Alex Lepe
Pat Green still recalls the conversation. His country band had self-released “Carry On” - the third of its first three albums - and sold 250,000 records and was packing fans into its concerts when the head of label for Universal Records dropped by a show in Washington, D.C. “Please don’t tell me you’re here to make me rich and famous,” Green told the exec. “I want longevity.” Green, 43, might have hit the trifecta. December marks the 20-year anniversary of his first album, “Dancehall Dreamer,” which he churned out with his band while studying at Texas Tech. And 10 studio albums, two live albums, and more than 2.5 million record sales later, including a hot streak where he toured with Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, Willie Nelson and the Dave Matthews Band, Green’s certainly had a long career. And rich?
“He’s always had financial goals,” Craven Green, Green’s dad and a longtime wealth manager who manages his son’s money, says. “He’s been derailed from time to time, but the numbers are still running around in his head. He still makes projections: ‘At 55 or 60, I ought to have x dollars, the house’ll be paid for, the kids are off, and (wife) Kori and I ought to be able to do what we want to do. He hasn’t hit those numbers yet. But he is very comfortable with where he is right now.”
Some of what Green estimates have been his band’s numbers over two decades: $22.5 million in revenue from record sales, including the Universal Records release “Wave on Wave” album in 2003, which went Gold. And $55 million in revenue from ticket sales, T-shirts and other merchandise, endorsements, and the like. Except for one year where he bought a second touring bus and its accoutrements, Green says the band has been consistently profitable, shooting for a 22-27 percent profit margin each year.
After five studio albums between 2001 and 2009, Green came back in 2012 with the “Songs We Wish We’d Written” on the independent Sugar Hill Records label. Then, burned out, he took a lengthy break, coming back only this year with the self-released “Home,” in which he writes, “I finally found my way home.” In short: Green’s happy to have dialed it down.
“I call it ‘making records by committee,’ ” Green, who moved to Fort Worth near TCU 10 years ago from Austin, says of the demands of working under a major label. “There’s 15 guys in the studio telling me what to do with my songs that I wrote.”
During his break, Green teamed up a group of partners, including Free Range Concepts of Dallas, to open The Rustic, a restaurant, bar and live music venue at North Central Expressway and Uptown Station in Dallas. Green, with a minority ownership, is the Rustic’s public face and occasional performer. With the Rustic’s alcoholic beverage sales running at $9 million per year, making it Dallas’ top alcohol-selling restaurant and bar, the partnership is drawing close to nailing down plans for Rustics in Frisco, San Antonio and Houston. All three could open simultaneously within 18 months of the announcements, Kyle Noonan, one of the Free Range partners, says. Green “has a name that carries a lot of weight here in Texas,” Noonan says.
Most importantly, Green’s way back home has meant more time at home with his wife Kori, a Fort Worth lawyer, and their two children, Kellis, 11, and Rainey, 9. Where Green estimates he was on the road 240 days a year between 1999 and 2009, now he does 80-100 shows a year. “I get to be home almost every day of the week,” he says. He’ll tour Fridays and Saturdays with the band, “then I’m home Sunday most of the time.” The time at home has also given Green more time to work with his Pat Green Foundation, which raises money through golf tournaments to benefit The Gladney Center for Adoption in Fort Worth and Ben Hogan Foundation’s initiatives, including the First Tee youth program.
Green’s ambivalence about spending so much time on the road is reflective of the sacrifices and tradeoffs of anybody building a business. “I missed the first few years of both my children’s lives,” he says. “It’s the biggest regret I have. It’s also the reason my children can go to college without a loan.”
And, he adds, “There was also a part of me that felt a certain responsibility for continuing to grow a very good business.”
Green has always had an eye on the numbers behind the business, but he says he’d never have gotten into it but for breaking his arm in 17 places during a pickup basketball game during his freshman year at Texas Tech. “I always thought I was going to be a baseball player,” Green says. “I was never good enough to be a pro baseball player. And I was never going to be a college ball player.”
While recovering from the fracture, Green picked up guitar. His mom had forced him to take piano as a child. “That was miserable,” says Green, who grew up in Waco. And he played drums in the high school band. “Also at a very low level,” he says.
Why guitar? “It was the only thing I could do,” he says. “I used the guitar to prop up my arm. I was bored. And medicated.” Green became music leader for an all-Greek Bible study, which meant “beer after and playing guitar at somebody’s apartment.”
Green and his band made “Dancehall Dreamer” at a Lubbock studio in 1995 for $12,000, borrowed from family and friends; “Wave on Wave,” by contrast, cost as much as $250,000 to make later under the Universal Records label. The band then produced “George’s Bar” in 1998, plus two live albums. And it produced “Carry On” in 2000.
