Like practically everyone in the live entertainment biz, Mike Kestin, founder and president of JamFam Productions, a New Jersey-based entertainment and marketing agency, knows first-hand what it’s like to have your business negatively impacted by the COVID19-era’s canceled culture. That happened when his planned Waterloo Village rock music festival in Stanhope, NJ, went up in smoke two years ago due to COVID health and safety concerns.
Not long after New Jersey went into COVID lockdown, Kestin was told that the Waterloo Village festival – what was to be the state’s largest music festival in decades – would not see the light of day. It was a period of great frustration and disappointment for Kestin and others who worked exclusively on the doomed event for over eight months.
“It was probably one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” Kestin recalled of his decision to cancel the festival which had booked 20-plus local and regional acts, in addition to nationally known headliners Melvin Seals & JGB, Grateful Dead founder and guitarist/singer Jerry Garcia’s band, and the New Riders of The Purple Sage, formed in the ‘70s as a Garcia-driven side project.
Music-industry neophytes like Kestin and seasoned promoters had been forced to navigate the uncertainty of live entertainment in a COVID-stricken world. But in Kestin’s case, his young company flourished and dug deep roots over the past two years. COVID be damned!
During the height of the pandemic, Kestin was busy booking tribute and cover bands all over the Garden State, an opportune time when most big national and international acts were cooling their heels or performing on live stream platforms because virtually all the traditional music venues went dark.
Kestin realized that if people couldn’t see mega-watt rock bands like Dead & Company or Dave Matthews in the flesh, they could still hear their music performed by tribute or cover bands (the difference between a tribute band and a cover band is that the former dedicates all or nearly all of their sets to a specific band or solo artist while the latter plays songs from different groups).
Kestin, who has a discriminating ear for recognizing quality talent, booked and worked with the region’s well-known and unknown bands – and made a number of the latter known.
Muligo attended a bunch of those shows and, in our opinion, some of those bands were just as good as the originals, if not better, and the price of admission was a fraction of the price that fans would pay to see the real deal. Unfortunately, the music industry is back in true form, aggressively charging fans to pay stratospheric prices to see the big acts perform, and a lot of people are happy or resigned to the fact of digging deeper into their wallets to see these bands take the stage again.
But during the pandemic, closed concert halls and arenas were not a problem for Kestin. In fact, their closure provided the impetus for Kestin to provide a suitable alternative.
Kestin joined forces with the Sussex County Fairgrounds to turn a portion of the fairgrounds into a drive-in music venue, booking nationally acclaimed Dead tribute band Dark Star Orchestra and trance-fusion jam band The Disco Biscuits in the spring of 2021 and major groove-grass acts Railroad Earth and Twiddle in the fall of 2020. “It was an incredible opportunity, “Kestin recalled of bands’ appearances at the fairgrounds. “JamFam was still the only one in the state doing anything at the time.”
Today, JamFam Productions books mostly local or regional entertainment at bars, restaurants and other smaller venues with up to a 300-guest capacity. The company has hired acts to perform in places in Manhattan, Long Island, Atlantic City, Somerville, Sayreville, and even in the state’s hinterlands like Hackettstown, Phillipsburg and Asbury. JamFam Production’s first local band booking was the R&B cover band The Tyrone Stackhouse Project at the popular brewpub Village Brewing Company in Somerville on New Year’s Eve 2021.
JamFam’s growth strategy seemingly has paid off: people are running to bars or anywhere else to be happy again listening to live music and other forms of entertainment, while venue owners featuring live music are ringing up more sales.
Perhaps, part of the reason for JamFam Productions’ growth is due to the world we live in today – live entertainment-starved fans desperately searching for some relief in the stressful post-COVID era. And one of the best ways to relieve stress is by attending a live entertainment performance. There’s even medical proof that listening to music ignites and releases a brain chemical called dopamine that is associated with your brain’s pleasure center.
On a chilly March evening, Muligo met with Kestin on a weekday night at Village Brewing Company to hear how his company managed to thrive during the COVID outbreak.
The last time Muligo interviewed Kestin (muligo.com/jam-band-concert-promoter-goes-country/)was not long after the COVID-related debacle at Waterloo Village. At that time, an undeterred Kestin proclaimed the festival’s cancellation would not turn out to be his own Waterloo, a reference to the famous battlefield where French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte saw his final defeat.
Standing at the bar, the tall, bespectacled Kestin was checking his cell phone amid the din of VBC’s multi-generational clientele that evening.
On this night, the pub’s entertainment Grateful Dead tribute band Cosmic Jerry Band was setting up their equipment. As the evening progressed, most of the younger crowd cleared out, making way for mostly an older crowd comprised of Deadheads and classic rock fans, or those who were curious about the psychedelic-jam rock sounds blasting from the brewpub, once the site of a Woolworth’s and an antique store.
