Jim Aiken is the sort of person you tend to meet at airports. Last weekend at JFK he was looking forward to the big fight in Atlantic City and after that he was off to Kentucky for the Breeders' Cup. The high-life certainly but there was also, of course, a certain amount of business to be done. Aiken's self-set retirement age of 65 has already passed without a fuss. As you read this, there is every chance that he is attending some US gig and talking to someone who just might be available to perform in Ireland at yet another outdoor spectacular.
As a rather visionary concert promoter, Jim Aiken has been a hugely significant influence on the entertainment industry over the years. He has brought some very serious players to Ireland and must get much of the credit for making Dublin a major concert venue for international acts.
From his early days with the Royal Showband, Bill Haley and Roy Orbison through to the big outdoor festivals with The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, Jim Aiken has taken some very big chances indeed.
"The first thing I ever ran was the 1948 Olympics in Jonesboro. I think I won the high jump and the 5,000m which was run over about 500 yards. There was the GAA, of course, and again, I was usually the organiser there. But then I think I really needed to get out of that environment and I believe that the big change happened when I went to St. Patrick's in Armagh and I realised that I really could become an organiser, arranging the handball tournaments or the football tournaments. "It was really in that environment that I discovered I was a leader, but I never thought at that time that it was part of something I would use for the rest of my life. The total interest for me has always been in organisation and the outlet for that has been through music."
Music was not, however, the first option. One look at Jim Aiken's priestly (or even episcopal) bearing and it's not all that surprising that, like many young men with his particular organisational skills, he was initially drawn to the church. There was little doubt that he would be the very man for raffles, football teams and new community centres. But there were other doubts and Aiken began to recognise, well into his studies, that the priesthood was not for him.
"I realised that, while I think I would have won the county championship and I would have built the church, I was on the wrong path. I had these great dreams but then when I got into the detail of it and the spirituality of it, I realised that while I might have been able to lead people to win the championship, I mightn't have been able to lead them to heaven. "My parents were able to ride that out and therefore what could have been confidence destroying, helped me to face the world without it as a positive thing. It was three or four years of my life that I would have hated to have missed and it has stayed with me to explain life in ways that cannot be explained by success, by money, by cars or by concerts. It cannot be explained without this other part of my life, the spiritual or the philosophical side. Without that, my life, no matter how successful, would have been less than it is."
While working as a teacher in Belfast, Aiken became attracted to the possibilities that emerged around the start of the showband era. Bands such as The Melody Aces and The Clipper Carlton were doing great business around the country but they were not playing Belfast. A curious Aiken investigated the ballroom business and saw no reason why he shouldn't attempt to lure these big showbands to the city. And so began his career as a promoter.
"I forget what I paid them for New Year's Eve 1959, but I know what I counted up when I came home afterwards and it was as good as six months' teaching! And I've led this phenomenal risk-taking life since. It's a job that everybody thinks they can do. There isn't anyone that doesn't think that if they got Garth Brooks tomorrow they wouldn't make a success of it. But the biggest skill is a total lack of respect for money and total belief that whatever you say you are going to do, you actually do it. You have to spot a trend, to take a risk and to make sure that those who go have an experience that was good value and that they enjoyed. And also that it is an experience that nobody else could have produced for them. "That sounds a bit trite nowadays, but think of it back when I did Springsteen at Slane or The Royal Showband in Belfast on New Year's Eve in 1959. This was something that nobody could ever have thought would have happened. I never thought it would be as big. They never thought it would be as big and there are people today who will look back at these as major dates in their lives. A promoter is an entrepreneur. He is sometimes a fool. It seems good now but it was horrendous in the 1970s and early 1980s to be a promoter in Northern Ireland when nobody wanted to come to Ireland. If you could have picked a bad job I had it."
For Jim Aiken, concert promotion gave him an opportunity to be a businessman on an international scale without, as he puts it, "the trappings of a big involvement". Here he found the satisfaction of doing something that nobody else could do while having the independence to act on a whim and take a risk with his own money. "I wanted to keep entertainment going in Belfast. That gave me a private satisfaction. You see, they couldn't do it with public money, they couldn't do it with grants and they couldn't do it with sponsorship. But I did it and that's the best I ever did in life. I did it by travelling to see people and by encouraging them to come and then them having a good experience and coming back." "It's difficult to realise how different it used to be. There was a worldwide fraternity that controlled entertainment then and when The Beatles or The Rolling Stones came to Dublin it wasn't locals that promoted them. For locals to get in ahead of that brotherhood took a bit of cheek and a bit of a hard neck. But it worked."
Aiken was very soon promoting a lot of major acts in Ireland. His first international act had been Tommy Rowe and later Bill Haley and the Comets.
Many more were to follow, including Tom Jones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Cream, Rory Gallagher and Thin Lizzy. This was an impressive list but it was the 1970s and the North was about to enter a very bad period.
Aiken, too, was to suffer. It would take more than a persuasive promoter to attract any major international act to a smouldering city like Belfast.
"On the night the Troubles started I took John Bonham of Led Zeppelin up to Leeson Street in Belfast to see the riots. That's how innocent we were at the time. He wanted to see what was going on. And I remember driving Roy Orbison from Magilligan to Enniskillen on the night of the first fires in Derry. He rang later and asked me to come out and live with him and take the family until the Troubles were over. It was a nice offer.
"Then the Troubles came and I stopped. I had years of Limerick Junction and Punchestown and then I had nothing left. I was cleaned out. In 1979 in the Kings Hall in Belfast I did Nana Mouskouri, David Essex, Leo Sayer and Demis Roussous. I paid every one of them every shilling and said that if they couldn't come they could keep the money. I raised the money by mortgaging my house for a second time. Leo Sayer sold out two shows in the one night and the rest sold out one show each so that was phenomenal.
"On the day before it was all supposed to start, a post office van was put outside and in that post office van, there was supposed to be a bomb. If that had been a bomb there would never have been any concerts ever again and I would have been stony broke. I went to the doctor that day and said was there nothing he could give me. He said, `Well, you don't drink and you don't smoke and the only advice I can give you is to sing that song One Day At A Time.' So you have to be a fool and you have to have a very understanding wife."
Entertainment in Ireland took a huge leap when Aiken decided to move outdoors. These weren't the first outdoor shows in Ireland but they were the biggest and suddenly some very big names were arriving in helicopters at Slane Castle. This was a major risk for Aiken and yet his biggest problem was still one of simply convincing people to come.
"When we decided to do the outdoors, we had to do them better than anybody else. When anyone was doing a world tour they never included Ireland. So we set out to do everything better, down to the last detail. Nowadays Dublin is a definite, but then it was a no-no. We really didn't come into our own until we did the outdoors. When Springsteen sang Born in the USA with the Boyne behind him - the place packed, a beautiful day, one of the most beautiful places in the world - it was a great feeling to have pulled that off. "Similarly, with Garth Brooks. I went to see him in Fargo - somewhere where I'd be the biggest head. I spent a couple of hours with him there and I said he could do 10 dates and that I'd give him a million dollars for it and I told him that I was a good promoter when I had my money down.
He said, `Well you'll just have to learn to be a good promoter without your money down because we'll settle up afterwards'. "Later I brought him around to Croke Park when they had just knocked the Cusack and there was a hole in the ground. I told him that when it was ready we'd do outdoors, and those gigs went out to 28 million homes in the US. "You can't equate that with the financial. There are fellas who have made multi-millions but they would never have got the buzz of doing something like that. And I've had a lot of that. As for the commercial factor, I've got enough to do me. I have a comfortable life - nothing like what people think I could have or should have - but it's adequate and therefore I'm satisfied."