The HITS Interview: Q Prime's Cliff Burnstein and Peter Mensch

Q Prime’s Peter Mensch says that he and his longtime partner, Cliff Burnstein, agree 99% of the time. “We may both be wrong,” he says, “but at least we agree.”

In their four-plus decades as proprietors of their management firm, they haven’t been wrong very often. Formed in 1982 with Def Leppard as their lone client, Q Prime has deftly navigated the trends and volatility of the music business by steadfastly believing in the power and longevity of rock music, and in building audience apart from the vagaries of hit singles and even label support, through a focus on creative independence and constant touring.

When they signed their signature client, Metallica, in 1984, “People thought they were European because they recorded in Denmark,” Mensch recalls. Now an institution, the Bay Area band has taken in nearly $500m on its ongoing M72 tour. Today, between their New York homebase, a satellite office in London and two variants in Nashville—Q Prime South, headed by John Peets, and Aaron Frank’s Q Prime AF—Q Prime stewards the careers of Pantera, Cage the Elephant, Eric Church, The Last Dinner Party, Three Days Grace, Greta Van Fleet, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Brothers Osborne, Ashley McBryde, Disturbed, Foals, Declan McKenna, Silversun Pickups and Jesse Welles, to name just some. They’re also managing the newly announced tour of Canadian legends Rush.

We caught up with Cliff and Peter in late July. Weeks prior, they’d been in Birmingham, England, for something of a family reunion at Black Sabbath's Back to the Beginning farewell concert. Ozzy Osbourne had taken Metallica on tour back in 1986, which Cliff and Peter credit with helping to break the band. Metallica was in Birmingham to perform, as were Pantera, Disturbed’s David Draiman, “extended family member” Zakk Wylde and former clients Billy Corgan and Tom Morello, plus assorted sound guys and crew members who had toured with Q Prime bands throughout the years. “We were proud of them all,” they beamed.

So how’s business?

Peter Mensch: Business is good. This year, it’s good.

Cliff Burnstein: Last year was good, too.

Do you still go into the office most days?

Mensch: Most days. But we both go on the road a lot.

When were you last on the road, Peter?

Mensch: Last week. I just saw Foals. And the week before, it was... I forgot. I’ve lost track. I’ve always thought, and maybe this is my neurosis, that we’re in a personal-services business. So you’ve got to show up.

Burnstein: We were at Black Sabbath.

Mensch: I’ll tell you what that weekend was like for me. The Thursday before Sabbath, I was at Declan McKenna’s show supporting Imagine Dragons in Lyon, France. On Friday I was at the Garorock festival in Marmande watching The Last Dinner Party play. Saturday morning I flew to Birmingham and caught up with Cliff, and we spent the day with Metallica. Hung out with Pantera. Said hello to an ex-client, Billy Corgan, I hadn’t talked to in a decade. Tom Morello was there; we used to manage Rage Against the Machine, and Cliff’s on the committee with him at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. That was my three-day weekend.

How was the Sabbath show?

Burnstein: The whole event was great.

Mensch: People really did check their egos at the door. And Ozzy sang extraordinarily well for a guy sitting down, doing Ozzy from the chest up, basically. He was great.

Do you recall the first time you met Ozzy?

Mensch: Not exactly, but I’m almost 100% certain I visited Sharon Osbourne at the Grosvenor Hospital after she had a C-section. Because my mother told me, if a friend of yours was in the hospital, you say hello to them. Sharon was always good to us.

Burnstein: Speaking of being out on the road, a few Saturdays ago, I was at Jones Beach getting pummeled by the power of Pantera. Meanwhile, Jesse Welles was performing at the Newport Folk Festival, and because I couldn’t be in two places at once, Erica Collins and Mary Moyer were there for us. I love the juxtaposition of Pantera and Jesse Welles. Over the summer we had Gillian Welch and David Rawlings playing Carnegie Hall. It’s the first time we ever had an act play Carnegie Hall. Well, of all things, that was the same night that Metallica was playing in Blacksburg, Virginia, at Virginia Tech’s Lane Stadium. I was at Carnegie Hall, getting reports from Blacksburg. Gillian and Metallica in the same night. It’s pretty cool. It really boils down to this: This is a lot of fun. And our artists, they create their own material.

