HILARIOUS ARTICLE FEATURING ME (from The Emory Wheel)
The Promoter
How Matt Graham pulled off the most anticipated party of the year - and managed to keep his money
Chris Megerian and Christina Casadonte
Posted: 3/3/06
It's 11 p.m., and Emory students are lining up outside Club Eleven50 in midtown Atlanta. Girls in frayed jean skirts and pastel tank tops clutch each other as they wait in line, braving the January air. The line inches forward as the bouncer takes his time inspecting each ID. Once they receive the OK to pass, the students shuffle forward another few steps to hand a $20 bill to the girl sitting at the table with the cash box.
On the other side of the velvet ropes; past the bouncer, the door girl and the cop with the cigar; through the foyer and into the warm and brightly lit nightclub, there are three students who don't need to wait in line.
Emory seniors Matt Graham, Zach Suchin and Vishal Dalamal are the organizers of a student-run company called MisEdukated Entertainment that arranges college parties at Atlanta nightclubs. The three are responsible for making sure that Emory students show up to a club, spend lots of money at the bar and have a night to remember. At the end of the evening, they take home the cover charges their fellow students paid at the door - sometimes barely breaking even and sometimes pulling in more than $10,000.
For Graham, the founder and director of MisEdukated, the night began more than an hour ago, before most students had even called a cab, as he paced back and forth inside the empty club and discussed "celebrity control" with the staff. He is wearing a pinstripe blue oxford shirt and a long black suit jacket, and drinking from a small glass of scotch on the rocks.
Graham's constant challenge is controlling and legitimizing a volatile business that mixes friendships, rivalries, celebrities, alcohol and large sums of cash. And tonight - Bid Night 2006, the year's most anticipated party - will test how far the club-promotions industry has come since last year, when a fellow promoter threw the business into disarray by stealing the profits from Bid Night 2005.
Inside Club Eleven50, the dance floor begins to fill up. Fraternities have just given out invitations to new members, and everyone is ready to blow off some steam after a long week of recruitment events. Eleven50 is one of the bigger clubs in the Atlanta area, with a tented outdoor lounge, two full bars and a balcony overlooking the dance floor. The whole place is awash in red and purple lighting. Members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and the rap prodigy Young Geezy are in the VIP sections.
The whole night, Dalamal is never far from a bar. He orders two drinks and hands the bartender a credit card. When the bartender says there is a $20 minimum on charges, Dalamal waves his hand and pays the difference. "V. Diddy" is known as a kid who is always up for a good time. An international student who has lived in Hong Kong, Nigeria and England, he's certainly not in the promoting business for the money; his family is already extremely wealthy.
Suchin, on the other hand, spends the first half of the night running back and forth inside the club in a blue suede jacket, pink tie and sneakers. He jumps from person to person, putting his hand on a shoulder and asking, "You cool? Let me know." Unlike Dalamal, Suchin cares deeply about the financial side of promoting; he keeps a poster of crumpled $100 bills on the wall above his bed.
By 1 a.m., the club is so packed it's hard to keep track of Graham. At one point, he emerges from the crowd, flanked by the club manager, the chief of security and a uniformed cop. He blows through a keypad-locked door, clutching a Ziploc bag full of cash that he is keeping safe in the back office.
A little while later, Suchin begins to feel restless and heads toward the office to check the earnings. But he can't get in, and Graham is nowhere to be found. Finally, Suchin tracks Graham down in the upstairs lounge. A sullen-looking Graham tells Suchin that he just had a big argument with his girlfriend. Graham disappears, and Suchin walks to the edge of the balcony, leaning on the railing and watching the crowd below.
"This is about to get interesting," he says.
It's the tensest part of the night, when the promoters' minds begin to drift from having a good time with friends to turning a profit. And it has only gotten tenser, with an emotional wrench being tossed into the economic process.
At 2:15 a.m. Graham heads into the office, but Suchin is stopped by a guard. Only the top promoter is allowed in the back. Suchin argues, then pleads, but is turned away. He plops himself on the couch next to the office door, waiting and complaining. "I just want to get my f-----g money and leave," he says. "A partner in a business has a right to see how it all works out."
Less than a hundred feet away from him, behind locked doors, someone is counting thousands of dollars. "This s--t is stressful," Suchin says. He leans back on the couch, and begins to wait.
