Pretty Polly Productions / Howie Cusack

Howie Cusack was born on July 15, 1949 and raised in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. His father, Howard, worked for Travelers Insurance and his mother, Madeline, was a successful banker. He was a sports-obsessed, with a particular focus on basketball. Growing up across the street from St. Gabriel’s schoolyard courts resulted in endless hours of practice and by the time Cusack was 11, he and his hoops-obsessed friends were regularly taking the crosstown bus in search of other courts where they could go up against new players and improve their game.

RADIO BEGINNINGS, MOVE TO BOSTON

Cusack got into the music business on a fluke. After his basketball days at Fordham University in New York City were eclipsed by some guys faster and more talented, he landed a weekly show on the campus powerhouse station WFUV. When graduation day rolled around, some classmates announced they were moving to Boston in the fall to start a band and, figuring that Cusack knew all about the music business since he spun records on the radio once a week, asked him to join as their manager after wrapping up his last summer in the Hamptons.

Though he knew only slightly more than the average person about the ins and outs of the music biz, Cusack took the gig and he turned out to be a natural, landing the band a salaried gig at a club within nine months. In the early ’70s, it was pretty much unheard of for a bunch of unknowns to be working musicians without a day job.

LEARNING THE BUSINESS

Cusack had to learn the business very quickly and spoke to everyone he could in the Boston music scene; he was thrilled that his degree from Fordham in mass communications was frequently given the acid test and passed with flying colors. He went to four clubs per night, five days a week, for months on end – which he never considered to be a hardship in any way – and amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the popular bands and venues in New England.

He became a partner in Pretty Polly Productions in 1973. Dave Werlin and Roe Vallely had founded the company in late ’72 and often called to book Cusack’s band, soon realizing that his knowledge of the scene could be hugely helpful. “They realized that since my band was always busy, perhaps I might be a good addition to their team,” Cusack says. “I came in as an immediate partner which, in reality, sounded cool but resulted in me doing an incredible amount of long hours and hard work.”

The intensity of his efforts gradually began to pay off and Pretty Polly gained a considerable amount of traction in a very short time, he says, but he realized that the company needed to take a different approach. “Initially, in addition to managing The Chris Rhodes Band, we just were on the hunt for any gigs we could  land for any bands that were available,” he says. “Within a couple of years, I realized that the fast track to success was signing up the best bands for exclusive representation.”

KATHE BURBACH, EXPANSION

Enter Kathe Burbach, who’d started her career in the mid-’70s as Fred Taylor’s assistant and helped run Paul’s Mall and The Jazz Workshop. She’d also done stints at Ted Kurland Associates, Rounder Records and Harvard Square Productions, where she was promotional director and handled a variety of management tasks. After Cusack and Burbach married in 1980, they worked tirelessly together for 30 years, turning Pretty Polly into a major artist-booking and concert-producing organization. “Without Kathe’s expertise, commitment and belief, there would be no Howie Cusack nor Pretty Polly Productions,” Cusack says. Burbach passed away in 2010 after a battling with a variety of health issues.

Cusack’s first move upon joining Pretty Polly was signing up as many local venues as possible, which gave the outfit a significant amount of control of the market and allowed them to expand its range of artists beyond Boston. For example, if you were a band from southern Connecticut that wanted to play in Boston, you had to go through Pretty Polly. This operational, managerial and organizational style resulted in forming relationships with many new bands and allowed the company to expand its range of bookings dramatically. Most importantly, Pretty Polly mastered the art of production from load in to load out, establishing a network of support companies and a reputation for integrity and paying close attention to every detail.

AEROSMITH, FESTIVALS, OTHER NOTABLE BOOKINGS

Pretty Polly’s first major success came when they signed Aerosmith in 1974, just as the band was starting to gain national traction, after seeing them play before some 30,000 in Eschoheag, Rhode Island (opening for Sha Na Na). In 1976, the company ran a huge event at Raceway 42 in Warren, Ohio that featured Steve Miller, The J. Geils Band, ELO and other big names; 40,000 people paid for tickets and another 40,000 didn’t but got in anyway. “I’ll never forget leaving the venue in a helicopter just as ELO took the stage and unleashed a torrent of beams which appeared to be aimed directly at our chopper,” Howie laughs.

