What's up, 89Bridge? I'm Ellie Sadler, and I'm here interviewing Terry Morgan. Terry Morgan got his Bachelor's of Arts degree in Ethnomusicology and his Master's in Systematic Musicology at the University of Washington. He's the CEO and owner of Modern Enterprises, a company founded in 1979 that is the most successful minority-owned event production company in Washington State.
His company provides talent, technical, and production services to help create the best event they can. They host many celebrations, including concerts, events, and gallows. Some of their clients include Nordstrom, Microsoft, the Museum of Light, and Seattle Children's Hospital. Thank you for joining me today, Terry.
How are you? I'm doing fine, Ellie. Thanks for having me. Yeah.
So how did you decide to enter the business side of the entertainment industry instead of pursuing a strictly performance career? It just kind of happened naturally. I mean, I've been a player since I was 13, and I grew up on Ruby Island, so I kind of just put my own bands together and started booking my own bands, but found out it was just as easy to book other people's bands at the same time. Once I had a relationship with the other schools, I could say, this is a band from Seattle.
You want to book them? So I just was bold and started making phone calls. Awesome. And then, so what inspired you to create Modern Enterprises?
Well, I was doing, I never, just to correct a little bit of my bio, I didn't finish my Master's. I was like two quarters away from being done, and I just got tired of academia after being in school for like six years or longer. And I had a friend named James Shustead, who was an electronic musician, and he had a buddy that he was playing with named Roland Barker, and he was starting a new band called The Blackouts. And they were a really, really progressive arts rock band, punk rock band, basically.
And I liked them, so I started managing them, and they kind of just drew me away from academia into the punk rock world. And we ended up joining up partnerships with three other guys, Mike Rainey, Jim Lightfoot, and Carlos Ganduzzi. And we formed Modern Productions at the time and took over the Showbox Theater. At the time, it was a bingo parlor called the Talmatora, and we would go in there on the weekends and put on punk shows.
So the first band we did was a group called Magazine, which featured Howard DeVoto from the Buscocks, and The Blackouts were the opening act. And from there, we just started booking more punk bands from the Northwest, everything from the West Coast, everything from the Dead Kennedys to, oh, who else? Black Flag, just a whole ton of stuff from the States, including the Ramones, Iggy Pop, and then all the English stuff, too. We were the first American stop for a lot of the British bands who would fly from London to Vancouver and then end up coming to Seattle.
And so we had The Police, Squeeze from Australia, obviously, XTC, Gang 4, PIL, The Specials, The Selector, Dire Straits. It was just on and on and on. Every week, we had a different band from England, and it was fun. That's awesome.
So how did you get in contact with all these bands? Because I'm sure it wasn't easy. Well, a lot of it was just Mike Rainey and Jim Lightfoot, Jim owned a shop downtown on First, no, Second, and Pike, basically, called Time Travelers. And it was a comic book shop that sold punk rock records.
And so through those record companies, we developed relationships with the record companies and then with the bands. And so we would call the bands directly, say, hey, you want to come to Seattle? And say, sure, we'd love to come up there. That's awesome.
It was totally a do-it-yourself kind of business at the time. Yeah. And so do you have any events or concerts or anything that have stuck out to you the most, that you're the most proud of or anything? Well, the first time when The Police played the showbox, it was pretty special.
Because the specials were the opening act of it. And the whole thing was really kind of crazy because nobody really believed that this alternative music was going to be anything. So we couldn't get any play cards. We barely got any airplay.
I think KISW was the only station that was playing the police for us. But everybody else was like, ugh, music, ugh. Who likes that? And so with The Police came, we kind of made history.
People were like, okay, this music is here. This is going to be big. It's growing. And then the next time we brought him into town, we put him at the Paramount.
So it jumped that fast. And XTC was the opening act on that. So that was a really special show. I mean, there's been so many great ones.
James Brown in the showbox was pretty amazing. That was just a big party. I would have had a long-time relationship with James over the years. And the last time we worked together, we were doing Halloween shows at the Paramount, big James Brown Halloween parties, which were like the funnest party you could ever imagine because it was just totally danced in costume and just having a great time.
And then across the street at the Camelot Hotel used to be the Cloud Room, which was a cocktail lounge on top. You used to have a piano player just playing the piano bar. Well, James' band would always usually stay at the Camelot. And instead of just going out on the town, they'd get bored.