Two days before Bid Night, Suchin is sitting in the Dobbs University Center. He pulls a pack of Tahitan Noni fruit-flavored soft chews out of his pocket. "This, daily exercise and sleep are the only things that keep me sane," he says.
Every few minutes, Suchin waves to a friend or blow a kiss to a girl he knows. At one point, he answers a phone call from Graham on his black Motorola Razor. Graham is nervous about Bid Night, and Suchin tries to reassure him. "The only thing I'm nervous about is our money getting jacked," Suchin says. "It'll be fine. We'll promote it, it will be fine."
It's hard for Graham to shake the feeling that last year could repeat itself. On Bid Night 2005, Dan Weisman ('04C) pulled off what many call the most infamous act in the history of Emory promotions: He stole between $12,000 and $15,000 from his fellow promoters and sent shockwaves through the business.
Five years ago, Weisman entered the club scene as a DJ. He became a promoter, he says, after getting stiffed by the biggest name in club promotions at the time, Scott "Scooter" Braun. Weisman recognized that promoters, not DJs, made the real money and called the shots. He held a grudge against Braun, and began shadowing his parties in the fall of 2002. Wherever Braun threw a party, Weisman would throw a party the following week, picking up the overflow. "They were f-----g pissed, man," Weisman says. "People get really sensitive when it comes to this much money."
In the fall of 2003, Weisman began promoting against Braun and Evan Harwood, one of his own brothers in the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. One night, Weisman and Harwood were throwing competing parties: Weisman at SPF-15, which has since been renamed Venom, and Harwood at the Velvet Room. The difference was that Harwood's wasn't legally 18-and-over.
The day of the party, Weisman e-mailed the underage drinking task force at the Georgia Department of Revenue to tip them off about Harwood's party. When the police broke up the event, evicted Emory students found their way over to SPF-15, where Weisman was holding a wet T-shirt contest.
Afterward, Weisman was legit. One night, he and Braun ran into each other at a bar and had a "heart to heart." They decided to stop competing and to start working together. For almost a year and a half, Weisman and Braun did just that, even making $22,000 at Bid Night 2004.
But according to Weisman, all was not well, and Braun kept making him empty promises and stiffing him more money. Weisman planned to get back at him on Bid Night 2005.
That night, rap superstar Petey Pablo was performing to a crowd of 1,500, and a team of promoters was trying to make sure everything was running smoothly. Braun was on stage helping the musician set up, Graham was getting drinks for the rapper's entourage, and Suchin was monitoring the dance floor. "Nobody was at the front door," Graham said. "We just figured we were a team."
Then, without being noticed, Weisman walked into the club with an empty bag and two armed security guards. "When you are dealing with that amount of money, you don't know if someone is going to try to get brave," he says. Weisman emptied the register at the door and drove to his friend's apartment in Caliber Woods. "He walked into my apartment, dumped a bag full of money on the bed and said, 'Count,'" says Dara Silverstein ('03C). "All I could think about was that icky money on my white Ralph Lauren sheets."
Once they discovered what had happened, the other promoters spent much of the rest of the night sitting on a curb, wondering how to get back their money.
Accounts of what happened next differ. Since there were never any official contracts, there was no way to get the money back through legal action. Suchin says he personally negotiated with Weisman for several weeks before Graham, Suchin and Dalamal received their shares of the profits. But Weisman says he quickly paid back all of the other promoters - except for Braun, who had stiffed him years before.
The heist, which Weisman says was more than a year in the making, led to a huge crisis of confidence for Emory promoters. In a business without legal contracts or official records, promoters' investments are only as secure as their friendships. Suddenly, nothing was safe. Once again, promoters began working against one other, and profits were scarce for months. Says Graham, "It was an absolutely horrible semester."
Job security is not something a promoter can expect. Normally, promoters promise club owners a minimum amount the club can expect to make at the bar - usually around $5,000. If the target isn't reached, promoters have to reach into their own pockets to pay the difference. "If it rains, oh man, you're screwed," Dalamal said. "It's more likely you're going to have to write a check you don't want to write."
As Suchin says, "Take the normal social stresses of college and multiply it by a thousand."
