From Grateful Dead to Phish: 20 years of security

WILLISTON – Remember the tail end of 1999, when people feared the turnover from 19-something to 20-something was going to bring down computer systems and utility companies and generally cause mayhem around the world? That was around the time Kevin Cheney realized his company, Green Mountain Concert Services, was not only going to avoid being consumed in an apocalyptic Y2K fireball, it was ready to thrive.

The Vermont jam-rock band Phish planned a giant end-of-the-millennium concert for New Year's Eve 1999 at the Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. Cheney's company was hired to handle security. He and his GMCS staff spent three weeks in the Everglades setting up the event that would draw 90,000 Phish fans.

"We built a city," Cheney said. They were in the swamps of south Florida where GMCS hired a teenager named Danny to wrangle snakes and alligators out of the waters bordering the concert site. "We called him the Gator Guy."

Members of Phish have called that epic concert the pinnacle of the band's career. It was also the moment Cheney knew his young company had arrived. He helped oversee the building of a temporary city that caused what he called "the largest non-weather traffic jam in Florida history," yet only a few automotive snarls, drug issues and fire-ant bites marred an event otherwise hailed as a success.

"Everybody was for the most part safe," Cheney said in a recent conversation at the Green Mountain Concert Services offices in Williston. "All things considered, that event was very smooth."

Green Mountain Concert Services took off from there, going immediately from the humid swamps of south Florida to the frigid hills of southern Vermont to handle security for ESPN's Winter X Games at Mount Snow in early 2000. That led to gigs across Lake Champlain at the sports network's Great Outdoor Games at Lake Placid, N.Y., and a reputation that in the ensuing 15 years has helped the Vermont-born company extend its reach into nearly a dozen states.

Green Mountain Concert Services hits its 20th anniversary this year with a pool of 800 part-time security professionals the company taps into for the 1,500-plus events it handles each year. GMCS employs 40 full-time workers, most of whom are based in Vermont. An 11-year-old sister company, Green Mountain Flagging, provides security for utility workers and others doing roadside projects.

The companies combined for $6 million of business in 2014, said Allen Ostroy, vice president of sales and marketing. The growing companies moved in October into new offices in Williston after overflowing from their previous space in Essex into an adjacent condominium complex.

"Kevin had positioned GMCS correctly in this market," Ostroy said. He said GMCS handles security for the University of Vermont and overnight patrols everywhere from Burlington's parking garages to the Trapp Family Lodge outside Stowe, from methadone clinics to hospital satellite-parking lots. Green Mountain Concert Services personnel are visible at high-profile Vermont events including the Champlain Valley Fair, Burlington Discover Jazz Festival, Lake Champlain Maritime Festival and Grand Point North music festival.

"Everybody knows the yellow jackets," Ostroy said.

"We really have a reach in the New England area," Cheney said, "that a lot of our competition does not."

'Nothing personal'

Cheney, 47, was born in St. Albans. His family moved to Virginia but returned to Vermont in time for him to graduate from Middlebury Union High School.

In high school, Cheney was the kid who watched the door at friends' parties. After high school, he had no idea what to do with his life. He wound up joining the Vermont Army National Guard's Mountain Battalion.

"It was something I needed, the structure," he said.

Cheney began working security in April 1992 for Front Row Productions, a company run by friend Karl Barth. They handled outdoor concerts in Stowe and Essex Junction and indoor shows at Memorial Auditorium in Burlington.

Cheney, Barth and a third partner, Stephen Myers, met in March 1995 with an accountant and an attorney at the now-defunct Chicken Bone Café in Burlington to incorporate a new company, Green Mountain Concert Services. Barth and Myers have since left GMCS, leaving Cheney as president and chief executive officer.

GMCS began with a trial by fire: the notorious Grateful Dead concert in Highgate in June 1995 that Cheney said drew 65,000 paid concert-goers and another 25,000 or so who snuck in. "It was a sea of people," he said.

