As a person who moved to Milwaukee a decade ago from another city, Witt ultimately sees the Pabst as a gateway for outsiders to come and eventually settle here. This is the crux of the Gary Witt gospel: What Milwaukee needs more than anything is fresh blood with new ideas that will upset the applecart. He evangelizes so passionately for this because he’s seen it work in his own experience. If it can work at the Pabst, it can work for the city.

“I know what it was like in 2002,” he says. “I know what Downtown was like. As the city has grown and gotten younger and younger and younger, there’s been a tremendous influx of people from other places. And that’s what all successful cities need. They need other people to weave their fabric into the overall network of what makes the city better. Not just have the same thing rammed down everybody’s throats, which is what the city used to be made up of, Milwaukeeans from Milwaukee. But now, it’s people coming in from everywhere.”

“Milwaukeeans from Milwaukee” might bristle at transplants like Witt changing the cultural face of the city, but on this point, most people will agree: There’s almost always something worth seeing at the Pabst venues. The level of impact that has on the overall health of Milwaukee is debatable, but there’s no denying how the city is better off from an entertainment perspective than it was a decade ago. And as long as people keep on attending his shows, Gary Witt will keep on preaching.

“The city has changed dramatically in the last 10 years,” he says. “I think we’ve had something to do with that in a small way.”