Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Quinn Cantra picks. When I'm six, I'm gonna call
him a friend of the program. He's a friend of
the program. Bob Belber, who's been running that downtown Albany
arena for thirty plus years, you know it as the
MVP Arena. Now, Bob's got a brand new book out,
Life with the Stars. This is all about your time
in the business around entertainers and sports celebrity.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
But I'm way more interesting than I gave you credit
for even Thanks guys, rats.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
On the book.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, thank you very much. You know, it took me
about three years to write. It started during the COVID time.
You know, I think everybody had a little bit more
time than they wanted during COVID. And it is funny
as hell. People's ribs are gonna hurt when they actually
read this book. It it's got stories from back when
I was at the old Starlight Music Theater with the
(00:48):
likes of Variety, Dangerfield and Luther Vandros and just have
some funny backstage stuff, you know, with me on Willie's bus,
Willie Nelson's bus, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah, so I'm reading the story in the tu says
you hit he took some tequila. You hit it from
Willy's bust and.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
The bottle is that it? Bob Well? Well, I was
I was right. I was called. I was called over
from his manager at the end of the concert and
he said, will he wants to see you on the bus.
I'm like, oh, ship, what happened? I knock on the
door and I go up on the bus. First of all,
the bus is full of maria marijuana smoke. It's like
(01:26):
you can't even see Willy practically. He's sitting at the
table there in the kitchen, facing the bus driver, and
he says, come on over and sit down, son, and
I sit down, and he takes a swig of this
Jose querbo gold bottle, and I mean a big swig,
and he puts it down on the table and he
slides it over and he says, here, take a swig
of that. And so what are you gonna do? Say
(01:48):
no to Willy? Well, speaking of bottles of bottles of booze,
the Tom Jones story is one of whose sounds good too.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
That's brutal.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah, he was out a way to give away all
the stories. But he he would collect these bottles that
he would demand from the venues and then resell them.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I'm not sure it was actually the artist. I don't
even know if the artist knew about it, but I
will tell you that it was a requirement in the
contract at the time. And I talked to his manager,
Lloyd Greenfield a number of times about this. And if
you didn't give two bottles of dome Point burying you uh,
you know, to the backstage for hospitality purposes, you wouldn't
(02:30):
get a Tom Jones date. It was. It was that
much of a deal, and I thought nothing of it.
I thought, well, Tom must be enjoying some Don Perignon. Well,
the reality is I walked back there and there was
this rider truck back there, and you know, the guy
is messing around on the back of the truck and
I look back and the boxes all over the truck there,
(02:51):
and they took the two bottles from the dressing room
that I had given Don Perion, you know, for the
person to the contract, and they were stuffing in a
box and I and what are you guys doing? And
the guys it was a crew guy, and he says,
we boxed these. Don't put your own bottles up and
they get shipped out to Vegas and they get resold.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I'm like, what, it's just wild. Yeah. Also, Bob, in
the book We Know, you go into this whole Antonio
Brown backstory, which Jeff Levac of the Firebirds was surprised.
You told that this is interesting. You had to recruit
the FBI for help on this.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
One, right, Yeah, this was I mean, everybody knows the
story about what happened with Antonio Brown. He tried to
be an owner of Arena Football team Superstar from the NFL.
You know, arguably one of the best wide receivers ever,
but a little bit of a different person as it
relates to, you know, owning a team and operating it.
(03:47):
Fired players, fire players, fired coaches. I think some of
the stories had them being thrown out of hotels and
restaurants for not paying bills and smoking pot and so forth,
and at the end of the day, in fact, smoking pop.
We had to almost close our offices here a couple
times because his office is just down the hall and
had shared shared ductwork, and at nine o'clock in the morning,
(04:11):
our offices are full of marijuana smoke at nine o'clock
in the morning, and so those were interesting discussions. But anyway,
at the end of the day, he got voted out
of the league, as you guys know, for not paying
league dues. And at the end of the run, he
had equipment and stuff that he owned in the building
that had to be taken out because we were trying
(04:33):
to get another team in for the following year, and
so the field system was something that he had owned,
and I had just gotten an email from a guy
from Florida that he had sold the field system to.
The guy said he wanted to bring a truck up
and get the field system out of the building, and
he gave us proof that a wire transfer took place.
The funds were sent to Antonio Brown's trust's account, and
(04:57):
so he was the rightful owner of it. And the
same day in the afternoon, one of Antonio Brown's people
walks into my office and says he wants to take
the field system out and he's got another buyer for it.
