Topspin's Ian Rogers: How I met the Beastie Boys
How does a nerdy fanboy get to go on tour with the hottest band of his time?
Our profile of Ian Rogers of Topspin in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times deliberately left out the story of how Rogers met the Beastie Boys in the early 1990s and was invited to go on the road with the band.
We omitted the details not because we were lazy, but because Rogers (pictured on the right with his daughter Zoe in 1996) himself told it best. His description of the events, sent as an e-mail response to our questions, is a picture of serendipity, powered by a couple of good ideas along the way. Want to go on tour with Radiohead or Eminem? Read on, and you might find some tips.
The following is an edited version of Rogers' story, in his own words. It starts out with how he met John Silva, the Beastie Boys' longtime manager, in 1993.
There wasn't a computer in John Silva's office, which was called Gold Mountain Management at the time. There was a record label down the hall called World Domination, which had the only Internet connection in the building. Jason Fiber, who worked at World Domination, saw the Beastie Boys site I'd created and walked down the hall to Silva's office. "You have to see this," Fiber told Silva. They saw it, and John had his assistant Bethann reach out to me.
I started working for Gold Mountain as a consultant from that point, building websites for their artists for $8.50 an hour, which was a lot of money to me at the time. In addition to the Beastie Boys, I helped with the Breeders, Redd Kross, Bonnie Raitt and others.
When the Beastie Boys came through Los Angeles for Lollapalooza in 1994, Bethann called to see if I wanted to come. I was a punk rock kid and wasn't interested in the big festival shows on principal. I'd already seen the Beastie Boys a few times and didn't really want to see them with 20,000 other people. The conversation went something like this: