Going behind the scenes with Eleven Productions founder Jacki Becker

Jacki Becker isn’t an easy person to get face time with. The owner and operator of booking agency Eleven Productions is often working in the trenches, behind the scenes at concerts in Kansas City and Lawrence. But Becker is a ubiquitous presence on the scene and beyond. (The reach of the nearly 15-year-old firm is throughout Missouri, Iowa and Nebraska.)

The Pitch caught up with Becker to discuss booking bands and staying plugged into the local scene, though she admits that she’d rather stay out of the limelight.

The Pitch: How did you get your start in the business?

Becker: Oh, it was so long ago. [Laughs.] I started working at KJHK and I started a local show called Plow the Fields [in 1998], and had no intention on sticking around. I was planning on going to graduate school. Brett Mosiman, the owner of Bottleneck, asked what I was doing. I was like, “Oh, I don’t know, applying to grad schools, writing a play,” and he was like, “Do you want to book bands?” And I was like, “Hell, yeah!”

It’s completely random in your life, how you think you’re going to take this one path — I thought I was going to be a college professor or write books or something — and the next thing you know, it’s the ’90s and grunge is exploding, and I’m booking these amazing, hugely popular acts and helping run the concerts and venues. Then I was booking for Pipeline [Productions], and then I took a couple years off and started my own company. It was all super-random, but I feel very lucky for it all.

You run a booking agency. Tell me what that means.

I basically put concerts in any possible place that makes sense for the area and for the Midwest. In addition, I run production at Cricket Wireless Amphitheater, so I’ve run Warped Tours and things like that in the past. I run an event wherever somebody needs me, basically. So sometimes you’ll see me at Starlight, sometimes you’ll see me at Crossroads, sometimes at the Uptown. It depends. I’m sort of everywhere, between booking and production.

Summer concert season is high season for you, right?

For me, as an independent promoter, not necessarily. In terms of me getting hired out to run production at large events, definitely. But booking for the club world — the 2,000 to 3,000-seat club world that I usually book in — for us, it’s usually April and October. But for everyone else, yes, the summertime is when you go outdoors and play it as big as you can.

Your job sounds glamorous, but I’m sure there are parts of it that are a struggle. Tell me about some of the nitty-gritty.

Anyone in the music industry, whether you’re promoting it or creating it — it is not a moneymaking venture. It is a labor of love. It is a 24/7 job at this point. Live music is very micromanaged, heavily, because we don’t really have record labels anymore, and there’s not a lot of ways for musicians to make money except for touring. It’s a lot of work, and there’s not always a lot of financial reward to it.

But it is amazing. I would never trade my life for anything else, obviously. But we’re always working, and you always have to be on top of something and three steps ahead. When people come to work for me, I’m like, “OK, you’re going to see that music isn’t always kittens and puppies and love.” It’s a lot of hard work, and a lot of times, you put a lot of effort into something and you realize you don’t make any money, and that’s just part of it.

It’s like any band going on tour. You have this product, this thing you love to do, and it’s your passion, and then you come back and you look at the bottom line and you’re like, “Wow, we didn’t make any money! Well, what’s next?” And I think a lot of people don’t realize that running an event, you’re the first one there and the last one to leave, and sometimes it’s an 18-hour day or a 12-hour day. People are always like, “Why are you sending e-mails at 1 a.m.?” And it’s like, “Well, I got 26 e-mails from midnight to 1 a.m., and I need to answer them.” So I love it, but you have to be really committed. And there’s something fun about that, too.

You’ve been in the business for nearly 15 years. What’s one of the biggest changes you’ve seen in the industry?

One big shift is really convincing today’s generation that live music is where it’s at. The experience that they have with live music is so different. If you look at a crowd now of kids, they’re holding up iPhones and iPads. Their connection to the artist is to record that and retain it and share that with their friends. It’s something really different. It’s not a body experience. It’s a body-attached-to-device experience. And making sure that those people still want to go see a live show and value it, when they can just as easily watch it on TV or their computer or phone — that’s hard.

I imagine you must get requests from a lot of local bands wanting to fill opening spots for touring acts. What advice do you have for musicians who are trying to break into the business?

There’s definitely a way to go about it. Sending us a DM on Twitter probably isn’t gonna cut it. But once it gets to me, I’ll be pretty up-front about it. Because the truth is that most touring bands these days don’t want a local opener. But it never hurts to ask. I have no problem going, “Hey, thanks for asking, again, not today.” You know, opening for Tame Impala or Belle and Sebastian — that probably isn’t going to happen. But some of these smaller, developing acts, you know, give it a try, see what can happen. You don’t always have to shoot for the highest.

But it’s definitely a tough thing to tell local bands “no” because that takes me more out of the local scene, just because I’m spending so much time doing national booking. But if a local band is willing to keep bugging me, I’m more likely to think of you when we do happen to have a touring act that has an opening spot available.

For more information, see uptoeleven.com.