If you lived in Kansas City in the ’70s and ’80s, you surely heard of the promotions czar Chris Fritz, the president of New West Presentations and manager of the 18,000-seat Azura Amphitheater, which is the former Sandstone Amphitheater off I-70 in Bonner Springs.
You may have even gone to one of the big rock shows Fritz organized in the 1970s at Municipal Auditorium, Memorial Hall, Royals Stadium, Kemper Arena and Arrowhead Stadium. “Probably one of the coolest was Summer Rock II in 1978, with the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Dan Fogelberg at Arrowhead,” Fritz says. “It was magical. It was very euphoric. Everything was perfect.”
If you didn’t go to a show, you’ve surely heard of “Missouri’s Woodstock,” the notorious 1974 Ozark Music Festival in Sedalia, Missouri, and the biggest rock festival that then-27-year-old Fritz had ever done. Wild public orgies, an over-capacity crowd of fans tearing down fences, people passing out from the heat, badass bikers messing with anyone in their path, drugs being sold everywhere, overdoses here and there, a guy sleeping under a truck getting run over. Whew. It was intense.
Fritz is reportedly banned from Sedalia even to this day. More on that in a minute.
Fritz has seen it all in concert and event promotion. He produced shows at the Hollywood Palladium, the Wiltern Theatre and the Fox Theatre in Long Beach, California, from 1968 to 1971 before moving to Kansas City in 1972.
He’s done it all in concert and event promotion, too—and not just rock shows. He established the Eagle Pro Box Lacrosse League (now called the National Lacrosse League), the AND1 Mixtape Tour, as well as motorsports events, comedy events and more.
Fritz has hung out with some of the biggest stars. Been to the coolest parties. Launched the careers of stars.
He taps into what he calls his sidekick—“that’s my imagination, because it’s the only person I trust”—as he ponders putting together an audience-fun twist or adding something special to an event.
But back to Sedalia. It’s mid-July 1974. An outdoor rock festival in sweltering 100-degree heat gets underway. Billed as a three-day outdoor concert/carnival on the 520-acre Missouri State Fairground, it was expected to draw 50,000 people paying $15 to $20 each to enter or campout. But it became a massive Woodstock wannabe event. Conservative estimates say there were 400,000 concertgoers.
Thirty bands were scheduled to perform, including Bachman-Turner Overdrive, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Bruce Springsteen (who reportedly bailed on the concert), Leo Kottke, REO Speedwagon, the Eagles, The Marshall Tucker Band, Ted Nugent and other popular acts of the time. Disc jockey Wolfman Jack was the master of ceremonies. The host of America’s first syndicated rock ‘n’ roll radio program in the 1960s, Jack was featured in a memorable scene in the George Lucas film American Graffiti.
A report from the Missouri Senate Select Committee that investigated the concert—which it described as a “relatively new phenomenon known as a rock festival”—spelled out the trouble: “The Ozark Music Festival can only be described as a disaster,” the committee concluded. “Natural and unnatural sex acts became a spectator sport. Sex orgies were openly advertised.”
Drugs—even heroin—were openly sold. Concert gate-busters used wirecutters to cut down fences around the venue, allowing cars to drive in. Biker gangs were beating up people, including other bikers. Over 2,000 concertgoers were treated for various medical conditions, a third of which were drug-related, according to the senate report. Nearly 1,000 overdoses were reported. One concertgoer ended up with a broken back after being run over by a car while sleeping under it.
“That concert ended around 6 pm on Sunday, and I jumped on a helicopter to get out of there,” Fritz says. “We flew down I-70 to Blue Springs, where we had a pretty bad landing.”
The festival was the pinnacle of achievement at the time for Fritz, who started out his event production career at the age of six doing a backyard circus. “We had an organ grinder and a donkey for kids to ride,” Fritz says of that first circus. “I think I made $80 after we sold popcorn and lemonade. Ever since I went to a circus, I think it got in my blood. I was inspired by P.T. Barnum,” he says.
Fritz went at the outdoor festival gig again in 2009 with the Kanrocksas Festival, featuring Eminem, the Black-Eyed Peas and Tupac. That festival experienced some issues with crowd control. The 2010 version was postponed, and Fritz bowed out of the 2011 version, which eventually got canceled.
Fritz got out of lacrosse in 2008 after 25 years of event promotion. He had hoped to develop lacrosse on rollerblades but couldn’t get the rights to the name “rollerball,” which was owned by the producers of the movie Rollerball, originally released in 1975.
The Azura Amphitheater deal came about when Fritz’s company was working Starlight Theatre and Kemper Arena as their main venues. The amphitheater had opened in 1984, then known as the Sandstone Center for the Performing Arts, to generally good reviews. But it changed hands frequently, with naming rights going from Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre (2002-2007) to Capitol Federal Park (2008-2012) to Cricket Wireless Amphitheater (2012-2015) to Providence Medical Center Amphitheater (2016-2021) before becoming Azura in 2021.
Fritz has had a management deal in place for the amphitheater with Wyandotte County since 2007. “The place was a little funky,” he says. “It’s nothing like it is today. We did the Grateful Dead and other shows in the late ’80s, and then Sandstone went under in 2007. The people at the time with the Wyandotte County government approached us, and we got it.”
Fritz and New West redid the whole place, he says. “We were dirt people for all our motorsports where you would bring in 1,000 truckloads of dirt. So we built the lawn up. Back then, it didn’t have the backstage, so we put in the backstage, a club, all the concession stands, and then opened it in 1993.”
Fritz sold the management rights to media entrepreneur Robert Sillerman, owner of SFX Entertainment, who bought all the amphitheaters that existed. Sillerman sold SFX to Clear Channel, who sold it to Live Nation venture capitalists, who pulled out of the amphitheater deal in 2005. “I was under contract with them to manage the amphitheater,” Chris Fritz says. “We took it back over to the Wyandotte Unified Government to make a deal to keep it open. It was needing a lot of work, so we did a huge renovation when we reopened it, and then we did another renovation in 2016. Last year, we started renovating to even have a new stage built. It’s beautiful right now.”
Asked who his favorite band was to work with and why, Chris Fritz ponders for a moment. “That’s hard to say,” Fritz says. “Obviously all the old-schoolers. There’s fond memories of after-parties and just camaraderie and doing multiple shows with various acts, from REO to Ted Nugent to tons of people.”
The changes he has seen are first and foremost the data that’s become available. “There are a lot of tools to work with to tell you just because some entertainer has 3 million likes doesn’t mean they’re going to sell any tickets,” Fritz says.
The industry is not just sex, drugs and rock and roll anymore, he says. “It’s an industry, and it’s finite and everything. So you need a good production manager. You need a good stage hand group. You need to have a good catering group. You have to have a good marketing group. You have to have a good ticketing company. There’s a lot that goes in. People don’t realize how hard it is on time and energy to make these things work. They’re very consuming.”
Chris Fritz says he is working on a project now that could be “Super Bowl huge.”
Is 75-year-old Chris Fritz done? “F**k no,” he says. “When I expire, that’s it. It’s when the barcode says you’re done.”
