From the promotion of his first high school party in the late 1970s to the creation of today’s five-venue, two-city concert-making empire, Scott Stienecker, founder and president of PromoWest Productions, has played no small part in Columbus’ transformation from Podunk to Major League in the past three decades.

This is, after all, the man who managed to reopen a wing of the Ohio State Penitentiary for guided tours in his early 20s, acquired the iconic Newport Music Hall just a few years later, brought The Rolling Stones and U2 to Ohio Stadium, and is responsible for attracting and promoting nearly every major musical act in the city since the closing of Germain (Polaris) Amphitheater in 2007 – which, not incidentally, he built and owned through its first three years.

The soft-spoken St. Marys, Ohio native, who studied the music promotion industry under the late-great San Francisco-based Bill Graham, still does all of the booking for all of his venues – The LC Music Pavilion, Newport, The Basement, A&R Music Bar and the newest edition, Stage AE in Pittsburgh.

Your career from the opening of the Newport to today is well documented. Tell me about the pre-1980s Scott Stienecker. What in your past has led you to where you sit today?

I went to a show at St. John Arena when I was a sophomore in high school – probably 1976 – and saw KISS, and it just blew me away. I was blown away not just by the show – but that somebody actually just put this thing all together, the whole set. That’s what got my interest going, really. I actually started doing shows in high school. When I was junior, a lot of the seniors would bitch at our class about, ‘You guys always come to our parties – why don’t you ever throw a party?’ So I said, ‘OK, we’ll throw a party.’ I hired bands, charged five bucks a head. I made $1,080. I was 17. So that was my first stab at it, really. I went on to Bowling Green and was on the concert committee up there … It’s stagehand work, putting up flyers. That’s where I met Jules Belkin. Belkin was the largest promoter in the Midwest – he controlled all of Ohio – Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo, Dayton. At Bowling Green, the dorm room closets were all wood, and I engraved the names Bill Graham, Jules Belkin and Jerry Weintraub in that closet wall. I’ve since partnered with Belkin and interned under Graham. I never did meet Jerry Weintraub. Eventually, I transferred to Ohio State and became head of the PEP board, which is now OUAB. Through the PEP board, I was able to co-produce shows with Belkin Productions – (owned by) Belkin. We did AC/DC at St. John, we did Black Sabbath, Jimmy Buffett, all these shows where I had communication with Jules, so when I called agents, they’d actually take my calls … so through meeting Jules and through using the Ohio State University’s name, I got my name known.

So, did you end up graduating?

I didn’t graduate from Ohio State. I went and got a job in California with Parallax Productions. They did shows in secondary markets out in California. You have Graham in San Francisco, Avalon in L.A., and then Parallax – we’d do Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara. I worked for them for about six months when a guy I knew here in Columbus called me and said, “Hey – the old Agora is shutting down.” I tracked down the owner – they were going to turn the space into a Walgreens. [The owner] told me, “OK, if you can have me $25,000 toward the lease at the end of this week, we’ll let it stay alive as a rock club.” So I raised $30K real quick, but I raised a total of $180,000. When I was 23. When I was living in California. For a project in Ohio (laughs).

So how did the old Agora transform into today’s Newport?

After I flew back into Columbus (after personally cutting the $25,000 check to the former Agora owner) at the beginning of 1984, a guy who was on PEP board with me at Ohio State, Joe Brooks, was working in New York City. I talked him into coming to Columbus and being my vice president. I picked him up from the airport and drove right to the Agora. No lights worked except for one in front of the bar. We pulled out some round tables – one for each of us – and we started having meetings with people. Hiring people and redecorating the building – we conducted all our meetings from two tables in front of the bar. I picked him up from the airport in March of ’84 and we opened in September of ’84 with Neil Young.

And for the Newport, the rest is history. With the emergence and success of it and your other venues, it seems as if there’s a shift toward smaller, more intimate facilities within the industry – the massive Polaris Amphitheater failed after a strong start, for example. Is this the end of the large concert venue?

You can’t fill 18,000 seats anymore on a regular basis. The problem with the amphitheater – when it first opened in ’94, we did 40 shows the first three summers. Then we sold it … and since then, it became harder and harder (to fill). In the old days, every market had a QFM96. Whatever they played and told you were good, you listened to – Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Ted Nugent. Now, with the Internet – you can’t tell these kids what to listen to; they tell you what they listen to. Radio is not a strong medium for a young age at all. They tell us. It’s a whole different world now. The industry isn’t driven by radio like it once was. These kids, whatever they get into, there are so many bands now, so much music – these bands only get so big, and then the kids move off to something else. So we’re not building many acts that can sell 18,000 seats. We might build some that can support eight, nine thousand. Those days of Aerosmith selling out every city … for right now, those days are gone. Seven thousand is the ideal venue now.

Why is Columbus such fertile ground for a company such as yours? Do you ever find yourself “selling” the city to skeptical artists? How do we stack up nationally?

Columbus has become a primary (market). When I was here (in the early 1980s) it was a secondary market. What put it on the map was Polaris. Once we built that 18,000-seat venue, the industry as a whole started looking at Columbus and said, ‘They aren’t a secondary market anymore.’ And then you have two arenas built. So it went from secondary to primary pretty quickly. With all the shows that we do – we did 426 shows last year – the venues here in Columbus, the radio stations like CD101, Columbus is a hotbed for music. We do as well as, if not better than, most markets.

Why?

I think it’s been built up. I think it’s been years of building people to want to go to live shows. The fact that Ohio State is here, the fact that it’s a young, white-collar market, there are a lot of things that go into that. Mostly I believe it’s that young base, that growing young professional tier in Columbus. We have a hip base. Your Death Cab for Cuties and your Foster the Peoples – we do extremely well with those, where Cleveland might do better with a classic rock kind of thing. Columbus, musically, is a very hip city.

So the cowtown label is a thing of the past?

It used to frustrate me in college when people would say, ‘Oh, you’re from Columbus, Ohio, that cowtown.’ It used to burn me. So I kind of set out to say, “You know what? Columbus needs to be done being considered a cowtown.” I get so excited when someone opens a new restaurant … anything new that comes to Columbus helps get rid of the whole connotation that we’re from a cowtown. When I lived in San Francisco for two and a half years, that’s what everyone thought. I hated that connotation. Then you have someone come out and put (concrete) corn stalks in a field in Dublin. There was a movement several years ago to paint cows on the city’s street corners. They’re regressing us years from what we’re trying to do with Columbus. There are a lot of awesome things that go on in Columbus, Ohio. We try in our little world, the concert industry, to make people understand that Columbus is the real deal. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job.