Last year, Mike Cohen ('05C) expected to return from his semester abroad in Italy and jump right back into promoting. But Suchin and Dalamal had different plans and cut him out of the business. "We didn't like the way he was handling things," Suchin says. "You shouldn't have to do that to friends, but we are in a unique position."
Every Thursday night, promoters have to stress not only about their investment, but also their reputations. "It consumed me for a while," Weisman says. "When I was throwing parties against Scooter, that whole week would just be trying to get people to come to my party. You worry so much, not because you want to make money, but because you don't f-----g want to be put out there."
But the image that most promoters desire can also be damaging. "It comes with a scarlet letter," Suchin says. On any given night, surrounded by hundreds of screaming peers, promoters are repeatedly forced to choose between business and friends. In a business where friends are regular customers, promoters are often asked to provide special treatment. "Every other person thinks they shouldn't need to wait in line," Dalamal says.
But as business dictates, not every friend can be accommodated, and some grow resentful that promoters are essentially pocketing their fellow students' money.
Emory junior Brett Siegal, who worked with Graham last year, says those who complain don't understand that promoting is a business. "We unite people who want to go out, provide a venue, and they just have to show up and have a good time," he says. "We take the guesswork out of having fun."
Promoting isn't the type of business in which people keep official records. Instead, an oral history gets passed down through the classes, forming a sort of folklore. The business started out closely tied to three different fraternities: Sigma Nu, Pi Kappa Alpha and Apes. Although the promoting business is not as closely tied to specific fraternities as it once was, most of the major players are Greeks. Graham is a member of Pike, and Suchin and Dalamal belong to Apes, an unrecognized off-campus fraternity.
Promoting didn't start when Braun stepped onto campus, but he may have had the biggest impact of any Emory promoter. Emory students have been advertising clubs for years, but it wasn't until Braun began utilizing personal relationships he'd developed with club managers throughout the city that promoting at Emory began to resemble a business.
Currently spending his time brokering deals between major corporations and celebrities, Braun is legendary for his fast-talking. He rarely goes more than a couple of sentences without mentioning some celebrity he's met. As Suchin says, "He's not from planet Earth."
Braun entered the business one night in 2001 when he noticed a Buckhead club was closing. Looking to make some extra money, Braun asked the owner if he could be paid to bring a large number of people to the club that week. With permission, he passed out fliers and sent e-mails to friends. Both Braun and the owner turned a profit from the party, and Braun soon began to expand his business throughout Atlanta.
"Frat Row used to be like Mardi Gras, but the faculty cracked down and forced kids to go off campus. All I did was sit in the background and provide the memories," Braun says. "I owe my entire career to the fact that Emory doesn't want their students to party."
Braun started forming relationships by getting the attention of celebrities and club owners in the Atlanta social scene. He spent his profits buying bottles of liquor and champagne for upwards of $100, projecting the image of a high-rolling, fun-loving guy. This reputation eventually got him the attention he needed to cultivate important business relationships. "I was just a broke college kid," he says. "But people started noticing me."
From there, Braun recruited fellow students to help him promote his parties, forming Kryptonite Entertainment. The way Graham tells it, he was a freshman at Park Bench Bar & Grill in Emory Village, when Braun, who had never seen Graham before in his life, saw him drinking with a bunch of girls. Braun decided on the spot that Graham was a natural. "He brought me out to his purple Mercedes CLK and handed me fliers and told me to pass them out," Graham says. "That's how I got started in promoting clubs."
Graham remains loyal to Braun and even gives him a cut of the profits when MisEdukated throws parties at places where Braun has connections. But Graham is not just Braun's protégé. Their styles are markedly different. If Braun is flashy and kinetic, Graham is professional and even-handed. Or, as Suchin puts it, "Graham lives on Earth."
And Earth has changed considerably since Braun left Emory. Previously, the promoting business was a web of alliances and students, stretching from the "face boy" in charge of the operation to immediate associates to lowly freshman fraternity pledges. This interlocking network often created conflict among promoters.
Graham took the messy infrastructure and molded an institution, with himself at the head. By creating a logo, a brand, a LearnLink conference and a Web site for MisEdukated, he has cut almost every other operation out of the business. A brand or a company has a longer shelf life than the popularity of a single Emory student.
