Jeff Trisler remembers the early days.<\/p>\n
The concert king of the Pacific Northwest was still a young buck in the music business four decades ago when what we now call the Gorge Amphitheatre held its first concerts. Now a regional president for concert-promoting superpower Live Nation, which operates the venue, Trisler started out as a SeaTac high schooler running lights for (and eventually managing) The Heats<\/a> \u2014 a pregrunge Seattle power pop band he swore was going to be the next Beatles.<\/p>\n By the mid-’80s, Trisler went to work for Heart\u2019s former manager and promoter Ken Kinnear, who struck a deal to produce a concert series at a Central Washington winery situated at the edge of the Columbia River Gorge. In 1987, Chuck Berry \u2014 the godfather of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll \u2014 played what was then called the Champs de Brionne Music Theatre in its second formal summer hosting major concerts. Back when the idea of downloading electronic tickets on your pocket-size telephone seemed as far-fetched as flying cars, Trisler was tasked with delivering hard-copy tickets to various outlets around the area.<\/p>\n \u201cOh man, it was a really ragtag thing,\u201d Trisler said of the Gorge\u2019s early years. \u201cThere was, like, a plywood stage. There was no lighting, so you had to end before sunset or people wouldn\u2019t be able to find their car. It was very rough and very primitive to say the least.\u201d<\/p>\n What a difference 40 years, millions of dollars and a lifetime of shared musical memories makes.<\/p>\n This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the Gorge \u2014 the crown jewel of Washington music \u2014 as a bona fide destination concert venue. In that time, generations of fans from the Pacific Northwest and beyond have made the I-90 pilgrimage to see their favorite artists in one of the most naturally stunning and unique amphitheaters in the country. Trisler has had a front-row seat for (and a significant hand in) nearly every step along the way, as the Gorge grew from a humble winery stage to a remote landmark concert that hosts some of music\u2019s top draws.<\/p>\n Of course, it all starts with the view.<\/p>\n On the surface, plopping a 22,000-person music venue in an agricultural no-man\u2019s-land two hours away from the nearest international airport doesn\u2019t seem like the most prudent decision. But for Trisler and several generations of Washington concertgoers, it was love at first sight.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I walked into that place the first time, I had no idea,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve lived in Washington state my whole life, and I had no idea something like this was there. It was like discovering the Grand Canyon\u2019s in your backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n Walk into the amphitheater and up over the hill overlooking the concert bowl, and those breathtaking canyon vistas quickly feel like the real headliner. It’s<\/mark> as if the artists and their congregation have gathered in service to the natural wonder that serves as one of the most awe-inspiring backdrops in the country, rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you’re from here, and you experience the Gorge for the first time, you just think that everybody’s got a venue like that,\u201d said Brandi Carlile, who will reprise her three-night Echoes Through the Canyon blowout at the venue May 29-31. \u201cYou think that those exist and that venue does not exist anywhere else.\u201d<\/p>\n Carlile\u2019s friend and adopted Seattleite Dave Matthews seems to agree. Since Dave Matthews Band first played the Gorge in the mid-’90s, no artist has performed at the venue as many times (75 and counting) as the jammy, roots-rocking juggernauts, whose annual Labor Day weekend residency has sold more than 1.3 million tickets over the course of three decades.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no place like it in the world,\u201d Matthews said in the 2019 documentary \u201cEnormous: The Gorge Story<\/a>.\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s just something so enormous and endless about the place.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite the drive time, Trisler never doubted that if they built it, people would come. Upon taking in the surroundings himself that first time, he immediately understood the vision of his former boss Kinnear and winery owners Dr. Vincent Bryan, a neurosurgeon, and his wife Carol, whose family now runs the neighboring Cave B Estate Winery.<\/p>\n In terms of U.S. amphitheaters with wow-factor landscapes, the Gorge arguably trails only the smaller Red Rocks Amphitheatre \u2014 with its longer history, natural acoustics and closer proximity to Denver \u2014 in allure.<\/p>\n \u201cAs I was trying to sell the place to people on the agency side and management side of the artist community, I would say, \u2018Think of us as Red Rocks with capacity,\u2019\u201d Trisler said. \u201cRed Rocks is 9,000, at that point, we were 18,500, so we were twice as big as Red Rocks. That seemed to be a really good, simple pitch that people understood.\u201d<\/p>\n Scaling up the Gorge from its plywood-stage days hosting a few thousand people to 20,000-plus didn\u2019t come without some growing pains, from traffic management to finding out how many Honey Buckets were needed for crowds that size. Part of the challenge in the early days, Trisler said, was \u201cfinding money to get some basic infrastructure in place.