The great impresario

Jake Sumner’s Ron Delsener Presents star, wearing a 99 Elvis Costello Armed Funk Tour badge from 1979 (presented to him by music producer/99 Records founder Ed Bahlman) with Anne-Katrin Titze at the Quad Cinema Photo: Ed Bahlman

Jake Sumner’s stellar Ron Delsener Presents (a highlight of the 2023 edition of the Tribeca Festival) on the great impresario features insightful remembrances from Billy Joel (Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin’s Billy Joel: And So It Goes was the Opening Night selection of this year’s Tribeca Festival), Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Steven Van Zandt, Cher, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley (from Kiss), Jon Bon Jovi, Bette Midler, Verdine White (Earth, Wind & Fire), Jimmy Buffett, Lorne Michaels, Sparkie Martin (promoter), Lenny Kaye with Patti Smith and more.

Jake Sumner with Ed Bahlman and Anne-Katrin Titze on The Clash at The Palladium: “David Johansen and Andy Warhol and obviously Ron and of course The Clash, Nico from Velvet Underground, like everyone was at that show.”

When Ron Delsener (at the Quad Cinema in New York) happily reconnected with Ed Bahlman (music producer and founder of 99 Records) on their past together he said: “You should have been in the film.” The conversation went from The Clash and Elvis Costello shows at The Palladium (1979) to Frank Zappa at Carnegie Hall (1971) and a Bob Dylan with Van Morrison show at Madison Square Garden (1998). Plus the many memories Ed had of Ron’s monumental gift to music lovers with the $1 ticket to his Rheingold and Schaefer Music Festival concerts at the Wollman Rink in Central Park during the Sixties and Seventies.

Jake Sumner’s amazing stamina in keeping up with his energetic subject Ron Delsener, the flâneur of the New York music world, is quite impressive, as he dashes from venue to venue meeting and greeting people backstage. Through clips from past performances, including The Clash at The Palladium in 1979 (where Ed with his 99 partner Gina Franklyn designed & sold their official band T-shirts) and home movies showing Ron as a young boy performing with his sister Harriette.

There’s the terrific use of animation created by Sean Donnelly’s AWESOME + modest. Conversations with Ron’s wife Ellen and daughter Samantha, plus a revealing visit to the family home in East Hampton where he has his exhaustive archive and where the deer roam freely, we get a complete picture of the man who did the most to bring live music to New York for decades.

From New York City, Jake Sumner joined us on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Ron Delsener Presents.

Anne-Katrin Titze: Jake, hello!

Jake Sumner: Hi! How's it going, Anne-Katrin! Nice to meet you. I've got these notes for my next film here, so let me change the background.

Ron Delsener gives a hug to Ed Bahlman at the Quad Cinema in New York Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

AKT: Okay, for the screenshot later nobody will be able to read anything behind you anymore. Where are you, what are you working on?

JS: I'm in PostWorks in New York City, which is a post facility where I'm cutting another film that I'm doing on the contemporary artist KAWS that I've been making for a while.

AKT: I heard about that and was going to ask you. So that's in the end stages?

JS: I never say finished. We're close. We're maybe halfway through. I keep these things going until I end up quitting at some point. But yeah, no, it's coming along.

AKT: How long did you film for the Ron Delsener?

JS: Oh, I mean it was weird, because that one it kind of stopped and started. And there was Covid and like a lot of these documentaries didn't all happen. All the filming didn't happen in one summer, it was over a long period of time we'd film a little bit. We'd go and edit some stuff, would come back and film and it just went on like that.

AKT: When did you start? What was the starting point?

JS: We began in around 2019 and at that point we would just sort of follow Ron around shows. I came to Ron with the idea and then at first he wasn't that into the idea, or he just kept on saying, I'll do it. And then he would pull out of the meeting, or what we were filming, and eventually I pinned him down.

And then he wanted us to come to film every concert so we just started following him around. And at that stage I didn't really understand. I don't think I really understood what the film we were making was in the beginning, or I was working it out on the fly. That was around 2019. And then Covid changed how we made the film.

The Clash Pearl Harbor Tour '79 (99 T-shirt) sold at The Palladium shows Photo: Ed Bahlman

AKT: But the following around is central. It's beautiful, because actually in many scenes we can see you're following him with a camera because he's everywhere. He is this flâneur, walking through any music-connected event that is happening.

JS: That expression, flâneur - says here: strolls or saunters aimlessly with a keen eye for urban life. It fits.

AKT: I did not expect your documentary to begin with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, which is a beautiful starting point. Sol Hurok, whose name I had never heard before, is the one who sparks it all for Delsener. And then comes that anecdote about Hurok dying right after he met him. Did you say: print the legend, or did you actually do some checking up on that?