And I said, well, I've got another guy coming with
a truck and he sent me the proof that he
owns it, and Antonio's guy said, no, we're going to
(05:19):
give him his money back because we've got somebody else
that'll pay more. And so with that, I'm like, no, no,
that's not going to I'm not going to be in
the middle of this. So I said to the guy, look,
I'm not going to give it to you, and I'm
not going to give it to the guy from Florida
unless I see a court order or unless there's a
sheriff that comes to the back door and says who
the rightful owner is good for you?
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
And so what happened was the guy from Florida reached
out to Craig Apple, the sheriff of Albany County sent
him all the paperwork. We had a sheriff that came
to the back door. The guy from Florida sent the
truck up, and the sheriff directed us to release the
field system to the guy from Florida. But before that happened,
(06:02):
the other guy from Antonio Brown came back to the
office and basically threatened to put out a letter that
had all kinds of accusations in it that you know,
I had stolen money from them personally, and all kinds
of other total bogus stuff. And of course you know
that to me, my reputation was on the line, and
(06:23):
it really is aggravating when somebody it's like putting a
gun to your head. Right, if I don't do something,
then they're going to do something that's going to harm
you badly. Well, the public doesn't know, you know, what
was done, what wasn't done. And if they hears something
an allegation, half half of the people are going to wonder, well,
maybe he did do something wrong. On the other half,
(06:43):
it's going to think that it came from Antonio Brown.
So you got to discount that. But at the end
of the day, I was so upset with it that
I contacted somebody, a friend of mine with the Homeland
Security that I know, and he gave me a contact
with the FBI and said that it was probably a
cross lines because the trust is located in Florida. And
(07:03):
so the guy from the FBI, a guy the named
Mike DiCaprio, just one of the nicest guys I ever
talked to. And and at the end of the day,
had they sent that letter out, I think you would
probably see a totally different scenario right now, and you know,
mister Brown probably would be in a different place. Wow. Well,
(07:27):
And and it was never sent and thankfully, you know,
because I didn't have to deal I didn't have to
deal with the repercussions of it and so forth, but
just to have that under the head type of mentality
because things weren't going the way that he wanted it
to go. When when he had already sold the damn
field system, he had already received the money for it,
and then he was trying to play games. So or
(07:50):
the trust, I don't know if it was him or
the trust, but anyway, that was a bad time.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Life with the Stars. Were talking to Bob Belbur, longtime
general manager of the MVP Arena as as far as shows,
do you have a favorite show? Like did someone blow
you away? More than everyone else?
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I think there were two that really stand out to me.
The Rolling Stones, I think was the best concert that
I've ever seen in my life here in two thousand
and five. Paul McCartney I think arguably could have been
right there with it. I mean, both those shows were
just so good, nice, But there there have been so
many others. I mean Old Dominion was a phenomenal show
just a couple of years ago. You know, there's so
(08:27):
many different shows that are played in here. When Billy
Joel and Elton John played together on the Face to
Face Tour that I think could be considered one of
the best shows ever as well. But the things that
happened backstage, I mean I walked around a corner backstage
and heard ping pong going on, and and I get
to the place where the sound's coming from and it's
(08:47):
Michael Bublay playing ping pong against one of his crew guys,
and they were just finishing up when he looks at
me and he says, you will to play a little
And I said sure, So I took my jacket off
and started play with him. I'd played a little bit
in school. He kicked my ass by how many How.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Many contests do you think you've seen in your lifetime?
Speaker 2 (09:16):
I think I have booked about a little over four
thousand shows over the course of forty one years.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
But you don't see every show, do you? Or do
you do?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
No? I don't see every show. I mean I'll see
pieces of the majority of the shows, but it's very
rare that I'll actually sit and watch a show from
start to finish. The Rolling Stones was one that I did.
Paul McCartney. I did It's the Bash of Men of Scalco.
I did the comedy show. He was funny as hell.
But you know, there's there's experiences that I share in
(09:48):
the book of when I was the director of booking
for the US while I was a GM here, our
corporate office liked how many shows were getting in Albany.
This is back in the late nineties, early two thousands.
You know, back then we were getting two sold out
Backstreet Boys two sold out, and Syncs two sold out,
Britney Spears and a lot of the other you know,
(10:09):
secondary market venues were not getting any of these shows.
