A Dallas native who joined the Navy shortly after high school, Rios was mesmerized by the rock star performances he witnessed at the clubs in San Diego with the screeching guitars and thunderous applause that followed. He dreamed of starting a record label, but didn’t have the money, and most of all he wanted to know how someone put on shows like the ones he'd been experiencing.
On this Monday night in 1991, his rock wish would be granted.
At Blind Melons, a lone talent buyer who resembled Dave Grohl and who was also the bartender and manager, lingered behind the bar. They struck up a conversation over drinks, and the talent buyer pulled back the veil on the rock events, explaining the work that goes on behind the magic — like Dorothy exposing the Wizard of Oz.
Nearly 30 years later, Rios is retiring from the talent-buyer business. He spent most of those years booking bands in Dallas for his company IRock Entertainment at places such as the Galaxy Club, Gas Monkey and the Red Blood Club, later known as RBC. In his earlier years, he booked shows for bands such as Slow Roosevelt, Pimpadelic and Hellafied Funk Crew. For the last couple of years, he’d been booking bands at Six Springs Tavern, a newer original music venue in Richardson, and at The Rail Club Live in Fort Worth.
But Rios grew tired of COVID forcing bands to cancel and reschedule, only to call off the show. The years of uncertainty were a big burnout for those involved in the music industry. In a Jan. 4 Facebook post, Rios announced he'd be leaving the business.
“Now here we are in 2022, and no one knows what's going to happen,” he wrote. “I'm just not having fun doing this anymore, and that was one of my main reasons for doing this: to bring in some good shows and have fun in the process. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore — at least for me. I had a good run of 29 years and was part of some great shows. I still can't believe I was able to pull off a few of those that I did. Being able to bring in some bands that hadn't played Dallas in 25-30 years was something special to me. But it's time to say goodbye. Thanks to all of those who supported me. It's because of all of you that I was around this long.”
Rios got his official start in ’93 at the Galaxy Club in Dallas where he’d been working the door after a six-year stint in the Navy and going into the office to learn the ins and outs from club owner Kent Wyatt.
“Mike had the heart and the passion for it,” Wyatt says.
One day, Wyatt offered him a chance to put on his own show and gave him the club’s pay scale for bands, which back then depended on their popularity and time slot and averaged between $50 and $300 per show. The clubs would keep track of the door and bump up bands who brought in a crowd.
“That’s how you moved up the pay scale,” Rios says.
Rios tapped a couple of local bands to play his first show at The Galaxy Club. It was a success, and it led to more shows.
In the ’90s, it was much easier, he says, to find good local bands to play at the clubs. Their flyers were plastered on telephone poles and inside the clubs in Deep Ellum. He'd often meet band members who'd attend the local shows to hand out their band's flyers and support the other local acts. He'd leave the shows with a handful of flyers and find another handful under his car's windshield wipers.
Wyatt began teaching Rios how to land national acts, which required a lot of bartering with record labels over purchasing tickets for giveaways (and to hopefully cover the cost of the band) and a lot of time sitting by the phone at the club's office. Then there was the cumbersome process of obtaining signatures for the contracts, which would take about 10 days to get back in the mail.
“Everything was slow back then,” Big Mike says.
Soon he was booking shows for some of the hair metal acts that inspired him to pursue the rock 'n' roll life as a talent buyer. He left the Galaxy Club in ’96 and started booking bands at the Rock and eventually the Vampire Lounge, where he was the head talent buyer until it became a Target. Rios told the Dallas Observer in May 2018, “If there was a venue back then, more than likely, I did a show there at least once.”
As the 2000s came around, a dramatic shift began in the local scene. Talent buyers, the in-house promoters who helped pack the clubs, vanished as clubs started renting out their venues to freelance promoters to help pay the bills. Local bands’ flyers also started disappearing due, in part, to Dallas City Council passing an ordinance to ban them. Bands instead switched to MySpace and eventually Facebook to promote their live shows. It became harder, Rios says, to find good local bands because many of them were no longer hanging out at each other's shows to network and offer support.
“They don’t even put posters up at the clubs anymore,” he says.
But it also got easier to book them. Rios could now do business from the comfort of his own home instead of having to spend three days a week waiting by the office phone.
Promoters began paying bands based on the number of tickets they sold, and would give them a percentage anywhere from $3 to $7 per ticket, depending on the type of show it was. If it was a national act, opening local bands would often get the lower rate since it costs more to secure the national ones.
Of course, talent buyers and promoters also get a percentage of tickets sold. Rios says he never tried to make too much money off the bands.
“I always just wanted to break even on the shows and give the bands an opportunity to play for bigger crowds,” he says.
