PETER RIX MANAGEMENT

An Australian Music Industry Icon
1973 – 2003

The legacy of Peter Rix Management – PRM as it was commonly known – looms large in the history pages of Australian rock and pop. As a music management and concert production company throughout the 1970s and 1980s, PRM was a driving, effervescent force in the development of a bustling local music industry.

In its musical heyday, PRM looked after a full stable of now legendary Australian performers, including the likes of Marcia Hines, Mark Holden, Jon English, Billy Field, Sharon O’Neill, Richard Clapton and Marc Hunter. Alongside managing its stars’ successful recording careers, PRM would self-produce and promote tours for all its acts, staging over 700 gigs a year all across Australia.

PRM was also the primary name behind a host of iconic Australian music events spanning over quarter of a century, from the legendary “End Of The Decade” concert on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in the last days of the 1970s, the infamous Narara rock festivals of the early 1980s, right through to the establishment of the annual ARIA music awards in the late-’80s and the unforgettable Olympic Games concerts in Sydney’s Domain in 2000.

For the record, PRM technically closed its doors in 2003 when Peter Rix agreed to a very friendly takeover of his business by the George P Johnson group of Detroit, Michigan, one of the world’s most prestigious event management companies.

Since the mid-1980s, PRM itself had gradually outgrown its rock & roll roots and started focusing more and more on producing major events for corporate and government bodies rather than artist management. So the amalgamation with George P Johnson was, in the end, a very natural fit.

Today, Peter Rix – Rixy as he’s affectionately known throughout the music and corporate worlds – is the Managing Director of George P Johnson Australia, still surrounded by many of the same key support staff he had back when PRM was based out of its old offices in Crows Nest. [Incidentally, George P Johnson Australia’s offices occupy the historic ex-Festival Records building in Pyrmont, Sydney.]

Even today, Rix and his team retain some hefty links with the local music industry. Naturally, many of Rixy’s oldest, dearest mates are still in the game, pretty much running the show. Personally, Rix continues to produce the annual APRA songwriting awards ceremonies, a job he’s enjoyed since the early’80s, as well as still acting as personal manager of Australian entertainment icon Marcia Hines, just as he’s always done since virtually the first time he heard Marcia sing way back in 1974. Rix’s extraordinary professional relationship with Hines is one of the most enduring and successful partnerships in all of Australian entertainment.

Rix says he looks back on his rock & roll years as “one of the great experiences of my life”. Certainly, for the longest time, it seemed as if Rix was born to be a music manager, even before that pivotal day in his life when, as a 22-year-old, much to his grandmother’s horror, Rix decided to drop out of a law degree at Sydney Uni to jump into a tour van and become the full-time manager of glam rock band Hush.

“I was the original run-the-school-dance boy,” recalls Rix, who grew up in Sydney’s south and, as an adolescent, attended Narwee Boys High School. “I was that guy. Every school had one. Ran the school dance, ran the school fetes. I was captain of the school, captain of the first-15 football team. I was hopeless, just shocking. They were the things that I used to enjoy doing and I evolved out of it. I used to get on a train, go to town, go to the clubs, find the bands, put a deposit down and come back and start counting the money, because we were the only school in the whole district that had a real band playing. Otherwise, the band would come from local church, and that was nowhere near as much fun.”

Young Rix’s life changed one night in the mid-1960s when, not for the last time, a perfect mixture of fate and tenacity helped give the bourgeoning entrepreneur a gentle heave up.

Rix had heard about a local Beatle-esque-styled band called The Allusions playing the Sydney clubs. Rix tracked them down to a place in the city called Caesar’s. He snuck his way into the club under-age, talked his way back-stage and locked the band in to perform at one of his school dances – $40 if they played the whole night. Between the deal being struck and the night of the dance, The Allusions scored a major hit with their classic single, “If I Had A Ticket”. “So this band’s suddenly got a Top 10 single in Sydney and I’ve got them on at the local school dance for 40 bucks. It was my first taste of: ‘Oh shit, so this is what it’s like!’ So I gave them an extra five dollars. And they played the night, happy to take the money home. It was a very innocent time.”

By the early 1970s, while studying part-time at Sydney Uni for his ill-fated law degree, Rix was already booking nightclubs and dance halls. On Friday nights, he ran the Aquarius – an illegal gay club in Kings Cross bankrolled by “a bunch of fabulous new town thugs and criminals”. On Saturdays, Rix and his crew would stage a dance somewhere in or around Sydney, featuring talent of the calibre of The Easybeats’ Stevie Wright or The Dave Miller Set.

Appropriately enough, it was through the Aquarius gig that Rix first met the members of Australian glam rock pioneers, Hush. Everything that followed with Hush, Rix says, was simply one happy accident after another. Rix started regularly booking the band for his weekly dances. At the same time, thanks to one of the band members having a day-job at Warner Records, Hush was offered a record deal. Not knowing what to do, they turned to the only person they knew that had any sort of legal background.

Rix helped Hush negotiate a one-album deal and then organised for the band to record their debut album, 1973’s Aloud ’N’ Live, featuring the song that would turn out to be a hit single, “Get The Feeling”.

