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Are you ready to rock? Here comes The Sound
Hello there ladies and gentlemen
Hello there ladies and gents
Are you ready to rock?
Are you ready or not?
How appropriate that these are the first words to the first song that people will hear coming from the stage of The Sound, Clearwater’s new 4,000-seat outdoor concert venue (those are covered seats; there’s lawn seating for an additional 5,000).
Cheap Trick has the honors for Wednesday’s opening-night show, and unless the band pulls some set list switcheroo, “Hello There” will be the opening salvo, as it has been at nearly every Cheap Trick concert for the last 40-some years.
The free tickets for Cheap Trick’s Wednesday show at The Sound have all been distributed. Publicity photo.
The Sound is the centerpiece of Clearwater’s $84 million redevelopment of Coachman Park. A lot of ideas got tossed around before the City settled on the partially-covered amphitheater design, said Ruth Eckerd Hall Executive Vice President of Entertainment Bobby Rossi, who’s in charge of booking concert acts at The Sound.
“This area, as wonderful as it is with an abundance of venues and phenomenal base of people who love going to concerts, is missing this size,” Rossi explained, “what’s called a proper boutique venue.”
The quandary is this: Put an act in a 50,000-capacity hall, there might be 10,000 empty seats. Not a good look. Promoters will “paper the house” by giving away blocks of free tickets; they might “drape” the hall (erecting curtains so nobody will see those rows and rows of unsold seats). Still not good.
Put an act in a 2,200-seat theater – like Ruth Eckerd Hall – and the tickets can sell out in a matter of days. You could have sold more.
“We’ve been bursting at the seams for a number of years,” Rossi explained, citing performers such Ringo Starr, Van Morrison and the Tedeschi Trucks Band, all of whom sold out Ruth Eckerd in a hurry.
“They’re playing larger-capacity venues on either side of us … so Friday night they play to 5,000 at the St. Augustine Amphitheater, then they come to Ruth Eckerd, then the next night they’re at the Hard Rock in Ft. Lauderdale at 6,000.”
The Sound, with its 9,000-person capacity, hits what Rossi calls the “sweet spot.” He’s been in the booking and promotion business for decades, and began doing the job for Ruth Eckerd Hall in 1995 (he also books Ruth Eckerd’s sister venue, downtown Clearwater’s 750-seat Capitol Theatre).
“It’s long overdue,” he said. “This has been in the back of our minds for over 10 years.”
In February, the City chose Rossi and the Ruth Eckerd team to book, manage and promote The Sound, over two other applicants. “When we thankfully were awarded this, and the industry found out, they were like ‘How did you guys not have this in that market for so long, in such an abundant market for shows?’”
At the beginning of the process, he explained, the City’s plans called for nothing more than improvements to the existing Coachman Park bandshell.
“We said, ‘This is the one time that this can happen, in a beautiful place, and make that impact. Let’s not settle and just make things a little nicer and spruce up. Let’s make this a true driver – a true catalyst – for not only downtown, but the region, the state and the country.’”
The Sound’s first round of bookings, he believes, are bearing that sentiment out. Several of them – including Wednesday’s Cheap Trick concert, Friday’s dual billing of Colbie Caillat and Gavin DeGraw, Kenny Loggins’ Farewell Tour (Sept. 16) and Starr’s All-Starr Band (Sept. 26) will be those artists’ only appearances in the entire state.
“That’s heads in beds, that’s restaurants, that’s destination,” Rossi said. “It’s much needed. We’re not just blowing smoke here.”
The word “destination” gets a lot of play in Bobby Rossi’s playbook for The Sound. He sees these concerts as part of a larger Clearwater experience.
“We are really calling it an outdoor theater,” he said, “because we want people to go enjoy a nice dinner in downtown or at the beach, come on over, and go back for dessert – because we’re not going to hold you captive for 12 hours. That’s not the point of this. We want it to be a true outdoor experience, a Hollywood Bowl type of thing.”