JS: Well, we know the date that he died. And I don't doubt Ron's story. It was interesting, because Saul Hurok is the guy that definitely Ron and Bill Graham also used to credit as being the originator, the first promoter, the guy that created the the model of bringing acts. Obviously very different ones, but bringing amazing Russian acts to New York. That was really the beginning and he was such a hero for Ron.

So it is this weirdly tragic story of Ron taking this lunch meeting with Saul, and then Saul dying that same day. But it's also in a way that Ron embodies so much of what Saul Hurok talks about. In the film is a piece of archival where Sol Hurok says, I love it. I love it even more, and I'll do it till the day I die. And I think Ron embodies that same spirit. So in a way, the spirit of Sol Hurok, I think, lives on through Ron and through the impresarios and people that love bringing music and shows to the people.

AKT: Yeah, it has a passing of the baton to it. It's a great story. Being an impresario, being the one who “presents” has something of the circus, of the carnivalesque to it as well.

JS: Yes!

Ron Delsener on the stage of The Palladium in December 1976 Photo: James Hamilton

AKT: That's that idea of normal life suspended. Now you are entering a different world.

JS: A 100%, Ron is very much like a vaudevillian character and sort of lives in that world, and embodies that. He grew up in New York, in Queens, but was as a young kid going to so many shows in New York City. His dad was a cosmetic salesman, but I think loved show business and would take Ron to a lot of musicals and Broadway.

And then, of course, the circus. So I think Ron kind of grew up around that. And then, as a teenager was going to places like the Copacabana to see Sinatra or to Birdland to see Count Basie. Ron really, I think, his first love is jazz. If you ask Ron, I think he loves all music, but I think jazz is really where his heart is. So I think just something he embodies is show business in New York. He's been doing it forever.

AKT: His love for animals also comes through with his deer and kissing his dogs, despite the fact that they just vomited! The circus with its animal acts could have been an alternative, if music hadn't happened. He could have done animal acts.

JS: Yeah, he's like a ringmaster. Ron is like kind of P. T. Barnum.

AKT: How is he, by the way?

Ron Delsener - The mastermind of the Simon and Garfunkel Concert in Central Park

JS: How is he like today or in general?

AKT: Today or maybe last week! Whatever you know!

JS: We had dinner last night. I hadn't seen him for a while, so we caught up because the release of the film is coming up, and he's good. Ron's good. Ron's Ron, you know. He's sort of always the same but he's getting older. I think Ron still wishes that he was a young man putting on shows in some ways. I think it's hard to keep up. His energy level is not really where his heart is. Ron's love is to be at four or five shows a night and that's a tough schedule to keep up with when you're nearly 90 years old.

AKT: Right! What you show in the film is amazing, how he does still have that energy. A friend of mine is Gay Talese, who is in his nineties, and who has a reading tomorrow at Rizzoli’s. He is exactly like Ron. There were moments in your film when he actually reminded me of him, being out every night, doing things in the city.

JS: Oh, you're friendly with Gay Talese, that's cool! I wonder if their paths crossed at any point.

AKT: Yeah, I wonder. Ask him, please. That would be interesting. Ron seems to have a story about everyone in New York. On the one hand, there's the impresario, on the other, there is the businessman selling bedsheets and the dirty dishes The Beatles left behind and being the first one to really come up with something like that. That's also pretty interesting.

Paul Simon: “Ron was ubiquitous and New York’s his town. He’s just always been there.” Photo: Jake Sumner

JS: That is the beginning of merchandise. Right there. That's a great tale that one, and kind of hard to believe, but it shows the entrepreneurial spirit of a lot of these music business pioneers. It's both the love, the pure joy he had of seeing The Beatles, but also seeing, hang on a minute!

AKT: As an opportunity!

JS: Yeah, there's gold under these hills, you know. And he saw an opening, and he turned up at the hotel room they just left, and he bought everything, and he brought a lawyer, he had an affidavit signed that these were really the Coke bottles and cigarette butts that belonged to The Beatles. And he had this big auction.

AKT: I mean wild wild tales. Actually, I have someone here who worked with Ron Delsener in 1979, at The Palladium for The Clash show, Ed Bahlman of 99 Records.

Ed Bahlman: Hi, Jake!

JS: Hey! What's up? How are you doing?

EB: Boy! What a great film!

JS: Oh, you caught the film. Oh, nice! Thank you!

