Paul Weiss is just your average 26-year-old rabid rock fan. Saw Soundgarden five years ago, saw them last weekend at the Aragon. He’ll talk in great detail about this concert or that, or happily reminisce about the halcyon days of indie rock, hanging out with Mike Watt of Firehose or with the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood and his dog Kevin.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In one crucial respect, however, Paul Weiss is different from your average 26-year-old rock fan. He’s a lawyer–a lawyer, in fact, at an aggressive personal-injury firm, Harvey L. Walner & Associates. Instead of just getting mad, he’s doing something: last month he filed a big-time antitrust suit against Ticketmaster in federal district court.
Weiss is clean-cut and aggressive; he grew up in Northbrook, got both his undergraduate and law degrees at Indiana University in Bloomington. The Ticketmaster suit is his first big case. “I buy a hell of a lot of concert tickets,” he says, explaining the suit’s genesis. “I paid four and a quarter in fees on each Soundgarden ticket. That was the highest I’d seen.” The complaint lists the prices and service charges on nearly a dozen shows over the past 12 years to buttress his case. (“I put all the band names in there–I liked the idea of seeing Nirvana’s name in a federal complaint.”) “I went into Harvey’s office and told him my idea. He said, ‘Let’s go for it.’
This arrangement–Ticketmaster is kicking back a portion of its service charges to keep the venues and the promoters happy–may be the blockbuster issue. Alioto calls it a form of “commercial bribery.” “The two groups that are getting hurt, in my opinion,” he says, “are the fans and the bands. Those are supposed to be the two ingredients in the relationship, and they’re both being hurt by Ticketmaster in the middle exercising anticompetitive policies.”