And a lot of this was relationships that I had
built over the years having run the old Starlight Music
Theater for ten years. And when I was buying shows,
I was buying fifty shows a summer, and I was
buying them from guys like Rob Light who now is
the managing partner of CIA, and John Hughey who has
(10:32):
also gotten very big with William Morris. But all these
guys are friends, and just like in your business, in
the radio business, you know, it's all about relationships. And
so I was asked to be the director of booking
for the US by the president of our company from
SMG back in the early two thousands, and so I'll
share this story because this is the best thing that
I've ever done in my career. I was, I booked
(10:56):
and I routed nineteen cities for the Vince Gillen Name
Grand Christmas Tour, and we had just gone into Iraq.
Our country had just gone into Iraq. There was very
little media coming out of Iraq at that time. And
I basically went to the US Army and I said, look,
I like to do something special in San Antonio because
(11:17):
San Antonio has so many military people, and you know
a lot of people are disconnected. And so I explained
what I wanted to do. The general from the US
Army actually turns around and says, you can do that,
but you're going to need a tremendous amount of money
for satellite time. And so I wanted to link up
the US troops that were from San Antonio with their
families at the show live on stage. And so I said,
(11:41):
I don't have any money for satellite time, but if
you give me the senior vice president's name and number
from satellite company, I'll reach out and see if I
can get it done. So he did that. I reached
out to the satellite guy. He says, let me get
back to you in thirty minutes. Fifteen minutes later, my
phone rings and he says, we're in. And so on
the night of the show, Amy Grant and Vince Gill
(12:02):
do the first half and then Amy goes to the
edge of the stage. Lights come up fold during the intermission,
she says, don't go anywhere. She calls up seven ladies
that had seven barstools facing out. Kids were sitting on
the stage in front of them. She goes to the
first lady and she says, ask her name, and she says,
if you could have anything in the world for the holidays,
what would you want. She says, I wish my husband
(12:24):
was home, and she was all teared up, while the
whole back of the stage from edge to edge, lights
up full video screen. They had seven guys in chairs
in a rack four thirty in the morning. They had
four hundred military personnel and uniforms. They pan in on
the husband and the husband says, high, honey, and she
(12:44):
turns around and everybody turns around. I'm telling you, there
was not a dry eye in that entire place. Incredible.
It was the most incredible thing I've ever done. And
so just to tell you why the US Army really
cared to do this. The concert actually from start to finish,
through with the interaction for forty minutes and then the
(13:05):
balance of the concert, all of that was broadcast to
one hundred and eighteen military bases around the world. Live,
well done and yeah, yeah thanks. And nobody ever knew it,
by the way, I mean none of the local media,
none of the national media. This was not about No,
it wasn't about you know, look what we did. And
I never said that to anybody. You know, this is
(13:27):
something I'm sharing that happened, you know, many many years ago,
back in the early two thousands. But I'm sharing it
in the book because I think it's something that people
will be enlightened with and will know that. You know,
That's just one of the things I've done in my
career to represent Bob a lot of.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Time, General manager of what's now the MVP Unit's Bob Belber.
His book is out right now. You can grab the
book Life with the Stars. I do have to ask you, like,
and I'm not I don't know what your plan is,
but if you were to retire, would we see the
quality of shows go down? I mean, did your staff
have the same connections that you do.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
You know, you'll continue, You'll always continue to see the
quality of the shows that you see now because our
company ASM Global that I work for, is the biggest
in the world. We've got over three hundred and fifty
arena stadiums and convention centers that we manage. And there
are a lot of guys and gals out there that
are like me that have relationships with agents and so
(14:30):
forth promoters, so our company will always be able to
put somebody else into a spot. You know, nobody's there irreplaceable.
Having said that, you know, I've got a passion to
this community after being here for so long, and I've
had conversations with the county executive and others in the county,
and I would never even if I retired, I would
(14:54):
never leave everything to my replacement where that person would
have to be on their own. And so I've already
suggested that I would continue to help with the consulting
arrangement if and when I retire, and there's a lot
of receptivity to that, so, you know, I think that's
that's something that's very important. I would never want to
(15:16):
you know, the staff here by the way that I've
worked with for you know, so long, many of them
over twenty years. I would never put them in that position.
So I'll always make sure that at least for the
you know, three to five years after I retire, I'll
make sure that they're in good stead because we're lucky.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
I feel lucky, like we get a lot of great
shows here. So we certainly want to thank you for
your time and encourage our listeners to grab Bob Alber's.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
A lot more stories than that book.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah, Life with the Stars.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
I love the Rodney, a lot of stories in there.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, it's great. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Oh, you're welcome, guys, take care. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
It's Bob Belber, the book Life with the Stars.