Patti Smith with Lenny Kaye on Ron Delsener: “I don’t know what he did, it’s like he injected the air with something.” Photo: Jake Sumner

EB: Yeah, so many memories. And then you had the clip of The Clash at The Palladium!

JS: Yeah. Well, we were blessed with amazing photos from Bob Gruen, who was there, who gave us the contact sheets from that show you see. In the contact sheets in the green room, it’s David Johansen and Andy Warhol and obviously Ron and of course The Clash, Nico from Velvet Underground, like everyone was at that show.

EB: We did a conversation with Rex Miller on Harley Flanagan. He said he was at The Clash show.

JS: Yeah, right. It felt like from seeing Bob Gruen's contact sheets that it was a lot of important people in New York at those shows. I think they did two shows.

EB: Absolutely, yeah. And we sold the T-shirts. We had the design of the T-shirts through CBS Records. So we created the design for The Clash's first North American tour. On the West Coast it was Give ‘Em Enough Rope. The Clash originally wanted it to be called The Pearl Harbor Tour ’79.

JS: Oh!

EB: They said, you can't do that!

JS: Yeah, that's a controversial thing to call your tour!

Bruce Springstein with Steven Van Zandt: “Every time you went to New York, you knew you were going to see Ron Delsener …” Photo: Jake Sumner

EB: And we hadn't done the artwork for it. So Caroline Coon, who was managing them at that time, called me from Vancouver and said, Ed, let's go with The Pearl Harbor Tour ’79 T-shirts for the East Coast leg of the tour and that's what was sold at The Palladium. And Ron came by and made sure everything was okay. There were no competitive T-shirt people selling outside The Palladium. He took care of us. He made it possible for us to go in and see the show.

JS: Wow!

EB: By taking care of the T-shirts, the boxes! And then, seeing in your film that he had also done the Schaefer Music Festival.

JS: Oh, yeah.

EB: I lived on 69th and Broadway and we would go there all the time. Sit on the hill.

JS: On the rocks, right?

EB: On the hill, have a picnic. It was tremendous.

JS: Who did you hear?

EB: Well, many, but the one I remember most was Edgar Winter. I didn't know Ron was involved with that. Then he came to the hill and asked us: “you enjoying the show?” Ron did.

Ron Delsener making plans with Jimmy Buffett Photo: Jake Sumner

JS: That's nice. Yeah, that's cool.

EB: He was gauging the size of the audience for the act.

JS: Right, beyond the people actually buying, paying the $1. He wanted people just to enjoy it.

EB: And see if he could build it into a bigger situation, too.

JS: Well, he's good, he's good. Were you at the Bonds casino shows for The Clash, too?

EB: Yeah, the band I produced, ESG…

JS: Yeah. Oh, yeah!

EB: They opened for The Clash. Bush Tetras opened for The Clash. I helped The Slits out with the sound for the show.

JS: There was another guy in our film, Sparkie Martin, who was another promoter in New York, who promoted a lot of shows at the Apollo in Harlem. He, I think, was behind those shows. I don't know if Ron, I think Ron was involved at some point. I don't know, the history of that one is murky. But very cool.

EB: Do you know Don Letts, who did the video London Calling?

Ron Delsener was the man at Madison Square Garden Photo: Anne Katrin Titze

JS: Not personally. Of course I know Don Letts by name, and his work.

EB: I've met him in ’77. I met The Clash in’ 76, and all of those people. I also had the shop 99 on MacDougal Street.

JS: Oh, that's awesome! What a nice surprise to chat with you!

EB: On the flight back from St. Louis, I sat next to a woman who was being flown in to paint Van Morrison's portrait. Van Morrison was opening for Bob Dylan. She had some ideas about wanting to do some events with Ron Delsener. He was the one bringing her in, taking care of her. He put her up at the Mark Hotel, and so she said, come with me to meet Ron Delsener, and I didn't act like I had already interacted with him. She wanted to do all these different shows. But then I said to Ron I would like to come to the show because it was sold out. He said, go in the VIP entrance, and I'll make sure you get in.

JS: Oh, that's nice!

AKT: You must have had a lot of people telling you their own Delsener stories.

JS: Oh, yes, there's a lot. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of Ron Delsener stories that people want to share. For sure. I mean he's been around so long and done so many shows.

AKT: Patti Smith mentions him as 'the equaliser’..?

Jake Sumner with Anne-Katrin Titze and Ed Bahlman at the Quad Cinema Photo: Gabriel Borges

JS: I think she's saying that the $1 ticket was the equaliser exactly. But I think you could apply it to Ron, too, in some ways, for just doing that and doing those shows for $1. I think that applies too. I think he really did do that. And what's interesting about that from my research and certainly speaking to some of the subjects in the film who really know the business, people like Tom Ross, who ran CAA, one of the biggest agents at the time, he was like, in my mind there was no one before Ron that did sponsored concerts. You know, the Rheingold Music Festival in Central Park, and then Schaefer.

