Tony at the Academy of Music

Tony Bennett is coming to the Academy of Music in November, and we had the opportunity to go back a few years and speak with Sid Bernstein (the legendary promoter who brought the Beatles to America in the 1960's). He became instrumental in the career of several classic performers, and Tony was and is certainly one of them.



Sid: I feel so good about Tony because he is such a great guy. I was in a position to help re-launch his career and in so doing, he helped launch my career. Tony was singing at the Copa - two shows each night, seven days a week. He hadn’t had a hit record in years and couldn’t get himself back on the Ed Sullivan Show. Worst of all, he wasn’t making the money.

He asked me for my help and I immediately suggested a concert at Carnegie Hall, but they were afraid his best days were behind him and a Tony Bennett concert would be too much of a risk. I wasn’t about to tell Tony that he might be finished, so I took a gigantic gamble and Tony took a major risk. We found a way to rent the Hall ourselves and we had to sell tickets or Tony would lose some $10,000.

I ran some ads on my credit but our real campaign consisted of hanging posters with a caricature of Tony that simply said … "Tony Bennett at Carnegie Hall". My wife drove the car night after night in every Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn and I jumped out and hung poster after poster. It was illegal, but we did what we had to do.

With only some two weeks to go, we had sold the grand total of 200 tickets in a hall with 2380 seats. It was very tense, but our only choice was to keep hanging posters and keep sweating it out. On the evening of the concert, the good folks from those Italian neighborhoods came in droves, and it became a complete sell-out. Hundreds were turned away and one can only imagine how excited we were as Henny Youngman warmed up the crowd with joke after joke and a gracious and excited Tony Bennett followed with the concert of his life.

The press loved it and Ed Sullivan called to invite Tony back on his show. It was an event that turned his career completely around and to this day; he is still as great as ever. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.


Academy of Music - Friday, November 4th - 8 PM