It's Quinn Cantra picks. When I'm six, I'm gonna call
him a friend of the program. He's a friend of
the program. Bob Belber, who's been running that downtown Albany
arena for thirty plus years, you know it as the
MVP Arena. Now, Bob's got a brand new book out,
Life with the Stars. This is all about your time
in the business around entertainers and sports celebrity.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
But I'm way more interesting than I gave you credit
for even Thanks guys, rats.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
On the book.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, thank you very much. You know, it took me
about three years to write. It started during the COVID time.
You know, I think everybody had a little bit more
time than they wanted during COVID. And it is funny
as hell. People's ribs are gonna hurt when they actually
read this book. It it's got stories from back when
I was at the old Starlight Music Theater with the
(00:48):
likes of Variety, Dangerfield and Luther Vandros and just have
some funny backstage stuff, you know, with me on Willie's bus,
Willie Nelson's bus, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Yeah, so I'm reading the story in the tu says
you hit he took some tequila. You hit it from
Willy's bust and.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
The bottle is that it? Bob Well? Well, I was
I was right. I was called. I was called over
from his manager at the end of the concert and
he said, will he wants to see you on the bus.
I'm like, oh, ship, what happened? I knock on the
door and I go up on the bus. First of all,
the bus is full of maria marijuana smoke. It's like
(01:26):
you can't even see Willy practically. He's sitting at the
table there in the kitchen, facing the bus driver, and
he says, come on over and sit down, son, and
I sit down, and he takes a swig of this
Jose querbo gold bottle, and I mean a big swig,
and he puts it down on the table and he
slides it over and he says, here, take a swig
of that. And so what are you gonna do? Say
(01:48):
no to Willy? Well, speaking of bottles of bottles of booze,
the Tom Jones story is one of whose sounds good too.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
That's brutal.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, that was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah, he was out a way to give away all
the stories. But he he would collect these bottles that
he would demand from the venues and then resell them.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I'm not sure it was actually the artist. I don't
even know if the artist knew about it, but I
will tell you that it was a requirement in the
contract at the time. And I talked to his manager,
Lloyd Greenfield a number of times about this. And if
you didn't give two bottles of dome Point burying you uh,
you know, to the backstage for hospitality purposes, you wouldn't
(02:30):
get a Tom Jones date. It was. It was that
much of a deal, and I thought nothing of it.
I thought, well, Tom must be enjoying some Don Perignon. Well,
the reality is I walked back there and there was
this rider truck back there, and you know, the guy
is messing around on the back of the truck and
I look back and the boxes all over the truck there,
(02:51):
and they took the two bottles from the dressing room
that I had given Don Perion, you know, for the
person to the contract, and they were stuffing in a
box and I and what are you guys doing? And
the guys it was a crew guy, and he says,
we boxed these. Don't put your own bottles up and
they get shipped out to Vegas and they get resold.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
I'm like, what, it's just wild. Yeah. Also, Bob, in
the book We Know, you go into this whole Antonio
Brown backstory, which Jeff Levac of the Firebirds was surprised.
You told that this is interesting. You had to recruit
the FBI for help on this.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
One, right, Yeah, this was I mean, everybody knows the
story about what happened with Antonio Brown. He tried to
be an owner of Arena Football team Superstar from the NFL.
You know, arguably one of the best wide receivers ever,
but a little bit of a different person as it
relates to, you know, owning a team and operating it.
(03:47):
Fired players, fire players, fired coaches. I think some of
the stories had them being thrown out of hotels and
restaurants for not paying bills and smoking pot and so forth,
and at the end of the day, in fact, smoking pop.
We had to almost close our offices here a couple
times because his office is just down the hall and
had shared shared ductwork, and at nine o'clock in the morning,
(04:11):
our offices are full of marijuana smoke at nine o'clock
in the morning, and so those were interesting discussions. But anyway,
at the end of the day, he got voted out
of the league, as you guys know, for not paying
league dues. And at the end of the run, he
had equipment and stuff that he owned in the building
that had to be taken out because we were trying
(04:33):
to get another team in for the following year, and
so the field system was something that he had owned,
and I had just gotten an email from a guy
from Florida that he had sold the field system to.
The guy said he wanted to bring a truck up
and get the field system out of the building, and
he gave us proof that a wire transfer took place.
The funds were sent to Antonio Brown's trust's account, and
(04:57):
so he was the rightful owner of it. And the
same day in the afternoon, one of Antonio Brown's people
walks into my office and says he wants to take
the field system out and he's got another buyer for it.