Mensch: That’s a hallmark of what we do. Most if not all our successes come from bands that create their own material. The standing joke is, call us if you run out of ideas and we’ll find someone to co-write. But until that time, you’re writing the songs. Record companies want to chase hits. But we’re not necessarily in the hit business. I can tell you that there are people in the Universal empire that would like The Last Dinner Party to have a hit, because so many of their acts are hit-driven. And I keep saying, “We’re going to write the 10 best songs we can. If the band runs out of ideas on album five and they need a co-writer, okay.”

Most if not all our successes come from bands that create their own material... Record companies want to chase hits. But we’re not necessarily in the hit business."
—Peter Mensch

You’ve officially been partners for 43 years now. How do you think you complement one another? What makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts?

Mensch: Well, Cliff’s smarter than I am. I just follow his lead.

Burnstein: Peter really kicked this whole thing off for us because he started managing AC/DC in 1979. That led to the Scorpions and Def Leppard, and that got me from my job at Mercury Records into the management business at Leber-Krebs. Peter had forged a strong friendship with Mutt Lange. And without Mutt, Def Leppard would never have made Pyromania.

Is Mutt in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame?

Burnstein: No. And that’s a sore spot.

Mensch: He’s the best-selling producer of all time. We’ve added it up. Of course, he probably wouldn’t show up, but he deserves to be there.

Burnstein: When we started our business in ’82, pretty much the first album we had was Pyromania, and that gave us cachet. Flash forward a year or so. I’d heard about this band called Metallica, and when I visited Peter in London, I mentioned them to him. They were on Megaforce Records in the U.S. and Music for Nations in Europe. Peter was able to pick up the phone, call Geoff Barton at Kerrang!, and say, “Hey, what about Metallica?” And then an hour later, Lars Ulrich was on the phone with us.

Mensch: And the rest is history.

Back in black (and white): Clockwise from top, OG Def Leppard, OG Cliff and Peter, OG Metallica with Cliff Burton (center) (Def Leppard: Chris Walter/WireImage; Metallica: Pete Cronin/Redferns)

Burnstein: Getting back to your question about our dynamic, we’re like a doubles team in tennis. There are some days when one of the guys has a strong serve and that carries the day. The next match, the other guy might volley really well and that carries the day. It’s teamwork. I do want to say that Peter is much more knowledgeable and adept at the staging of shows than I am.

Mensch: And Cliff’s much more adept at radio promotion and what makes a hit single. Or what we think will make a hit single. We tend to agree about 99% of the time on stuff. We may both be wrong, but at least we agree.

Was there ever a time that you nearly split up?

Mensch: No. Never. Cliff’s my best friend.

Burnstein: Never. It’s not possible.

Are there any thoughts to—

Mensch: No.

...sunsetting?

Burnstein: I’m sorry, sunsetting?

Mensch: He means retirement. My cold, dead hands, Craig. This is all I know how to do. Dude, I’m wearing shorts to work. I get to talk to musicians. Is it frustrating at times? Have we gotten slightly more mellow about it?

Have you?

Mensch: Yes, absolutely. Because at the age of 72, at a certain point... Cliff once said to me, “We can’t want it more than they do.” And so nowadays, if Cliff and I think an artist should be doing things that they don’t want to do, instead of beating them over the head with it… I don’t beat them as much as I used to.

Cliff, the same for you? Cold, dead hands?

