Chutzpah. This is a typical Wednesday Superfly staff meeting. Jon's head is floating above us all, not because he led the meetings (he didn't), but because that's where he stood every week: Closest to the door (where the last ones in and first ones out stood), mostly on his phone (a blackberry, if I remember correctly), present but impatient.
At this point, Superfly was overflowing out of our only "conference room" at 64 West 3rd Street. Meetings were how our teams could share updates. Meetings made Jon... uneasy. Vacuums of creativity. Jon was a vortex chaser. He was most at ease when he was prowling the cultural zeitgeist or caving the American psyche to fuel his inspiration for the next big festival.
When I started as an intern in 2009, the first things Robin asked me to do most mornings were flag any important info
@bonnaroo emails for Tom and when Jon arrived, pick up a medium coffee (two packets of brown sugar), a banana, and a tuna salad sandwich. Most times when I dropped these off in his office he was on the phone arguing with an agent. Many times he was hungover (I mean, same). And some times, he would turn to me and ask point blank: "What do you think about Stevie Wonder opening for Jay-Z?"
Jon was full of chutzpah. Fearless and tumultuous. A stubborn gall and audacious nerve. It's hard to imagine it now, but this was seen by the artists' teams as a very risky move for Bonnaroo 2010. Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury in 2008 and blew the haters out of the water. But could he do it again in Tennessee? He did. Haters found out the hard way when Radiohead headlined in 2006, Jay-Z headlined in 2010, and Deadmau5 headlined in 2015. That's chutzpah.
Chutzpah is why we launched The Great GoogaMooga, and not Feastival or The Big Chow or any of the other 200+ names we brainstormed. Chutzpah is also why we debuted in New York, and not Chicago or DC. Every theater producer will tell you there's a reason why shows always do out-of-town tryouts before opening on Broadway. But that didn't matter to Jon. It's New York, he said. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
Thank you Jon, for your chutzpah.
