Photo credit: Jay Blakesberg

We’re revisiting this piece following the passing of Carl Monzo on the morning of November 16, 2020.

“You can open the doors as early as you want, but the crowd’s still going to come at the last minute,” says Carl Monzo, president and CEO of National Event Services, of the two-plus decades he’s spent working jam-scene concerts. “And the venue needs to be prepared for that.”

Over the past 21 years, Monzo and his company have provided event staffing and medical services for some of the biggest touring acts and largest concerts in America, including Dead & Company, Phish, Bonnaroo, Coachella and Stagecoach. His team of ticket takers, ushers, security and other essential event personnel have helped build the festival scene, beginning with the godfather of the modern summer gathering, The Clifford Ball, in 1996.

“With all of these things on the public safety side and, specifically, the security side, it’s really about trying to stay ahead of the curve,” Monzo says. “We are looking to see what issues we’re being confronted with in today’s world and then trying to make a decision as to how to best handle them—while being one step ahead of everybody else.”

What led you to your first job in the music industry?

I became an emergency medical technician when I was 16, though now you have to be 18 to do that job. I worked in the private ambulance industry, and the company that I worked for was looking to expand outside of traditional emergency medical services. It was roughly the same time, the early-to-mid-‘80s, when Pennsylvania started enhancing its laws or at least making recommendations as to what you needed to have from the medical side to put on a mass gathering.

We were interested in that, capitalized on it and started trying to take our services— traditional emergency medical services—into a specialty division. We opened an event medical services company in the mid-1980s. Our first real client was Electric Factory Concerts.

Did that ultimately lead to security?

If you think about it, the medical staff and the security staff probably work closer together than anybody else at the venue. If security has an issue in the venue or somebody gets injured in the venue, then, typically, they would call for the medical staff and bring them to a first aid room inside the venue. So, there’s a lot of shared information that goes on. Over the years, we morphed the medical side into the security side and formed one company that provides public safety for the entertainment industry.

In the ‘90s, we found an opportunity with Phish and their festival division. They were looking for someone on the emergency-medical side that would be able to adequately staff and take care of their guests at their festivals. The first show we did with Phish was The Clifford Ball in ‘96, and, over the past 22 years, we’ve established a great relationship with them. We’ve worked with Phish on the medical side, the security side and, ultimately, went into the personal security side for the band.

Can you walk us through your process from the time you first get a call to work a gig through the start of the show?

The process starts with us asking, “What is the tour going to entail? How many show dates are there? How close together are those dates? What size venues are you playing in?” Then we take a look at the big picture and ask, “What do you want from security?”

There are tours that have an advanced team and there are tours that will strictly have personal guys; there are tours out there that have nothing. It really depends on what the band’s management wants to put into it. There are a number of questions: “Are there any threats involved against the artist or the venues that we’re playing at? Are there any issues that we know of ahead of time that we’re going to have to deal with?”

Then, whether it’s Bobby and Phil or whether it’s Dead & Company, or Phish, it’s making sure that venues understand the demographics of a crowd. From the venue perspective, everybody wants to sell more food or beer and, in the jamband scene, the crowd is not coming into the show early. You need to have adequate staffing at the doors. You’re going to get that small amount of early arrivals that want to be up against the rail, and then everybody else is going to trickle in at the last minute. It’s just a matter of educating the venues.

What causes the most stress on a show day?

Typically, especially if you’re doing a multi-day run, the first day is probably the hardest because you are getting used to the venue—how it’s laid out, how your movements are going to be. A lot of questions come into play as far as which stairways and dressing rooms are being used: “Are there secondary or tertiary entrances into those areas? How are the doors secured? What time do we have coverage on the band hallways and doorways and on the stages and steps?” And then it’s meeting with people at those individual posts and going over what our desires are and how we want to lock it down. Then it’s getting the passes issued to the venues so that everybody that’s backstage has the right access.

Also, if we’re going to bring 18,000 people into an arena, then we need to consider all of the elements: the number of entrances, the staff available to do the searches and whether we’ll have a walk-through magnetometer, a pat down, a wand or a combination of all of the above. You have to ask, “What are the steps if someone walks through the magnetometer and it triggers? What is the secondary search procedure? What’s the procedure if your RFID or your ticket-scanning system goes down?” Anything you can do ahead of time to be prepared for any of those potential issues just makes you better prepared to have a good night.

This article originally appears in the June 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.