So they'd just go up to the Cloud Room and jam. And it was funky. It was fun. And people would like hear, oh, James Brown's playing at the Camelot.
And one time I remember it got so crowded, they had to turn the elevator off. And they stopped letting people up there. So that was a great time. I bet.
That sounds very eventful and something you would want to experience. Oh, yeah. So how do you decide which bands to suggest opening for people? Or how do you pair the bands together?
You know, it's just kind of in my head. If there's a band that I think deserves the opportunity to be seen in front of a large crowd, or if it's a band I manage, they have an advantage there. But I like to see opportunity. You know, if I didn't ever get the opportunity to do the things that I've done, I would not be where I am now.
And so offering other people that chance is kind of fun. And it's just seeing the new reaction. You know, when you put a band in front of an audience that's not expecting something really unique and they're totally blown away, that gives you, like, the sense of accomplishment that you've done something good. Yeah.
And you're also the director for Borealis Festival of Light. Can you give us a quick overview of what this company is and how it interacts with the Seattle music entertainment scene? So Borealis is a light festival. And so we work with light artists and musicians to create really unique kind of large-scale experiences.
Most of the work is animated, other than the light art installations, which are actual art creations. And we held the first festival in 2018 at South Lake Union at South Lake Union Park. And nobody really knew what it was going to do here. And I had an idea that it was going to be big because my partners are based in Budapest, Hungary, and they're involved in light festivals all over the world.
So we knew that we had the right combination. But when we kicked things off, we had no idea that we'd do 120,000 people our first year. And everybody was kind of just shocked and surprised but overwhelmed that it turned out so great. And the quality of the work was so good.
So we continue on doing things in the digital world. Two years ago, I did the New Year's for the Noodle. Not this year, but past year. And that kind of set records as far as viewership for King TV for New Year's.
And what everyone was shocked about was the afterlife. The video online has over 1.1 million views. And it jumped off into the rest of the social media, like wildfire. And within a week, it had 1.1 billion digital impressions, which is pretty cool.
That's super cool. And so I just have one more question for you. And I know you mentioned earlier that you didn't really like the – or you grew tired of the academic scene. But do you think it in any way, like, benefited you in leading companies like Borealis and Mondrian surprises?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I – I mean, I feel very fortunate to have the education that I have. And, I mean, going back to high school, I had what I think was very, very superior teachers.
My physics teacher, his name was Tom Graff. His father – his grandfather was – well, they were German. But he was Graff of Graff Zeppelins. I don't know if you know anything about Zeppelins.
But, you know, big inflatable flying machines. And so he would talk about the Zeppelin industry. And I was like, whoa, this is really, really cool. But he would totally end up being, you know, an environmentalist and conservationist.
So that kind of gave me inspiration. Plus, my music instructors at Bridges and Vernon Greenstreet were really world-class musicians on their own. And what they passed along to me and others was, you know, pretty amazing. College was great because I just studied what I wanted to study and just kind of absorbed all cultures possible.
Like you say, I did my work in ethnomusicology and history of jazz. So I just became a sponge for information. And also, that's where I kind of started my visual work. I studied video art with Bill Ritchie.
And we used to do abstract electronic art for television, which is all the way before MTV. So if I never got that exposure from school, I would have never developed a project like Borealis. Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on here today and talking to us.
This was super cool, super informational. And I'm very glad we got to talk. Yeah, and check out our website, the Borealis Festival Light Site. You'll see a lot of the work that we presented in 2018.
Plus, you'll see the One World, One Heart, which is a big piece that we co-presented with our associates out of the IMAP Festival in Bucharest, Romania. And it was all artists doing work towards making statements about COVID and how to survive COVID. And this last week, we unveiled a new piece called Enlightenment. It's Artists United for Peace, which we debuted at the CL Art Museum, the Asian Art Museum.
And it actually surprised us all by we had over, we started out with 30 cities around the world that we're going to show the piece. And now it's up over 65 cities that have been involved and more and more get involved all the time. So we'll be posting on Facebook where we're going to show it again. But until this war is over, we're going to stay visible.
That's awesome. Thank you so much. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah. All right. Thank you for listening to this interview with Terry Morgan on 89 The Bridge.