Theron Rodriguez
Founder & Principal Advisor
Everybody from Britney Spears to Tool — kids’ shows, comedy, symphony orchestras, Bob Dylan, Slayer, festivals, intimate club dates, stadiums.
Theron Rodriguez is the founder of The Concert Consulting Group. He spent thirty years in live concert production, starting as a stagehand at nineteen and finishing as Director of Production for AEG Presents, the world’s second-largest concert promoter. Along the way: roughly 5,000 shows, some 15,000 live performances, and every room size from a 100-cap club to a 30,000-cap stadium.
Supposedly you can learn concert production in a classroom. Theron learned it the other way: thirty years of loading docks, front-of-house consoles, settlement tables, and buses idling in the alley.
For most of those years the job titles overlapped: running sound one night, stage managing the next, production managing the run, settling the show after the encore. By the end, as Director of Production for AEG Presents, every department, every show, and every person behind the scenes rolled up to him. All sizes, all genres, all at once.
The career, settled
This is a company that teaches people how to settle a show, so here is the career in the format the industry trusts most.
Honest estimates. Nobody was keeping a tally at the time; there was always a show to do.
The career, as a day sheet
Thirty years, formatted the way the industry formats everything.
Stagehand
Pushing cases at nineteen. Where most people start and where a lot of people stay. It is also where you learn to love the smell of diesel in the morning. He gave it about a year before the next thing pulled harder.
Audio Engineer
Speaker-on-a-stick gigs first, then FOH, monitors, patch, system tech, department head. At some point he stopped taking stagehand calls entirely so the industry would take the sound engineer seriously.
Stage Manager
Running the deck: every piece moving to the right place at the right time, usually while wearing at least one other hat that same night.
Production Manager
Budgets, vendors, timelines, labor. The whole machine. For years this overlapped with everything above it on this sheet.
Promoter Rep & Show Accountant
The direct line to the artist’s team: finance and settlement, hospitality, production, labor, and everything else that touches the talent.
Director of Production, AEG Presents
Every department, every show, every genre, every room size. The seat where a six-figure labor bill stops being remarkable and starts being Tuesday.
The Walk-Away
The pandemic gave the industry its first real pause in decades. He looked around, decided he had finished the game, and clocked out on his own terms.
The Concert Consulting Group
The parts of the job he never got tired of: building systems, solving problems, and teaching people. That is the whole company.
Why he walked away, and why he is still here
I finished the game. I’m not going to play the same level for the rest of my life.
Leaving was not burnout, and it was not the money. It is that every rung of the ladder ended the same way: learned, mastered, routine, time to build something new. That restlessness is the through-line of the whole career. It is why the stagehand became a sound engineer, why the sound engineer took on stage managing, and why every title after that kept stacking.
After Director of Production, the remaining moves were booking, touring, a coast, or a production-house desk. None of them were new. What was new: taking three decades of hard-won judgment and handing it to the people still in the building. Consulting is the version of the job that kept everything he loved, the systems, the problem-solving, the teaching, and left the 6 a.m. loading docks to the next generation.
He will tell you plainly that he might take another production gig someday; history says he gets restless. For now, he is enjoying the two things thirty years of show business never once allowed, a full night’s sleep and a free weekend, and spending his working hours teaching everyone else how the machine really runs.
Off the clock
The guitar in the photo is a Schecter. It is not an expensive instrument, and that is rather the point: it is simply the one he loves to play. Thirty years around musical instruments meant he was never going to not pick one up, so the studio holds a drum kit, a dozen guitars and basses, amps, and a piano. He will tell you, unprompted, that he is not really a musician. He plays them all anyway.
Put the thirty years to work
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