Rios was handling local, regional and national acts such as LA Guns and Joe Lynn Turner, a singer who once fronted Deep Purple. He booked Machine Head's first Dallas show in the ’90s.
After talent buying in Dallas for several years, Rios began booking shows in Austin. Jim Ostrander, the former owner of Texas Mist, says he met Rios through a mutual friend about seven years ago. Ostrander had been working with talent buyers from Dallas and Austin for about four years, but most of them, he says, were inept and unable to deliver.
When Rios told him that he could bring in national touring acts, Ostrander says at first he was leery because it required about $5,000 or $6,000, which he says Rios would also help cover.
“What he said, he did,” Ostrander says.
The next thing Ostrander knew, he had rock heroes from his youth, George Lynch from Dokken, Faster Pussycat and LA Guns, playing his club. Rios also booked the Iron Maidens, a female tribute band, which Ostrander says brought about 450 people to his 300-capacity club.
“Man, back in the ’80s, if you had told me that some of these musicians would be playing my club one day, I would have said you’re crazy,” Ostrander says.
About six months before COVID, Rios headed over to Fort Worth and started booking shows at The Rail Club Live, a music venue that had become a fixture on the local metal scene. The club was under new ownership, and Rios reached out on Facebook and began booking shows. He brought in acts such as ’80s glam metal bands Kix and Slaughter, acoustic metal country duo WhiskeyDick, and Zebra, a hard rock band from the ’70s.
The Rail Club Live's former owner Chris Polone knew Rios from their talent buying days in Dallas. Polone became the talent buyer at RBC shortly after Rios left. He says Rios was his “arch rival,” but they grew closer over their mutual distaste of RBC and the owner whom they allege screwed them over.
“I always just wanted to break even on the shows and give the bands an opportunity to play for bigger crowds." – Big Mike Rios
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“I tried to warn Chris to stay away,” Rios says. “He called me later and said, ‘Man, everything you told me was true.’”
Polone says Rios is a good talent buyer “because he cares, and he’s passionate and one of only a few good ones left. He genuinely enjoys this stuff. Anytime you got someone who’s passionate about something you got the right guy. He’s got decades on me, and he’s been a helluva good friend and mentor.”
The future was bright for The Rail Club Live. Everyone was making money and putting it back into the club, and Rios and Polone planned to hold a three-day rock festival called “Rail Fest,” offering 20 bands — including Sick Puppies, Powerman 500 and Trapt — for $100 per ticket in March 2020. Polone says they booked about 60 bands for the year and paid about $80,000 in security deposits.
A week before the show, the government put everyone on COVID lockdown. Nonessential businesses were forced to close, and Rail Fest was canceled, along with the other 60 shows. Instead of giving back the security deposits, the bands began rescheduling, Rios says, since they had already spent the deposits paying their people and had it in their contracts that they could reschedule.
But every time a show was supposed to take place, COVID would strike and prevent bands like OTEP from traveling.
Polone says that it also didn’t help that they would announce a rescheduled show and then cancel it and then announce it again and then cancel it again. After the fifth announcement, he says people just figured the show wasn’t going to happen and decided to stay home. This happened to many clubs in Texas and around the country. Rios figures probably only about 25% of the 60 bands they scheduled ended up playing their rescheduled shows.
“That was a massive problem,” he says. “That takes the fire out of anybody.”
In Fort Worth, the COVID restrictions limiting clubs to about 75 people also didn’t help.
“We did a show with a Rush tribute band, and we had to turn [attendees] away at the door," Rios says. "You can’t make any money. It really hurt.”
Polone started battling Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission over COVID restrictions. He lost his liquor license after the TABC refused to renew it, which cost him his chance of recovering the thousands he lost on security deposits. The only way to renew it, Polone says, was for him to step aside.
He still plans to continue the fight in court, along with 15 other bars from around Texas. They return to court in April.
“When you love something, you got to set it free,” he says.
Rios saw the writing on the flyer. “I’m done,” he told himself.
Over the years, Big Mike has made memories with rock stars. He mentions a time drinking with Moterhead's Mickey Dee and Pantera's Dimebag Darrell and recalls several standout shows, including Motorhead and Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden at The Galaxy Club.
And though he has announced his retirement, Rios isn’t quite done with the rock life, as he pointed out in a Feb. 5 Facebook post to the local bands who started unfriending him after they learned about his retirement: "Just because I stepped away doesn't mean that I lost my contacts. I can still pick up the phone anytime for anyone if I choose. Hey, who knows, maybe I'll get bored and miss it and decide to come back."
He signed off the post with, "Up yours, Big Mike."
