Tony Raine
Tony Raine is from England and his life reached near-legendary proportions in the entertainment industry when he moved to New England. Born on August 4, 1955 in Blackburn, Lancashire (about 20 miles from Manchester and 30 from Liverpool), his father was a drummer and his brother manned the kit in a band called Kuba, whose claim to fame was opening for The Alarm a couple of times.
Raine is a self-taught guitarist who learned early on that he preferred working behind the scenes rather than performing onstage. “I didn’t get into playing music until my early 20s and I didn’t think I’d be good enough to get paid to perform but always wanted to make a living in music or performing arts,” he says. “It seemed there was always demand for production and management people and I knew a little about putting on shows at schools and colleges.”
DEEJAY BEGINNINGS, ELECTRONICS TRAINING
He showed a knack for promotion in his teens, running a dance club while in high school. “I was the nerdy audio-video guy,” he says. ”I joined just to meet the girls.” The club didn’t have enough money for new records, so Raine raised funds by holding dances in the gym on rainy days. Soon he was working as a deejay at youth clubs in his area and hitchhiking across England to see dozens of shows, one of which he remembers particularly well even now, 50 years later. ”In October 1970, a girl at school told me about a concert at King Georges Hall I should go to: T Rex,” he says, “There were only maybe 200 people at the show and we were all in the cheap seats at the back until Marc Bolan invited everyone down front. From then on, I was hooked.”
Over the next two years, Raine saw every major act he could as they played pubs, concert halls and festivals across the UK. After graduating from high school, Raine enrolled at Fleetwood Nautical College, a Merchant Marine school in Wyre, Lancashire specializing in Radio and Navigation Operations, where he received training in basic electronics. While there, he was the social secretary of the Students Union, which gave him his first experience in promotion, booking and concert production.
MOVE TO BOSTON, MUSIC-ORIENTED TOURISM, BEATLES HISTORY TOUR
After finishing college in the early ‘’70s, jobs weren’t plentiful in Lancashire so, after a stint warehousing albums at a record store, he moved to London and tended bar. He met his American wife, Bonnie, in 1974, they married a year later and moved to the States. After working as a waiter and bartender down South and out West for about a year, then running a pub in Wales for a little more than a year, they settled in Boston in 1982.
“I joined the Victoria Station restaurant chain to better school myself in operations and business management,” Raines says, “and I got involved early in the Boston scene with a local band and found my way around clubs like Chet’s Last Call, The Plough, Jacks and The Rathskeller. It was an exciting time to be in Boston with so many local bands getting national and even international attention.”
The Victoria Station owner said he thought the tourism business was quite interesting, and in 1982 an chance to test that theory arose when The Who announced their farewell tour; they scheduled a show at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia with The Clash and Santana, but there weren’t any New England dates on the schedule. Raines suggested that the Victoria Station owner buy 250 tickets and see if there was interest. And there was: They sold out five buses travelling from Kenmore Square to Philly for the September 25th show.
Soon after that success, Raines came up with the idea of Beatles history tours in the UK to coincide with the Beatles convention in Liverpool every August – “music tourism” at its best, especially for Fab Four fans. He booked a table at the upcoming Beatlefest at the Meadowlands in New Jersey to test the interest level and build a mailing list, billing the tour as “Get Back To Where They Once Belonged.”
MTV, ROCK APPLE TOURS
At the Beatlefest, he was approached by Martha Quinn, one of MTV’s original VJs, who asked him what he was promoting; he told her and she went on her way. When Raines returned home, however, he got a call from MTV saying that they were working on a promotion called “People Really Win” where the winner got to be a Bruce Springsteen roadie for a day and the grand prize was being flown to London on the Concord for a visit to Abbey Road Studios and being presented with the then-new audio file Beatles box set.
MTV asked Raines how he would entertain the winners on such a London trip, so he put together a proposal with Beatles-related sights – a walking tour, appropriate hotels, a daily itinerary – which MTV promptly accepted. The network agreed to cover all his expenses and promoted the project on air as Rock Apple Tours. The first tour was in 1983; Charles Rosenay of the Beatles fanzine Good Day Sunshine came along as a guest and joined the 1984 tour as a paying customer. When Raines moved on into the music business full time in 1985, Rosenay took over doing the tours, using the Liverpool contacts Raines had provided.
THE CHANNEL, WAYSIDE INN, MELODY TENT, SOUTH SHORE MUSIC CIRCUS
By 1985, Raines was in management training at Victoria Station in Burlington, Massachusetts and the program didn’t pay very well so he took a bartending job at The Channel to make ends meet. Peter Boras, who was running the club, said that after Raine finished the training program, The Channel would hire him to manage their bar operations. And that’s what he did for the next two years, when The Channel was in its heyday (several years before closing in late 1991).
In 1987, Raines moved to Chatham on Cape Cod and became the general manager of the Wayside Inn. In 1988, he promoted his own “Up Close and Personal” concert series there and produced shows by major names such as Bill Monroe, Roger McGuinn, Country Joe, Loudon Wainwright, Gene Clark, Roy Buchanan and Jim Carol. In the early ’90s, he helped establish Edible Rex in Billerica and the venue hosted local favorites like The Neighborhoods and The Zulus. In 1994, he became the manager at the Cape Cod Melody Tent, taking over as production manager shortly thereafter, and by 2012 he was managing and handling production duties at both the Melody Tent and the South Shore Music Circus.
OTHER PROJECTS, ARTIST MANAGEMENT, WEBSITE DESIGN
Since then, Raine has promoted shows and fundraisers, booked bands into Cape Cod clubs, produced CD’s for several Cape-based artists and managed performers including Siobhan Magnus (sixth-place finisher on the ninth season of American Idol), The Beat Poets, Les Sampou, Fred Fried, Lisa Jason and Jimmy Keys. He provided each of those artists with their “big break” by booking them as openers for national acts at the Melody Tent. In 2016, he built his music tourism business by producing music-oriented audio tours around studios and other places of interest in Nashville, Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
During the off-season winter months in the late ‘90s, Raines designed websites for musicians including Ray Davies of The Kinks and Carly Simon. “I promoted a show with Ray at the Cape Cod Community College and The Kinks had played at the Melody Tent in 1995, so we had a bit of a relationship,” he says. “I was able to convince Ray that he needed a website. We were in fairly early but as the net developed so fast and the technology enabled everyone to do what we were doing, it became too competitive for us.’
CURRENT ACTIVITY, FUTURE BOOK
In 2018, South Shore Playhouse Associates rehired Raines as director of production for the Cape Cod Melody Tent and the South Shore Music Circus, which keeps him busy from May to September. “I consider myself a self-taught
’musicologist’ at this point,” he says, “and I’m eager to exploit the knowledge I’ve accrued as I developed music-related travel products. I’m working hard to present our venues as first-class facilities that can attract and present world-class artists for years to come in the tradition we have maintained for over 60 years.” At some point, he says, he’s going to write a collection of short stories about his decades hitchhiking the rock ‘n’ roll highway.
(by A.J. Wachtel)