GMCS was in a secondary role, providing 70 personnel to support hundreds of other security forces and Vermont State Police. State police and the other security teams bore the brunt of the criticism for the chaotic event, something Cheney would come to understand in the ensuing years.

"As I grew," he said of his company, "the stresses obviously grew."

Security personnel at concerts and sporting events are not unlike umpires at a baseball game; they're there to enforce the rules and make sure the event the fans came to see runs smoothly. Like umpires, security teams tend to be noticed only when something goes wrong, and then they draw the fans' ire, as Cheney's company discovered a decade ago when a wet Vermont summer caused massive parking problems at Phish's farewell concerts in Coventry.

"It really did seem like whatever gods are out there were not with us on that day," he said.

The company knew it had a problem when it couldn't fit any more cars on the muddy site with 35,000 more fans on the way. "It turns out the best parking was on the highway," Cheney said. "That was one of the hardest events I've ever done."

Recently, GMCS worked the Feb. 13 concert at the Flynn Center featuring the Vermont-based rock band Death with openers including Rough Francis, featuring the sons of Death member Bobby Hackney Sr. There were no serious problems, though security personnel chased away a few people dancing in front of the stage.

The preschool daughter of one of the members of Rough Francis was dancing in the aisle to her father's music, next to her seated mother, when a GMCS security worker came over to talk with the mother. The girl, now crying, returned to her seat. A man sitting a few rows back yelled out, "Let the little girl dance!"

GMCS was enforcing the Flynn's rules. Cheney has accepted that that means the company will sometimes be seen as the villain. "We are the first ones on the line of defense," he said. "We're the face out there."

At moments like that, Cheney references the Zen-like line attitude of Patrick Swayze's bouncer character in the movie "Road House" — "It's nothing personal. It's just a job." He said GMCS emphasizes to its employees that people aren't screaming at them, they're screaming at the situation.

Good communicators

Security has evolved in the two decades since Green Mountain Concert Services was born. Gone are the days of looking simply for "a big brute" to throw people out of a concert or sporting event, said Ostroy, the company's vice president of sales and marketing. That's especially true in Vermont, which he said is one of the few states requiring 40 hours of training for security personnel to receive a two-year license.

"In the state of Vermont you can't just throw a T-shirt on somebody and call them security," Ostroy said.

Cheney said it helps to have a big brute monitoring crowd surfing and other potentially hazardous activities, but his company looks for "good communicators" to defuse problems before they develop. Security personnel are coached not to yell at someone in the parking lot as they arrive at an event, as that might foster bad feelings that flare up inside the event an hour or two later.

"You don't have to be a big guy to deal with the situation," according to Cheney.

He said The Station disaster, when 100 people died after fire broke out at a Rhode Island music venue in 2003, tightened restrictions on security companies. "It's sad that it takes a tragedy to change things," Cheney said. People at concerts often ask why there's so much security if nothing happens; the idea, Cheney said, is that the presence of security helps disasters from taking place.

His company shows video from The Station fire and resulting stampede to trainees. "I like to emphasize what it takes and why it's important," he said.

Cheney said he knows his security workers are often appreciated. He worked the Country Music Awards in Tennessee weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, where security screened everyone coming to the television broadcast. That included the famous performers themselves, who thanked the security workers for doing their jobs.

Ostroy used to manage jam-rock bands Strangefolk and Percy Hill and said he wrote many checks to GMCS before he came to work for them. He appreciated the company's approach to concert-site management. "The goal was always to create an environment that was safe for the fans," Ostroy said.

That, he said, translates to a fun environment as well as a safe one. "We still will get the goose bumps when you hear the crowd cheer," Ostroy said, "because you helped create that."

"That's a reward," Cheney added. He said GMCS just started working security at The Wobbly Barn, a music venue in Killington, and after a recent event there many people leaving the ski-town night spot thanked the security crew for a job well done.

Sometimes Cheney stands at a sold-out concert at an event such as the Champlain Valley Fair and takes a moment to look around and appreciate what his company set in place. "We created this event that these 10,000 people are enjoying," he said.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com. Follow Brent on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BrentHallenbeck.