During the ’70s and ’80s, Pretty Polly created and produced dozens of festivals all over New England. They also enjoyed a 26-year relationship with CBS Radio and brought virtually every top-name oldies group to City Hall Plaza and later to Hatch Memorial Shell. The company’s representation continued to grow through the jam-band era of the 1990s and 2000s, managing and/or booking hundreds of acts from New England and elsewhere. Among them were Aimee Mann, ’Til Tuesday, The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Guster, The Stompers, Robin Lane & The Chartbusters, Orchestra Luna, Human Sexual Response, Face to Face, New Man, Radio King & His Court of Rhythm, John Lincoln Wright and The Sourmash Boys, The Atlantics, Private Lightning, The Neighborhoods, Bim Skala Bim, The I Tones, Fat City Band, Pastiche, Percy Hill,  Moe, Tribe, Ellis Paul, Barrence Whitfield & The Savages and O Positive.

COLLEGE/UNIVERSITY INITIATIVE, MOVE TO OREGON

As the agency and the bands became bigger and better, it became increasingly difficult to keep the major agencies from wooing the groups and it became very clear that they couldn’t compete with massive outfits like William Morris, Creative Artists, and ICM Partners. To differentiate themselves, Pretty Polly began mining the college/university market, giving schools a list of options for their concert events; at one time, they were the exclusive booker for over 100 colleges/universities, organizing shows for New England-based acts in addition to national ones including The Pretenders, The Kinks, The Steve Miller Band and Dave Matthews.

In 2014, Cusack moved to Oregon and turned Pretty Polly over to his nephew, Dan Saldarini. “I was getting a little long in the tooth,” he said. “The time was right to move on. Dan had worked by my side for almost 15 years and I acted as an adviser to him and handled whatever special events needed handling.”

As it turned out, however, Cusack’s own concert-production days weren’t over. After reading that the newly opened Matthew Knight Arena on the campus of the University of Oregon wasn’t attracting enough touring act, he offered them a hand and coordinated shows by Passion Pit, Kevin Hart, Macklemore, Lee Brice and a couple of others. Eventually the venue became one of the hottest in the Pacific Northwest and Live Nation and Anschutz Entertainment Group began bringing in acts (which ended Cusack’s role at Matthew Knight Arena).

VERIZON COLLABORATION, CAMPUS CONSCIOUSNESS TOUR

In the early 2000s, with the birth of social media, technology corporations began looking for avenues to penetrate the under-utilized college market with innovative technology to establish a presence there. Around 2008, Mark Lev from Fenway Sports Group brought Cusack an opportunity to introduce Verizon’s new wireless technology to college campuses by booking a national concert tour. That year, they presented Howie Day and Brandi Carlisle on a tour of the Northeast and they landed the very popular All American Rejects the following year. Cusack eventually established relationships with Vice Media and others.

In 2010, in association with Reverb.org, Cusack created the Campus Consciousness Tour, which was loosely modeled on Dave Matthews’ efforts at “greening” his concerts. In addition to a strong environmental stance over the years, the tour included a variety of socially current issues ranging from voter registration and LBGTQ issues to healthy food alternatives. The first 25-show tour featured Drake, who exploded on the charts just as the tour launched, making Cusack and his crew looked like geniuses. They subsequently launched other tours featuring Wiz Khalifa, Passion Pit, Janelle Monae, Fun, Grouplove, Guster, Capital Cities, Iconopop, Ben Harper and others.

COMEDY EVENTS, CURRENT ACTIVITY

In addition to his efforts promoting music events, Cusack has booked a wide variety of comedians on college campuses, among them Bill Cosby, Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, Howie Mandel, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer and Russell Bran. Pretty Polly even managed to secure a show with master illusionists Penn & Teller at the height of their stardom.

Today, Cusack remains somewhat involve in things on the upper-left coast and has produced a couple of successful festivals there. In April 2018, he created and opened a Pacific-fusion/tiki bar that became the top-rated restaurant on Oregon’s central coast and received 50 five-bubble reviews on Trip Advisor. “‘I recently sold my share and am now traveling quite a bit” he says. “And I’m constantly going to shows, for sure.”

THINGS TO ASK CUSACK ABOUT IF YOU HAPPEN TO MEET HIM

• Getting a thumbs up from Bob Dylan
• Booking Muhammad Ali’s final tour in Providence
• The time he had to shore up a collapsing stage for Meatloaf
• Dealing with Aretha Franklin’s taxes at The Wang Center in Boston
• Having a guy run off with $60,000 in box office receipts without paying the bands
• Being held at gunpoint until 4am at The Bushnell Performing Arts Center in Hartford because an R&B show didn’t meet the promoters expectations

(by A.J. Wachtel)