Green, who graduated from Tech in 1997, got a final push into music about one year later by his stepfather, Jack Burgess. Green had gone to work after graduation for a wholesale company owned by Burgess, while doing gigs on the weekends. “I got to have my beer on Sunday night, while everybody else was recovering,” Green jokes.
Then one Monday, one of the band members brought the money bag from the weekend’s work to Green’s office. The gross: $20,000. The band’s net: $10,000-$12,000, including its 80 percent share of the door, plus the T-shirts, hats, and koozies it was selling to juice the profits. Burgess walked by. “Is that my money or your money?” he asked. He and Green took the bag into another office, where Burgess counted it.
“If you can do this one weekend, you can do it every weekend,” Green recalls Burgess saying. “He politely said, ‘It’s time to go.’ ” And Green says he was ready: “I just realized music was what I wanted more than anything.”
If Green needed the push, it wasn’t for any substantial doubts about the risk, his dad says. “I don’t think Pat ever had any doubts about his ability as an entertainer,” Craven Green says. “I don’t think it ever crossed his mind.”
Craven Green, who made Bank Investment magazine’s 2012 Top 50 Bank Advisors ranking, says he’s given his two sons minimal financial advice over the years: “Your personal and business world is going to be fairly simple; it’s adding and subtracting.” And, “There are times when what you want to do is not what you can do.”
“Pat’s always been able to recognize a potential value and assess it fairly accurately,” his dad says. He’s not surprised his son has had such a long career. “He’s always been a show kid,” Craven Green says. Early on, he recalls attending one of his son’s concerts. “The crowds were mixed, from junior high school girls to 50- and 60-year-olds,” he says. From the start, “he’s got very broad appeal.”
Brad Holmes
Pat Green at the Whitewater Amphitheater
After the band self-released “Carry On” in 2000, things took off. It packed thousands into its shows, including one in Bedford. “It just started exploding about that time,” Green says. The band had sold 250,000 records before it signed with Universal. Green and the band did three albums for Universal between 2001 and 2004, including “Wave on Wave,” which peaked on the U.S. country charts at No. 2 and sent Green off touring with Chesney. The band later switched to BNA Records, an imprint of RCA, and produced “Cannonball” and “What I’m For” in 2006 and 2009. Those records cost $200,000-$250,000 to make.
The major label deals also brought big advances, including $750,000 for “Wave on Wave,” and endorsement deals such as a two-year agreement with Miller Lite for $500,000 a year, under which Green appeared on billboards, sang in the beer’s advertising jingle, and played golf seven times a year with Miller distributors.
“Songs We Wish We’d Written,” in 2012, peaked at 15 on the country chart. Green released "Home" on Aug. 14 this summer.
What’s led to such a long career for Green? “His music has changed,” Craven Green said. “He was truly a honky-tonk hero. The themes of his songs are much more mature now. As tastes have changed, so has his music changed.”
Pat Green attributes his longevity to linking up with strong management and having a good touring schedule and visibility, which he views as key components to any band’s life. “We’ve got a pretty good plan,” he says. At every turn, Green says he’s sought to associate himself with “the biggest guy in town.”
Green’s team on the music side includes 888 Management, the William Morris Entertainment agency, a business manager in Nashville, and a tour manager in Fort Worth. Typically in the industry, 30 percent of the gross goes to those people, including 15 percent to management, 10 percent to the agency, and 5 percent to the business manager. Of his business manager, “I would admit I’m his most challenging client,” Green says. “I make a lot of decisions with my heart.” The Green team also includes Green’s wife. “She goes into that last comment,” Green says, adding, “She gives me an allowance.” And of Green’s money manager dad: “He doesn’t even charge me a fee. He better not; he’s my dad.”
“Most musicians don’t know what to do with the business side of it, but Pat loves the business side of it,” says Brad Ewert, who joined Green in 2001 as the band’s T-shirt manager and is now the tour manager and head of the Pat Green Foundation. “He still OKs everything.”
That doesn’t mean Green is pinching pennies on tour. The band has two potential configurations - a six-member band including Green, and one that includes Green and two band members. “He just wants the guys to be happy,” says Ewert, who manages all logistics of every tour, including travel, hotels, meals, media interviews and Green’s “Meet & Greet” functions. “He wants the most we can afford; that’s why we don’t have big turnover.” On the road in big cities, that means hotel stays at places like Westin, and, in smaller towns, Hampton Inns and Holiday Inns, Ewert said.
Green’s dabbled in various investments in recent years, with what he says have been mixed levels of success. He and two partners built a $10 million dollar real estate fund, leveraged it to $30-$40 million in assets, and then sold off. “Everybody got what they wanted out of it,” he says.