“In Sydney, this band and their blue Ford transit van had been playing kids’ dances for two or three years and they had a pretty big fanbase following,” says Rix. “And bang! Overnight the record goes Top 10 in the charts in Sydney and no one knows what to do. So they came and asked me what I thought they should do and I said, ‘Well, you probably have to give up your day job and get in the truck and go to Melbourne.’ They looked at me and said, ‘Well, if we give up our day jobs, are you going to give up yours and come with us?’ I was 22 and there wasn’t much pain in it. So we all got in the back of the transit van and off we went to Melbourne. And that was the start of their success. The single worked in Melbourne and then during that next two-year period, they kept working all around Australia and by then, Countdown arrived and all of a sudden life changed for every decent pop act in Australia.”

It was the middle of 1974 before Rix met the second act he was destined to manage. Hush, by now one of the biggest rock acts in Australia, was booked to perform at the Paddington Town Hall in Sydney as part of filming for an ABC music TV show called The Rock And Roll Ballroom Of The Air, hosted by Jon English. Also on the bill was an exotic black teenage American singer, who was currently appearing as Mary Magdalene in the Australian cast production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Rix remembers being at the afternoon soundcheck when Marcia Hines came on stage and preformed James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain”. Rix was standing with Tony Hogarth from Wizard Records (Hush’s new record label), along with the legendary Sydney radio broadcaster Trevor Smith and larger-than-life tour promoter, Michael Chugg.

“She finished the song and we all sat there with our mouths on the floor,” says Rix. “And I said, ‘Geez, she’s a pretty good singer.’ And Tony looks at me and says, ‘If you manage her, I will record her.’ And Trevor goes, ‘Oh right, well if you manage her and he records her, then I will play her songs.’ So Chuggy says, ‘Alright, alright, I will put the shows on!’”

The rest, of course, is pop history. Marcia would soon be crowned Australia’s Queen of Pop, over and over again. “I have always had significant respect for her,” Rix says of his incredible on-going partnership with the singer. “As a human being, she’s a very strong person and she has done an amazing job of continuing to reinvent, to grow. I’m just the guy who puts the deals together for her. But with every decade, she’s always found the ability to remain contemporary. She has always trusted me to provide guidance and the business acumen, that sort of thing, but I can’t go on Australia Idol and make her a judge. If you had told me 10 years ago that Marcia would be on television judging a new faces-style show, I would have told you not in a million years. But there was a change. One of many.”

From two acts on the books by the end of 1974, Peter Rix Management’s roster rapidly started to grow. Rix’s interests in different sorts of media also started to expand, including producing concert, television and radio events.

Soon, Rix was spending 11 months of each year out on the road with various acts and different shows. Moving into the early 1980s and now a dominant figure in the local entertainment scene, Rix found more and more people outside music starting to request his expertise in staging and producing large scales events. One such early gig, again through a chance meeting, came when John Quayle, the recently-appointed chief of the NSW Rugby League competition, asked Rix to handle the pre-game and halftime entertainment at the Grand Final. Soon, Rix would also be providing the entertainment for State Of Origin games, as well as the televised Friday Night Football.

As time moved on, PRM continued to get requests to help stage all kinds of events, many which had nothing to do with music at all. Rix would never say no. “I used to say yes to everything and you made friends out of that,” he laughs. “But I categorically believe that we all get our moments of luck and the trick is to take your moments and not let go of them. To relentlessly keep going. Luck, fate, whatever you want to call it, it does come, I think it comes to all of us, and I think that I have been lucky more than once. But I am a bit relentless.”

Rix’s non-music client list continued to grow exponentially. Toyota Australia, St George Bank, the Australian Financial Review – all sorts of clients and all sorts of jobs. As he approached his 35th birthday, Rix realised he’d just about spent enough of his life on a tour bus and started scaling back the music management side of his business, first to only Marcia Hines and Jon English, eventually just Marcia.

But Peter Rix’s interest in music didn’t simply evaporate. He was one of the main figures behind the legendary Narara Festivals staged in country NSW in 1983 and 1984.

By the mid-1980s, he was also board member for ARIA, the Australian Record Industry Association, and started spearheading a push for ARIA to launch its own peer-voted music awards. Peter Rix’s concept of an ARIA Music Awards would grow to become the single most important annual event in contemporary Australian music. Rixy was the Chairman and Producer of the first 14 annual ARIA Music Awards ceremonies.

Looking back, Rix says it’s now easy to see that his professional career moving in 15-year cycles. The first cycle was the band manager years, which aside from all the fun and rock & roll reckless, also provided him with the tools to produce and promote any sort of major public or private event. This skill set which helped make PRM one of Australia’s leading event and multi-media production houses throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Of course, Rix’s most recent career cycle began in 2003 when he happily handed over the reins of his company to George P Johnson and settled into the role of heading up the multinational’s Australian operations. Whereas PRM had a staff of 15, Rix now oversees a staff of 70.

Peter Rix jokes that, through the early years, he never had any idea how Peter Rix Management might eventually meet its end. Whenever he was asked about a succession plan, his response would be: “When I’ve had enough, I’m going to the office where the accounts are kept with a can of petrol and a cigarette lighter, walk out the door and go, ‘Well I’ve had a bloody good time!”

Whilst PRM has left an indelible mark on the history of Australian pop and rock, Peter Rix says that, personally, he doesn’t tend to reminisce too much. Whilst he loved his rock & roll, he’s pretty happy with the way everything has turned out. “How many people are lucky enough to have three lives?” he smiles.

Dino Scatena
Sydney
January 2008