Burnstein: I’m a little more Zen about it. First, who you sign is by far the most important thing. We’ve been fortunate in who we’ve been able to sign. There are acts that we wanted to sign that we couldn’t, but I always say that we get the acts that we deserve. You can’t get everybody. And every time there’s an artist that’s available, there are 100 people going after them. It’s like a golf tournament where you start with 128 people on Thursday, and only one guy can win.

Mensch: We don’t golf, by the way. That’s the sum total of our golf knowledge.

Burnstein: But we want to make the final round. If they like us, that’s great. If we see eye to eye, that’s great. And if we don’t, well, then they should be with somebody else.

From left, folk sensation Jesse Welles discusses his upcoming song cycle about Adlai Stevenson with Burnstein; The Last Dinner Party's Georgia Davies toasts to the end of the patriarchy with second-wave feminist Mensch

When you’re talking to prospective clients, what do you ask them to see if they’re the right fit for you?

Burnstein: Most of our questions are about how they create the music. What’s the process, who’s doing the writing? You want to see what the chemistry is in a band. There are artists who have, I would say, greater commercial aspirations than we think are necessary. Generally, we’ve had our best success taking artists who are not mainstream and then selling them in a way that the mainstream comes to them.

Sometimes—we hear this in the ether—other management companies will say, “We’re going to use the ‘Q Prime method’ to build an act.” As if there’s a method.

What do you think they mean by that?

Burnstein: I think it’s the touring thing. Everybody knows how successful our touring business has been, whether the artists have hits or not. We have our own touring department, and we have great people working in it.

Mensch: Records basically stopped selling in 2018. We tell our artists, “You’re going to have to go on the road not only to make money, but to convince the record company to work your album.” The Last Dinner Party played 150 shows on their first album. I said to them, “I want you to be a stadium band. So we’re going to go out and play France, Italy, Spain, Germany, America.” And on their next tour, they’ll be bigger. There are bands you run into who go, “We don’t really want to go out on the road that much.” Well, I don’t know how we’re going to break you unless we get lucky. And luck doesn’t really play into it.

Burnstein: Eric Church played three nights at Red Rocks with completely different sets. He played 100 different songs over three nights. We’re kind of semi-famous for Metallica doing these two-night, no-repeat weekends in most of the cities that we play now. Those are the kinds of artists we’re proud to work with. Jesse Welles is super-exciting for us. This is a guy with no label who built this thing YouTube video by YouTube video. People show up to his concerts knowing the words to 20 different songs and buy a shitload of merch on top of it. That’s a great indicator that we’ve got something.

What are the headwinds and tailwinds facing the live music biz?

Burnstein: First, the festivals started to take over the arena business. And everybody thought, well, this is great. For 150 bucks, I can see 20 acts instead of going to 20 different shows. That was nice. And now, in the last two years especially, stadiums are the new arenas. And so all these acts you used to see in arenas are now playing stadiums. The numbers are so significant on these stadium shows that if we get the call—”Would you like to play our festival next year?”—we’ve already scheduled a stadium tour. And it’s a better experience for the fans. They don’t have to be out in the sun at one in the afternoon.

Mensch: That’s the top end of the business. The bottom end of the business is much harder, because it still costs money to go on the road. And if you’re Jesse Welles or The Last Dinner Party, you can’t charge what Metallica charges. And remember, we mostly manage bands. There are four or five band members, three or four crew. You need a bus and a truck. It’s hard for us to see any money until the act gets big enough to play arenas.

Burnstein: Peter makes a good point. We did an analysis, and our touring costs have gone up 50% from pre-Covid.

Mensch: Which makes it tough for the management company’s commission. Probably 50% of our artists we can’t commission because they won’t even break even.

Have ticket prices kept up with the rise in cost?

Mensch: Not on the smaller acts. If you’re Metallica, you can pretty much charge whatever you want. But if you’re an act playing Craig’s Theater in Topeka, it’s a 50-buck ticket or whatever, and you suck it up because playing Topeka is important. Some acts go, “Well, we’ll just play the East Coast and the West Coast.” Well. okay, but that won’t necessarily give you the career you want to have. It’s fucking brutal out there.