They were really the beginning of sponsorship. Now, obviously, it's so many sponsors for shows. It's everywhere. But I think it was really Ron that had that idea. I think that's important in that he found someone else to foot the bill so he could make the ticket price kind of cheap. I don't think he would be able to charge $1 a ticket unless he had a sponsor. So in that way I think it's really interesting, but it also gave birth to corporate sponsorship, as we know it now.

EB: Also I have to give you a lot of credit the way you used animation in the film.

JS: Oh, thank you. Well, I would have to give credit to Sean Donnelly, who's the great animator we work with on those sequences, but that was a lot of fun.

EB: Yeah, perfect. AWESOME + modest is the name?

Ron Delsener closing a deal Photo: Jake Sumner

JS: Oh, yeah, AWESOME + modest. Ron is, and I don't mean this in a mean way or derogatory way, but Ron is a bit of a cartoon figure in some ways. He's sort of a larger than life persona, so it made sense to animate some of these stories. Because also, in a very practical sense, there was no archive for a lot of this stuff. So we needed to figure it out. We can't just have Ron sit there in a chair and tell the story. We need some visual aids here to help us tell the story. So animation made sense.

EB: Ron is also truly a nice person and knows what he's doing. He is so professional and nice and that's so rare.

JS: Nice sometimes. Sometime try making a film about him!

AKT: What was the biggest surprise for you while making the film? Was there anything that really you did not expect at all?

JS: It took a long time, that was one. Ron is mercurial. You don't really know which Ron you're going to get on a given day. Which is normal. So there would be days where Ron would be on fire. Let's go here and let's go there, and buy us lunch, and then there'd be days where he would say get the hell out of my house, I’m not doing this today.

Ron Delsener heading to East Hampton Photo: Jake Sumner

So it would just depend, but it was always in a very loving way. He's a man in his late eighties, so I think there were just days where it just didn't work and we had to figure out how to work around. But the biggest surprises, I mean, honestly, a lot of the stuff we found in his basement was a surprise. A lot of the archival we found, some Super 8 footage. That was his dad filming Super 8 footage when Ron was a kid in the Forties and early Fifties.

AKT: With his sister, right?

JS: Yeah, that's all real. A lot of people are like, oh, that's nice recreation you did. Those kids look just like him and his sister. No, that's them, and that's his dad, I think, who had an early super 8 camera. And there's footage of baby Ron, who's born in 1936, which is pretty rare, I think. I look at a lot of archives and it's rare to find anything like that. So we saw that stuff, and it was a gold mine.

AKT: And you try to be very accurate, which I appreciate. Is it actually the Green Dragon that we hear on the radio? He's saying something about the Green Dragon being his favourite radio show as a child.

JS: We couldn't find anything of the Green Dragon. Sometimes with these films, you need to find something that's representative of whatever is being talked about, because you can't find the exact thing.#

Ron Delsener Presents poster

EB: Early on you have them backstage for The Who concert and the manager introduces him to someone, and Ron says: “It’s an honour for you to meet me.”

JS: Yes, that's one of Ron's favourite lines.

AKT: And it’s often true, no?

JS: Yeah, it's true.

EB: You have a special thanks to Tony Shanahan.

JS: Yes, Tony was very helpful in helping us interview Patti (Smith and Lenny (Kaye).

EB: Great Guy. I put on a show at Site Santa Fe with Patti Smith for their benefit in ’97, or something like that and Tony became a good friend at that time, when he was performing with them.

JS: Yeah, very nice guy.

EB: I also noticed a Sarah Flack thanks.

JS: A friend and incredible editor and great person.

AKT: Please say hi to her from us. We had brunch with her and Frédéric Boyer about two weeks ago.

JS: Frédéric's another great guy. I will be sure to do that. In fact, I'll invite them to the screening. Thanks for reminding me, I’m gonna let them know about the release. Small world. A lot of connections here.

EB: You are doing Q &As for the opening weekend?

JS: I think we are, yup.

AKT: Maybe we'll see you after the screening and say hello!

JS: Yes, please join us! Anne-Katrin, I like that word for Ron. It’s good, that's fitting: Flâneur! He's exactly that, actually, it's funny.

EB: Thank you for the film. It brought back so many memories it triggered.

JS: Oh, that's so nice! Well, that's what I want because I want people to enjoy it so thank you!