In 2006, New Orleans-born concert promoter Louis Messina consulted with country music star George Strait about potential opening acts for an upcoming tour.
They chose a little-known but promising teenage singer-songwriter named Taylor Swift.
Messina got to know Swift and her parents during that 2007 Strait tour. Two years later, when Swift was popular enough to headline her own arena shows, she tapped Messina to promote her Fearless Tour.
Messina has worked for her on every tour since then, including The Eras Tour. The record-shattering Eras Tour, which will fill the Caesars Superdome from Friday to Sunday, is the top-grossing concert tour of all time, generating more than $1 billion in ticket sales.
As if Swift weren’t enough, the Messina Touring Group also counts George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Ed Sheeran, Blake Shelton, Eric Church and the Lumineers among its clients. It is one of the most successful independent concert promoters in the world.
The company’s namesake is a music industry legend, a brash, rough-and-tumble, old-school concert promoter who has reportedly mellowed a bit now that he’s 77.
He cut his teeth as a promoter, sometimes with disastrous results, in New Orleans. But to make it big, he needed to leave.
“For me, it’s almost like New Orleans is my bowl of bad memories,” Messina told host Alan Graham on the Gospel Con Carne podcast in 2020. “I love to visit for a couple days. I love going down some of memory lane.
“As I get older, all those things I’ve been trying to block out, I’ve been reprocessing my thoughts about: ‘Well maybe it wasn’t so bad. Maybe it was stuff that I had to get through to get to where I’m at.’”
Inspired by Elvis
Messina has often described himself as “just a kid from the streets of New Orleans. I’ll never forget that.”
His childhood was tough. He was, by his own admission, a handful.
“I was no angel at all,” he said on Gospel Con Carne. “I was totally a problem child.”
His grandfather was born in Italy and sold fruit and vegetables from a cart in New Orleans. When Messina was a boy, his family lived in his grandfather’s house near the Municipal Auditorium off Marais and St. Ann streets. They later moved to Lakeview.
His relationship with his father, a New Orleans boxing promoter and character known as “Leapin’ Lou” Messina, was complicated. The senior Messina helped integrate boxing in New Orleans but, in his son’s estimation, wasn’t especially successful or hard-working.
“He was more interested in seeing his name in the newspaper than he was putting food on the table,” Messina said on Gospel Con Carne. “His biggest inspiration of what I did learn from him is what not to do. What not to do as a business person, what not to do as a parent. He taught me great lessons, because I never wanted to be like him.”
One thing Louis does give his father credit for: sneaking him, at age 7, through a back door at the Municipal Auditorium to see Elvis Presley.
“At that moment, I knew I wanted to be in the music business,” Messina said on the podcast. “The excitement of the crowd, the energy that Elvis created, is something that I never forgot.”
Disastrous show at Loyola
As a young man, he worked as a clerk in a brokerage firm in New Orleans, then sold advertising for WWOM-FM. At the radio station — the deejays included a then-unknown John Larroquette — he made connections in the music industry.
Messina’s first foray into concert promotion couldn’t have gone worse. He set up a show on Nov. 3, 1972, at Loyola University’s field house featuring B.B. King and Curtis Mayfield. Tickets sold out.
But bad weather stranded King and Mayfield at the Atlanta airport. The crowd did not respond well to the announcement that the show was canceled; police were called to clear the building.
Messina was devastated, but picked himself up and, in 1973, produced his first festival: the Bayou Boogie, featuring Southern rock bands Black Oak Arkansas and Wet Willie, plus Peter Frampton and Bob Seger.
Two years later, he got involved in grand opening festivities for the Louisiana Superdome. A Houston-based company, PACE Management, booked several shows for the opening month, including a Bob Hope spectacular. PACE founder Allen Becker enlisted Messina and local politician Eddie Sapir to organize the Dome’s first rock concert.
Dubbed “Pride of Dixie,” the Aug. 31, 1975 concert featured the Allman Brothers, Wet Willie, the Marshall Tucker Band and the Charlie Daniels Band. Tickets were $10 in advance, $12 at the door.
Messina and Becker immediately hit it off. Back in Houston, Becker had a contract to promote concerts at a new arena called The Summit. He invited Messina to give him a call if he ever wanted to co-promote shows there.
Messina instead offered to move to Houston and become Becker’s partner at PACE.
“New Orleans was still living in yesterday,” Messina told the concert industry trade publication Pollstar in 2022. “There’s no way I could have survived in New Orleans.”
Upon moving to Houston in 1975, “my whole life changed,” Messina said on Gospel Con Carne. “I changed.”
Becker became Messina’s mentor. Just as Don Fox’s Beaver Productions dominated the New Orleans and Louisiana concert market, PACE presented most major rock concerts in Texas.
At PACE, Messina helped develop the concept of a traveling music festival via the George Strait Country Music Festival and Ozzy Osbourne’s OzzFest. PACE built amphitheaters across the country and expanded into motorsports and theatrical shows.
Messina worked nonstop, sometimes logging more than 200 days on the road annually. He eventually bought his own tour bus and hosted legendary post-show parties, fully embracing the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of his famous clients.
In 1997, a company called SFX acquired PACE and other regional promoters, consolidating concert promotion. In 2000, Clear Channel Communications bought SFX and eventually morphed into Live Nation, now the world’s largest presenter of live entertainment.
Messina didn’t like Clear Channel’s corporate culture. He left saddled with a two-year noncompete clause. But he negotiated the right to take five country music clients with him: Strait, Chesney, the Dixie Chicks, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.
Strait likes to have a female opening act. When he and Messina were planning a 2007 tour, Messina mentioned Swift, whose single “Tim McGraw” was doing well on country radio.
In what he has described as the “luckiest day of my life,” they locked in Swift as one of Strait’s opening acts, alongside country veteran Ronnie Milsap.
Swift’s first show with Strait was at the Cajundome in Lafayette on Jan. 11, 2007.
“By the third song, she had Strait’s audience in the palm of her hand,” Messina recalled in Pollstar. “I knew she was going to be a superstar.”
He’s been her exclusive concert promoter ever since.
Concert promotion is a risky business. Most promoters worry about whether they’ll sell enough tickets to turn a profit.
Swift, by contrast, sold so many tickets so quickly for the initial leg of the Eras Tour that TicketMaster’s website crashed.
According to Pollstar, the Messina Touring Group, which has offices in Austin and Nashville and is partnered with global powerhouse AEG Presents, sold 3.8 million tickets in 2023, grossing more than $500 million. Swift accounted for much of that total.
Messina’s clients are his best advocates. Swift introduced Messina to Ed Sheeran. Chesney introduced him to Church.
“Most promoters think that because they write the artist a check, the artist works for them,” Messina has said. “My style was different. I always tell artists, ‘All I want you to do is worry about what you do onstage. I will protect you, I’ll make sure you have fun.’ That mentality worked.
“Artists create the magic. I just got some magic dust that I sprinkle. I try to make their dreams come true.”
He certainly did with Taylor Swift.
“For her to grow the way she has grown and become such an artist that she is, that’s special, man,” Messina said in 2022. “And for me to witness that, and still witness that, is pretty cool.”