And Graham doesn't want to give up an inch of ground either. In the future, he will have all employees sign noncompetition agreements to make sure no former associates can legally compete with him in Atlanta.
Although Graham relies on Suchin and Dalamal for help, MisEdukated is essentially a one-man show, and that monopoly was facilitated by the Internet. Whereas promoters used to hire teams of freshmen to slip fliers under on-campus doors, students can instead visit misedukatedent.com for a constantly updated calendar of the week's parties. Graham advertises on two conferences on Emory's e-mail system - Emory Nightlife and MisEdukated ENT - and on facebook.com. He even plans to allow students to prepay their cover charge via credit card online, preventing them from having to rush to ATMs the last minute. He also wants to sell yearlong MisEdukated passes for about $100.
Graham doesn't plan to stay in the promoting business forever, but unlike his predecessors, he doesn't expect to leave anytime soon. Graham wants to recruit more students from other Atlanta schools to MisEdukated parties and then expand the business past the ordinary Thursday night. "There's no competition," Graham says. "I've got to be a f-----g idiot if I can't make it work."
Graham wants to get corporate sponsors so he can throw more free parties. And he is also considering throwing on-campus events at Emory's Clairmont Campus. Graham doesn't just want Emory students to look forward to Thursday nights; he wants Atlanta's party scene to draw prospective students to Emory.
After working for Braun at SoSo Def Records the summer before his junior year, Graham became intensely dedicated to the business. He is now more focused on his promoting than on his classes. He studies history because he finds it interesting, but also because it helps him make good conversation, a skill he wants to use to his advantage in the entertainment business.
Graham lives with Braun in a townhouse on Lavista Road. Emory senior Wil May, a small-time hip-hop producer, runs a recording studio in the basement. Every room has a TV or a sound system. On the bulletin board behind his iBook computer, Graham has tacked up a dollar bill, photographs of himself with friends and a calendar marked with MisEdukated's parties.
Eleven50's manager, Cliff Hoffman, says Graham and Braun are successful promoters because they're business-savvy. "They say the right things," he says. "They come with the right idea for how to throw a party."
Promoting is more complicated than just showing up with some cash and a lot of friends. It requires the ability to establish yourself within different communities around campus. Promoters must make people want to hang out with them. In essence, they are professionally popular. At the same time, promoters must have the maturity to form partnerships with club managers and owners.
Neither Graham, Suchin nor Dalamal is enrolled in Emory's business school, but they all know when to aim high and when to cut their losses. They have learned what will make an Emory student throw down $20 for the cover charge, at least $5 for a drink and another $10 for the cab.
"Emory kids are very predictable," Suchin says. Expect big parties at the beginning and end of each semester, blowouts around the holidays and smaller parties the week right after those holidays. If you're going to introduce students to a new, unfamiliar club, try to make sure it's close to campus so they don't need to drop too much money on a cab. And mix it up to avoid letting people get bored of the same old places.
Occasionally, MisEdukated throws free parties to attract students to new locations or to rekindle interest in an old favorite. "Anytime they don't remember how much you charge them is a good time," Suchin says. Some parties will do well and some won't, but the promoter has to see any action as an investment.
Making sure other people have fun isn't always enjoyable. As Graham says, "I haven't had fun on a Thursday night since I was a freshman."
By 2:20 a.m., the club is almost empty. The Hawks and Young Geezy have left. A pretty blonde wrests herself from the grip of her dance partner and scampers off to join her impatient friends. The DJ packs up his gear and tells the crowd, "Try to get the f--k out of here."
Suchin is sitting on the couch, his head in his hands, waiting for Graham and the club manager to finish counting their earnings. "They're building a gingerbread house or some s--t," he mutters. Dalamal is drunk and anxious to get to Maggie's, another bar.
Finally, at 2:57 a.m., Graham walks out of the back office with tired eyes and a roll of cash in his right hand. Suchin takes the money from him and walks to a table to split the earnings between himself and Dalamal. Each will go home with a stack of $10 and $20 bills almost an inch thick. In total, Graham says, the group made at least $10,000 that night.
Afterward, he and Suchin pile into Braun's purple Mercedes and drive away. Dalamal and a friend wander down 14th Street for a few minutes until they hail a cab and find their way home.
There are still 17 Thursday nights left in the semester.
© Copyright 2006 The Emory Wheel
