'There's nothing like it': Arena exec reflects on 35 years of Atlanta concerts

April 29th, 2022

Right out of college in the late 1980s, Trey Feazell moved from Kentucky to Atlanta to begin work at the old Omni Coliseum, booking concerts at the arena.

“We’d have meetings and we’d talk about ‘what’s going to happen when Bon Jovi’s not touring, and Bruce Springsteen’s not touring, and the Rolling Stones…’” recalls Feazell. “So here I sit 35 years later, and they’re probably gonna outlast me. They’ll be touring when my career is over.”

The Omni was torn down in the late 1990s and replaced by what later became State Farm Arena. This year marks Feazell’s thirty-fifth year in Atlanta. He’s now executive vice president of arena programming.

As he reflects on his decades on the job, Feazell is overlooking an empty arena. The Atlanta Hawks’ basketball court has already been re-installed after a Journey concert the night before. Feazell’s job includes booking acts of all different types of genres.

“In this market, Latin is doing well, hip-hop does great here, of course classic rock,” said Feazell. “One of the things about the arena, you touch every demographic, you touch the two-year-old that’s coming to Disney on Ice. The older people when we had [Andrea] Bocelli — it was people that came into our building who’d probably never been here before.”

He says Atlanta has always had eclectic taste in music, but there is change from time to time.

“Right now K-Pop is very, very popular,” said Feazell. “We just announced a show — Stray Kids — last week, [it] went on sale and sold out in 20 minutes. There’s three to four other shows in the same genre coming up soon as well.”

Feazell’s ability to keep up with the trends in music has served Atlanta well through the years, says Steve Koonin, CEO of State Farm Arena and the Atlanta Hawks.

“Every market has different tastes and proclivities toward different artists,” said Koonin. “And being able to make sure that one size doesn’t fit all is one key skill that he brings to bear.”

Koonin says Feazell’s tenure has allowed him to develop excellent relationships with concert promoters. He says that paid off in 2019 when the Super Bowl was held in Atlanta. Koonin says Feazell along with his team worked with the National Football League to set up a three-night concert series that the league has continued in subsequent years.

“He created a franchise for the NFL that’s ongoing. They just had the Super Bowl in Los Angeles and three nights of concerts as part of the Super Bowl Concert Series,” Koonin said. “So Trey helped create a property for the NFL and a legacy for the Super Bowl being in Atlanta.”

‘Long hours and craziness’

Feazell says he’s seen some unexpected things during 35 years of concerts at one of Atlanta’s largest indoor venues. He recalls a Metallica show where crowd members started throwing shoes on the stage.

“We went up on stage and we said to the band, ‘You need to stop the show, this is crazy’ and he [drummer Lars Ulrich] said, ‘One more song,’” Feazell remembered. “And then an hour later the show ended.”

Another night, Vince Neil of Motley Crüe was injured during a show and the concert had to be halted. Feazell worried that the crowd of 15,000 would become enraged. But he says everything worked out okay in the end after Tommy Lee came out on stage to explain what had happened and that the band planned to return to Atlanta.

No matter how hectic a night gets at the arena, Feazell says he always tries to be near the stage when the headliner goes on.

“When the show starts and the crowd’s going crazy, there’s nothing like it,” said Feazell. “And to think that you may have had just a little, tiny bit to do with that, it’s why you do it. All the long hours and the craziness that happens. It makes it all worthwhile.”