Burnstein: That’s true even for the mid-level bands that have been around for a while but have never had a huge breakthrough. They can still do 1,000 people a night, but it’s not very profitable. They can’t charge very high prices. And they have kids. They’ve got to pay for those educations. They need health insurance.

Mensch: Then add in the fact that you’re missing your kids’ Little League practice. Work-life balance comes up a lot more often than it used to.

Two-part question. What do you think the outcome is going to be of the DOJ investigation into Live Nation and Ticketmaster? And do you think it’s going to matter to the consumer, whatever the outcome?

Burnstein: The answer to the second question is no. Short of making Live Nation divest Ticketmaster, nothing will change. And I’m not even certain that would change anything at this point, because in a sense, you’ve got a duopoly now with AEG.

Mensch: As an aside, Live Nation is not in the promoting business the way we knew it to be. Cliff used to get on the phone with Brian Murphy in L.A. and talk about L.A. radio, how to massage it. Now, Live Nation says, “We’ll give you $10 million for 73 shows of your band.” I’m not sure they’re out there working the way they used to. Because no one does the show-by-show thing anymore. That bothers me. You can’t find the guy who cares about your act in, say, Portland. Because the biggest problem with promoting shows, if you’re not Coldplay or Metallica, is letting people know the act is coming to town.

Burnstein: Michael Rapino has objectively done an excellent job for Live Nation. Live Nation and AEG are both great to deal with. But we miss what most people don’t even know existed—that personal, local thing where you could break an act in one market because a promoter believed in you.

If you look at the math, we’re taking the small share of what gets earned. And I think that what we add far exceeds what you might save by paying somebody else a smaller percentage. The last 2,000 tickets you sell in a venue, those are your most profitable tickets. I believe we are better able than other management companies to get those last 2,000 tickets sold."
—Cliff Burnstein

Changing subjects. When an artist leaves your company—

Mensch: You mean fires us?

Sure. When an artist fires you, is it hard to separate the personal from the business?

Mensch: It is for me.

Burnstein: Personally, I can’t live my life with resentments. I just can’t.

Mensch: Part of the problem is that I spend more time on the road with the bands. I’ve had more meals with them. I’m trying to emulate Cliff’s Zen-ness. I’ve gotten better.

Burnstein: He has gotten better. Look, I only stopped having stress dreams about the Chili Peppers leaving us a couple of years ago. When you start with an act from square one, or you do a complete rebuild, when you’ve been through that and you’ve done a great job and the results are spectacular, then it really sucks to be replaced.

Mensch: A lot of it is that they just don’t want to pay you anymore.

Burnstein: Which always kills me, because if you look at the math, we’re taking the small share of what gets earned. And I think that what we add far exceeds what you might save by paying somebody else a smaller percentage. The last 2,000 tickets you sell in a venue, those are your most profitable tickets. Sometimes, those tickets are all of your profit. I believe we are better able than other management companies to get those last 2,000 tickets sold. And that’s where the margins are.

What do you guys do for fun outside of work? How do you relax?

Mensch: Baseball games. Dennis Arfa, our booking agent for Metallica, Disturbed and Three Days Grace, he has Yankees seats. So, Cliff and I will go probably five, six times a year to a Yankees game with Dennis. And I go to Mets games. And to the theater.

Burnstein: I read a lot of books, a lot of magazines. Peter and I have another interest, which is electoral politics. We find candidates that we like, usually congressional, and we give them money.

Mensch: This appeals to Cliff’s PhD in statistics. He looks at a lot of polling data, where the district is going, stuff like that.

Are you interested in the NYC mayoral race?

Burnstein: Absolutely. I am tired of people who want to run things more for themselves than for the good of the city. And I think Zohran Mamdani’s heart is in the right place.

Mensch: Being mayor is a shitty job. The fact that Mamdani wants to do it? Go with God, Zohran.