He was also in on an oil and gas venture that required continued investment. Unwilling to keep putting money in, he left and lost his investment. “It requires a certain level of ‘fundification,’ and I didn’t have the money to play,” Green says. “Now it’s making money - good for them.”
His biggest lesson learned from oil and gas, which he calls his “biggest mistake”: “Business at the highest level is not a respecter of friendship or anything else. Nor should it be. It’s just business.”
Green says he doesn’t dwell on the oil and gas investment. “I think a man who has no mistakes probably doesn’t have a mirror in the house.”
Making decisions with the heart has been Craven Green’s one worry for his son. “Pat has such a big heart,” he says. “You’ll rarely meet someone more generous than he.” His son agrees: “My biggest mistakes are probably decisions based on people” instead of a solid business concept, he said.
Music is still Green’s principal paycheck. “Touring pays the bills for my family,” he says. The Rustic, apart from that, is where he’s hanging his business hat. “My going concerns are here and the music,” Green said recently, during a visit to The Rustic.
Brian Manion, one of the partners in The Rustic with Green and Free Range, met Green years ago at a music festival, and the two became friends. Manion, whose background is in the hospitality industry, had seen “country concepts” that looked like The Rustic, “but they were missing the music aspect,” he says.
Manion pitched the idea to Green for the idea, which Manion calls an “authentic outdoor music backyard concept.” Green liked it, and Manion sold it to Free Range, which he had invested with previously. The Rustic, which opened in 2013, is an indoor-outdoor venue, with restaurant and a horseshoe-shaped bar inside against the backdrop of a big American flag fashioned out of beer cans. Overhead doors open up in season to the sprawling exterior patio, and the stage opens onto both the patio and into the restaurant. Forty beers are on tap. Don’t want to drive? The Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s Uptown Station is next door. The Rustic features live music, Wednesdays-Sundays, and brings in nine bands per week.
“It’s become its own brand,” Manion says. “The numbers are exciting, and the location is fantastic.”
Green says The Rustic has done $20 million in total sales over its first two years, against substantially lower initial expectations. His partners declined to verify those numbers.
Green’s happy with his role as the venue’s public face. “I don’t have any business being in management,” he says. He’s also happy with the projected growth plan. “Slow growth is permanent,” he says. “If you grow too fast, it tends to go away fast.”
Alex Lepe
The idea came up to name the venue after Green, but he didn’t go along. “I think that’s cheesy,” he said.
Noonan, the Free Range partner, compared The Rustic to the House of Blues as the closest competitor and said he believes Rustic can have 17 or 18 locations. “I think that would be a great target for us,” he said.
Long-term, The Rustic may not be the highest and best use for the prominent 2.7-acre Dallas location, he acknowledged. The Rustic has the site on a long-term ground lease; the property owner put up $1 million to build The Rustic, and the partnership put in another $2 million, Green said. “This has proven to be a strong use for the next 10 or 20 years or so,” Noonan said.
Besides The Rustic, Green’s also working on building his foundation, which he founded in 2012. It’s given $1.3 million so far, and its next golf tournament will be Aug. 4-7, 2016, at Spyglass Hill, one of the famed Pebble Beach courses in California. Players in the 32 teams will include Green, the Dallas Cowboys’ Troy Aikman and Billy Joe Tolliver, the ex-Texas Tech and National Football League quarterback. The weekend includes performances by two bands, including Green’s. “I’m for free every time, so all I have to do is find another band,” Green jokes.
Broadly, Green says he wants his foundation to “pick out foundations that look out for our interests and that have difficulty getting recognized.”
The foundation supports Gladney because of the families it creates, Green says. He knows numerous Gladney parents, including his brother’s wife, he said. “Adoption’s all around me,” he said. “I can see the joy it brings to people.”
And he likes the Hogan Foundation because of its support of youth golf through The First Tee of Fort Worth program, including building the Ben Hogan Learning Center in 2008. Green also likes Hogan’s backing of a partnership between Cook Children’s Hospital and Children’s Medical Center of Dallas that created Camp Broncho, which allows camping adventures to North Texas children who suffer from acute asthma.
“I’m sure a lot of people know Ben Hogan, but if you ask them what the Ben Hogan Foundation looks after, they won’t be able to tell you,” said Green, who typically auctions off a backyard concert for 20 at the fundraiser. “Asthma is a killer.”
This is Pat Green’s world. “He’s smart enough to mature, to evolve, to change perspective and to adjust what he’s doing,” Craven Green says. “He’s become much more conservative over the last five years. The kids and his wife. That world is a completely different world. He’s a person about as mature as he can be.”
Not bad for a guy who never expected this.