And I said, well, I've got another guy coming with
a truck and he sent me the proof that he
owns it, and Antonio's guy said, no, we're going to
(05:19):
give him his money back because we've got somebody else
that'll pay more. And so with that, I'm like, no, no,
that's not going to I'm not going to be in
the middle of this. So I said to the guy, look,
I'm not going to give it to you, and I'm
not going to give it to the guy from Florida
unless I see a court order or unless there's a
sheriff that comes to the back door and says who
the rightful owner is good for you?
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
And so what happened was the guy from Florida reached
out to Craig Apple, the sheriff of Albany County sent
him all the paperwork. We had a sheriff that came
to the back door. The guy from Florida sent the
truck up, and the sheriff directed us to release the
field system to the guy from Florida. But before that happened,
(06:02):
the other guy from Antonio Brown came back to the
office and basically threatened to put out a letter that
had all kinds of accusations in it that you know,
I had stolen money from them personally, and all kinds
of other total bogus stuff. And of course you know
that to me, my reputation was on the line, and
(06:23):
it really is aggravating when somebody it's like putting a
gun to your head. Right, if I don't do something,
then they're going to do something that's going to harm
you badly. Well, the public doesn't know, you know, what
was done, what wasn't done. And if they hears something
an allegation, half half of the people are going to wonder, well,
maybe he did do something wrong. On the other half,
(06:43):
it's going to think that it came from Antonio Brown.
So you got to discount that. But at the end
of the day, I was so upset with it that
I contacted somebody, a friend of mine with the Homeland
Security that I know, and he gave me a contact
with the FBI and said that it was probably a
cross lines because the trust is located in Florida. And
(07:03):
so the guy from the FBI, a guy the named
Mike DiCaprio, just one of the nicest guys I ever
talked to. And and at the end of the day,
had they sent that letter out, I think you would
probably see a totally different scenario right now, and you know,
mister Brown probably would be in a different place. Wow. Well,
(07:27):
And and it was never sent and thankfully, you know,
because I didn't have to deal I didn't have to
deal with the repercussions of it and so forth, but
just to have that under the head type of mentality
because things weren't going the way that he wanted it
to go. When when he had already sold the damn
field system, he had already received the money for it,
and then he was trying to play games. So or
(07:50):
the trust, I don't know if it was him or
the trust, but anyway, that was a bad time.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Life with the Stars. Were talking to Bob Belbur, longtime
general manager of the MVP Arena as as far as shows,
do you have a favorite show? Like did someone blow
you away? More than everyone else?
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I think there were two that really stand out to me.
The Rolling Stones, I think was the best concert that
I've ever seen in my life here in two thousand
and five. Paul McCartney I think arguably could have been
right there with it. I mean, both those shows were
just so good, nice, But there there have been so
many others. I mean Old Dominion was a phenomenal show
just a couple of years ago. You know, there's so
(08:27):
many different shows that are played in here. When Billy
Joel and Elton John played together on the Face to
Face Tour that I think could be considered one of
the best shows ever as well. But the things that
happened backstage, I mean I walked around a corner backstage
and heard ping pong going on, and and I get
to the place where the sound's coming from and it's
(08:47):
Michael Bublay playing ping pong against one of his crew guys,
and they were just finishing up when he looks at
me and he says, you will to play a little
And I said sure, So I took my jacket off
and started play with him. I'd played a little bit
in school. He kicked my ass by how many How.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Many contests do you think you've seen in your lifetime?
Speaker 2 (09:16):
I think I have booked about a little over four
thousand shows over the course of forty one years.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
But you don't see every show, do you? Or do
you do?
Speaker 2 (09:26):
No? I don't see every show. I mean I'll see
pieces of the majority of the shows, but it's very
rare that I'll actually sit and watch a show from
start to finish. The Rolling Stones was one that I did.
Paul McCartney. I did It's the Bash of Men of Scalco.
I did the comedy show. He was funny as hell.
But you know, there's there's experiences that I share in
(09:48):
the book of when I was the director of booking
for the US while I was a GM here, our
corporate office liked how many shows were getting in Albany.
This is back in the late nineties, early two thousands.
You know, back then we were getting two sold out
Backstreet Boys two sold out, and Syncs two sold out,
Britney Spears and a lot of the other you know,
(10:09):
secondary market venues were not getting any of these shows.