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I refer to as the big bang was in 1988 with Bob Dylan,\u201d Trisler said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Gorge\u2019s reputation had been growing thanks to positive word-of-mouth and dates with stars like Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson and Gregg Allman. But Dylan \u2014 even at a relative downturn in his career \u2014 was on another level.<\/p>\n Kinnear and Trisler made a \u201cbig bet\u201d on the classic rock\/folk legend, procuring a \u201cfirst-class stage\u201d that was set up \u201cjust in time to open doors\u201d before the supporting artist Tracy Chapman \u2014 an unknown singer-songwriter when they first booked the gig but<\/mark> had a No. 1 hit with \u201cFast Car\u201d by the time the show came around.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was what put that place on the map. We did 16,000 people when it probably could\u2019ve held maybe 12,000,\u201d Trisler said, chuckling over some lessons learned the hard way that night. \u201cThat\u2019s why I knew at that point that we were onto something that was going to be special and big, because the people supported it.\u201d<\/p>\n The date with Dylan might have elevated the Gorge\u2019s mystique with Northwest music lovers, but it was a 1992 gig with Jimmy Buffett that put the rest of the industry on notice.<\/p>\n \u201cDemand was insane,\u201d Trisler said, recalling how the 12,000 tickets they initially put up were \u201cgone in an instant. We were looking at how to expand capacity, so we came up with this idea to put aluminum bleachers up on top of the hill and came up with another 6,000-plus seating.\u201d<\/p>\n By his own admission, the short-lived bleachers weren\u2019t exactly the greatest addition.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThose horrible aluminum bleachers were so hot in the sun that people were burning their rear ends as they sat down,\u201d Trisler said. \u201cBut it worked. That show got the attention of the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n Having the mayor of \u201cMargaritaville\u201d draw 18,000 people to the remote Grant County venue caught the eye of MCA Concerts, which was acquired by Live Nation years later. MCA Concerts bought the venue and booking rights from the Bryans and Kinnear and took over the Gorge in 1993, putting Trisler on staff. The much-maligned bleachers came down a year later as part of a major excavation project spurred by an infamous Pearl Jam show, when fans clamoring to get closer to the stage tore down two metal fences and slid down a 25-foot cliff<\/a> that, back then, separated the hillside from the lower bowl. Roughly 100 people were treated for injuries, The Seattle Times reported at the time<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was an energy \u2014 still to this day I\u2019ve never seen anything like it,\u201d Trisler said of one of his toughest days on the job. \u201cPearl Jam was the opening act for Neil Young, and when Pearl Jam went on, those thousands of kids up on that hill, they were not going to stay there. There were literally people jumping off of the cliff. \u2026 There were compound fractures; it was so ugly. What should have been this really awesome experience \u2014 the music was great \u2014 turned into this carnage. Fortunately, nobody died, but there were some real serious injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n During that offseason, MCA Concerts blasted away that basalt rock cliff with dynamite and smoothed it out into a gradually sloping grass hill. That\u2019s when the Gorge as we know it today physically took shape.<\/p>\n For all the modern amenities and money-generating premium seating added since the start of the Live Nation era in 2006, the best seat in the house (at least before sundown) remains that grassy hillside, with optimal views of the sweeping canyon that has endeared the Gorge to Washingtonians for decades.<\/p>\n That same hillside is where a young Carlile used to drop her blanket, taking in formative Lilith Fair experiences long before she built her own Lilith-like Echoes Through the Canyon at the fabled venue.<\/p>\n \u201cBorn and raised PNW, Washington state girl, that venue\u2019s been in my soul and in my life since I was a child,\u201d Carlile said in 2021, on the cusp of headlining the Gorge for the second time. \u201cSo, when I\u2019m there, my whole life flashes before my eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n Surely, she’s not alone.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jeff Trisler remembers the early days. The concert king of the Pacific Northwest was still a young buck in the music business four decades ago when what we now call the Gorge Amphitheatre held its first concerts. Now a regional president for concert-promoting superpower Live Nation, which operates the venue, Trisler started out as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2427123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2427122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/How-the-Gorge-Amphitheatre-became-WA-musics-crown-jewel.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2427122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2427124,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2427122\/revisions\/2427124"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2427123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2427122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2427122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2427122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}