Before the band hit the stage, Muligo and Kestin ducked into a private room to hear how Kestin bobbed and weaved through the challenges to his business.
In November of 2019, Village Brewing Company erected a 6,000-square-foot heated tent at a nearby parking lot to host live entertainment, and JamFam Productions was called to duty to book the talent. The first bookings occurred during the deepest, darkest days of COVID in January of 2020. Even as COVID was at its peak, it was a difficult task to accommodate those who thirst to see live bands perform even with social-distancing protocols in place.
Unexpectedly, the first two non-ticketed shows that JamFam promoted for Village Brewing Company literally had hundreds of people that showed up since there was nowhere else in the tri-state area putting on shows.
Kestin promoted the first shows in the region in nearly 8 months – the guests showed up from as far away as Brooklyn and New Haven to have their thirst quenched for live entertainment. Needless to say, there were a lot of very unhappy customers turned away due to social distancing and new capacity restrictions.
Kestin solved the problem of too many people attending by offering pre-sold tickets and reserved seating for the shows. This structure allowed the venue to limit how many tickets were purchased and to comply with the social-distancing rules. According to Kestin, “It didn’t take long for other establishments all over New Jersey to follow suit with my seating approach. All of a sudden, other establishments were following my lead — all the way down the Jersey Shore.”
Kestin, however, did begin to encounter challenges in his quest to bring live entertainment to the masses. At one point, the brewpub got smacked with a big fine for violating the town’s noise ordinance, resulting in requiring bands to lower their sound levels. This kept the bar from getting hit with additional stiff fines; sadly it also put a damper on some of the bands’ performances because they were used to playing loud rock ‘n roll. VBC later had no choice but to pull the stakes from the tent in October of 2021. Kestin then continued booking live entertainment inside the bar earlier this year as a result of the easing of COVID regulations.
Despite challenges, Kestin has prevailed: JamFam Productions has quickly built a tri-state network of nearly two dozen venues offering live entertainment primarily in New Jersey, while expanding his geographical footprint to Pennsylvania, New York and beyond, working alongside with other tristate local live entertainment booking concerns like Elm Three Productions and Pisces Media. In 2021, JamFam Productions booked around 180 shows across New Jersey.
In January, Kestin set a goal to boost that number to do 300 shows in 2022. Amazingly, he believes he is on target to be involved with possibly 350 to 400 shows by the end of the year. Since pandemic cases have waned this year, more bars, restaurants, catering halls and other venues are booking live entertainment – some for the first time – in an attempt to cash in on the post-pandemic music explosion.
This situation has created a free-for-all for venues trying to book “quality” bands. In fact, demand has become so strong for booking certain tribute and cover bands, Kestin has found it difficult at times to “get the quality bands to play the dates that I need to fill because they are booking between 4 and 8 months.” Fortunately, the tristate area, like other major music hubs such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin, has such a deep pool of extremely talented musicians that makes it a bit easier for Kestin to find bands for his bookings.
Besides the local music circuit, music lovers are being inundated with a flood of summer festivals and concerts featuring those big acts which went on hiatus early on during the pandemic.
Speaking of festivals, Kestin has two festivals of his own scheduled this summer. JamFam Productions will hold two reenactments of the 1973 Watkins Glen music festival, the first on May 21 in Flanders, NJ, and the second on August 20 in Kempton, Pa. Kestin had the opportunity to announce the Kempton festival during a recent live segment of “The Tales From The Golden Road” a call-in show on Sirius XM radio’s Grateful Dead channel.
The original festival, which about doubled the number of those who attended the first Woodstock music and arts festival in 1969, featured some of the biggest rock acts at the time: The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers Band and The Band. JamFam Productions’ version has booked tribute bands The THE BAND Band (The Band), This Old Engine (The Grateful Dead), and The Peach Project (Allman Brothers Band).
For the New Jersey show, Kestin says he has already sold over half the tickets – and expects to sell it out and attract 1,000 attendees.
Since Kestin started his venture, he has been basically a one-man-band (pardon the pun), handling all of the booking, marketing, accounting and other business-related activities that have often kept him up in the wee hours of the morning. Besides juggling all of those chores, the former real estate agent–turned-entertainment entrepreneur stays busy raising his young daughter.
It helps that he is quite adept at navigating Facebook and other social media platforms to spread the word about his business and his band bookings. But Kestin, like the rest of us, only has so many hours in the day to dedicate to growing his company. As a result, he plans soon to hire staff to help with the day-to-day operations of the business.
Looking back, Kestin admits that he was “truly green” when he was working on his ill-fated jam band festival. Since then, Kestin has learned valuable lessons about the entertainment business that are fueling JamFam Productions’ stellar growth and expanding live entertainment opportunities in the post-pandemic era.