And a lot of this was relationships that I had
built over the years having run the old Starlight Music
Theater for ten years. And when I was buying shows,
I was buying fifty shows a summer, and I was
buying them from guys like Rob Light who now is
the managing partner of CIA, and John Hughey who has
(10:32):
also gotten very big with William Morris. But all these
guys are friends, and just like in your business, in
the radio business, you know, it's all about relationships. And
so I was asked to be the director of booking
for the US by the president of our company from
SMG back in the early two thousands, and so I'll
share this story because this is the best thing that
I've ever done in my career. I was, I booked
(10:56):
and I routed nineteen cities for the Vince Gillen Name
Grand Christmas Tour, and we had just gone into Iraq.
Our country had just gone into Iraq. There was very
little media coming out of Iraq at that time. And
I basically went to the US Army and I said, look,
I like to do something special in San Antonio because
(11:17):
San Antonio has so many military people, and you know
a lot of people are disconnected. And so I explained
what I wanted to do. The general from the US
Army actually turns around and says, you can do that,
but you're going to need a tremendous amount of money
for satellite time. And so I wanted to link up
the US troops that were from San Antonio with their
families at the show live on stage. And so I said,
(11:41):
I don't have any money for satellite time, but if
you give me the senior vice president's name and number
from satellite company, I'll reach out and see if I
can get it done. So he did that. I reached
out to the satellite guy. He says, let me get
back to you in thirty minutes. Fifteen minutes later, my
phone rings and he says, we're in. And so on
the night of the show, Amy Grant and Vince Gill
(12:02):
do the first half and then Amy goes to the
edge of the stage. Lights come up fold during the intermission,
she says, don't go anywhere. She calls up seven ladies
that had seven barstools facing out. Kids were sitting on
the stage in front of them. She goes to the
first lady and she says, ask her name, and she says,
if you could have anything in the world for the holidays,
what would you want. She says, I wish my husband
(12:24):
was home, and she was all teared up, while the
whole back of the stage from edge to edge, lights
up full video screen. They had seven guys in chairs
in a rack four thirty in the morning. They had
four hundred military personnel and uniforms. They pan in on
the husband and the husband says, high, honey, and she
(12:44):
turns around and everybody turns around. I'm telling you, there
was not a dry eye in that entire place. Incredible.
It was the most incredible thing I've ever done. And
so just to tell you why the US Army really
cared to do this. The concert actually from start to finish,
through with the interaction for forty minutes and then the
(13:05):
balance of the concert, all of that was broadcast to
one hundred and eighteen military bases around the world. Live,
well done and yeah, yeah thanks. And nobody ever knew it,
by the way, I mean none of the local media,
none of the national media. This was not about No,
it wasn't about you know, look what we did. And
I never said that to anybody. You know, this is
(13:27):
something I'm sharing that happened, you know, many many years ago,
back in the early two thousands. But I'm sharing it
in the book because I think it's something that people
will be enlightened with and will know that. You know,
That's just one of the things I've done in my
career to represent Bob a lot of.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Time, General manager of what's now the MVP Unit's Bob Belber.
His book is out right now. You can grab the
book Life with the Stars. I do have to ask you, like,
and I'm not I don't know what your plan is,
but if you were to retire, would we see the
quality of shows go down? I mean, did your staff
have the same connections that you do.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
You know, you'll continue, You'll always continue to see the
quality of the shows that you see now because our
company ASM Global that I work for, is the biggest
in the world. We've got over three hundred and fifty
arena stadiums and convention centers that we manage. And there
are a lot of guys and gals out there that
are like me that have relationships with agents and so
(14:30):
forth promoters, so our company will always be able to
put somebody else into a spot. You know, nobody's there irreplaceable.
Having said that, you know, I've got a passion to
this community after being here for so long, and I've
had conversations with the county executive and others in the county,
and I would never even if I retired, I would
(14:54):
never leave everything to my replacement where that person would
have to be on their own. And so I've already
suggested that I would continue to help with the consulting
arrangement if and when I retire, and there's a lot
of receptivity to that, so, you know, I think that's
that's something that's very important. I would never want to
(15:16):
you know, the staff here by the way that I've
worked with for you know, so long, many of them
over twenty years. I would never put them in that position.
So I'll always make sure that at least for the
you know, three to five years after I retire, I'll
make sure that they're in good stead because we're lucky.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
I feel lucky, like we get a lot of great
shows here. So we certainly want to thank you for
your time and encourage our listeners to grab Bob Alber's.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
A lot more stories than that book.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah, Life with the Stars.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
I love the Rodney, a lot of stories in there.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
Yeah, it's great. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Oh, you're welcome, guys, take care. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
It's Bob Belber, the book Life with the Stars.
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