036 INTERVIEW
John with daughter, Dani and wife, Amanda.
each other for a while. And I was telling him about the lack of a purpose-built loudspeaker for our needs. A couple of weeks later he got me together with his engineers and we started developing the Avalon series.” As an end user, John brought a different perspective to the table. “Because I was there on the front line, I was able to give them a somewhat educated user’s view. They understood exactly what we were trying to achieve and in pretty short order they put together some prototype boxes that became the Avalon series and it sounded great.” While all this was going on, the club design wing of the business had begun to take on a life of its own. “I was getting more and more pressure from people wanting to hire my sound and lighting company,” said John. “My clubs were winning awards and people would talk about them, about the great sound system. DJs would always say the Avalon in Boston is amazing. Other club owners from around the world would come and see what was going on. They would ask me for the name of the company that did the sound and I’d say ‘there is no company, I did it myself.’ They’d ask if they could hire me, and for the longest time I’d say no, because I was just too busy. Eventually the offers became such that I thought... Sure, why not?” Serendipity has played a major role in John’s life, with chance encounters turning into lifelong friendships. One such instrumental friend and partner has been entrepreneur Isaac Tigrett, founder of the Hard Rock Cafe and House of Blues. “Isaac had done the Hard Rock in London and New York, and he was looking to expand the brand to different cities,” said John. “There was a guy who worked for A&M records named Charlie Minor who was a friend of ours, and he got us together with Isaac. We ended up working with Isaac on the Hard Rock project in Boston, and a restaurant called Fynns, which became the Capitol Grill.” Issac sold the Hard Rock chain and retired to France, but remained a close friend. “Isaac always had a lot of big ideas. He was always thinking ahead. And he was very intent on not having a business that exploited culture, he wanted to create culture. The House of Blues was meant to be a restaurant, but also a place where shows actually happen.” Issac approached John to handle the sound and lighting. “We were partners in launching the fi rst one, which was in Cambridge.” The House of Blues project opened another new chapter in John’s saga. “Boston, by that time, had become a very comfortable place. I had been there since I was 19-years-old. I had gone from nightclub manager to owning multiple venues and businesses. But I was always dealing with the day-to-day of it, and before I knew it, 15 years had gone by. And while we were very successful, I really was living in a kind of bubble in Boston.” It was Issac who motivated John to escape the bubble. “He encouraged me to come along for the House of Blues ride and help him get it launched. For the next couple of years he and I travelled around the country and the world building places.
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Living in New Orleans, building the House of Blues, I ended up meeting all these new people, and getting into the whole culture and lifestyle. Then Chicago, then Los Angeles, Myrtle Beach, Orlando, and Atlanta. There was probably a three-year period where I spent more time on the road with Isaac than I did in Boston. I started seeing things from a completely different perspective.” Thus the seeds were planted for an eventual move out west. “Because our business had grown so much in Boston, it was almost an idiotic notion. I was still very involved in the day-to-day operating of our larger nightclubs, and it would have meant giving up so much. But I began to think more and more about what would it be like to leave Boston and live on the west coast.” Renting a house in Los Angeles set another chain of events in motion. “The idea was to just have a change and let the cards fall where they may,” said John. “I didn’t have a job per se, and did not really know what I was going to do.” It didn’t take long for John to fi nd the Hollywood Palace, an old vaudeville theater in the shadow of the Capitol Records building. After some extensive renovation, the Avalon Hollywood opened its doors to become one of the top-rated clubs in the US. These days, John Lyons Systems has kept its founder busier than ever. The growth of Las Vegas as a nightclub powerhouse has created new opportunities to push the boundaries of the nightclub experience. Avalon Sound and Moon Lighting have been behind a number of high-tech, high-profi le venues at the Bellagio, the Venetian, Hard Rock, Mirage, and elsewhere. The growth of Vegas is part of an overall shift in entertainment, John observed: “For quite some time, venues were artist-driven, people went to a venue see an artist or DJ. And the problem with having an artist driven venue is if you don’t have an artist that people want to see, it’s empty. So the big challenge in the nightclub world is to create a place that’s legendary enough that people want to go there as a destination. You’ve got to give them an experience that makes them want to return.” Clearly, John’s holistic approach to the entertainment experience has been a good one. But beyond the sound, the lights, and the visuals, he points to an even more basic tenet as a cornerstone of his philosophy. “I’ve always felt that a huge component to the success of an establishment is to have nice people working there. If people show up at a place, and they’re greeted and handled by people just like them, not better not worse, they will remember that experience. I’ve always tried to surround myself with good people. I’ve found that if you put together a core of good people, they tend to bring in more people like themselves. I’d rather look for people who are smart, and at their basic core are good and nice people. You can teach someone the mechanics of a job more easily than you can change someone’s character.”
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