How the Gorge Amphitheatre became WA music's crown jewel

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 SeaTac high schooler running lights for (and eventually managing) The Heats - a pregrunge Seattle power pop band he swore was going to be the next Beatles.

By the mid-'80s, Trisler went to work for Heart's 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 - the godfather of rock ‘n' roll - 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.

"Oh man, it was a really ragtag thing," Trisler said of the Gorge's early years. "There was, like, a plywood stage. There was no lighting, so you had to end before sunset or people wouldn't be able to find their car. It was very rough and very primitive, to say the least."

What a difference 40 years, millions of dollars and a lifetime of shared musical memories make.

This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the Gorge - the crown jewel of Washington music - 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 venue that hosts some of music's top draws.

Of course, it all starts with the view.

On the surface, plopping a 22,000-person music venue in an agricultural no-man's-land two hours away from the nearest international airport doesn't seem like the most prudent decision. But for Trisler and several generations of Washington concertgoers, it was love at first sight.

"When I walked into that place the first time, I had no idea," he said. "I've lived in Washington state my whole life, and I had no idea something like this was there. It was like discovering the Grand Canyon's in your backyard."

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'sas 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.

"When you're from here, and you experience the Gorge for the first time, you just think that everybody's got a venue like that," said Brandi Carlile, who will reprise her three-night Echoes Through the Canyon blowout at the venue May 29-31. "You think that those exist and that venue does not exist anywhere else."

Carlile's 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.

"There's no place like it in the world," Matthews said in the 2019 documentary "Enormous: The Gorge Story." "There's just something so enormous and endless about the place."

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.

In terms of U.S. amphitheaters with wow-factor landscapes, the Gorge arguably trails only the smaller Red Rocks Amphitheatre - with its longer history, natural acoustics and closer proximity to Denver - in allure.

"As I was trying to sell the place to people on the agency side and management side of the artist community, I would say, ‘Think of us as Red Rocks with capacity,'" Trisler said. "Red 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."

Scaling up the Gorge from its plywood-stage days hosting a few thousand people to 20,000-plus didn't 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 "finding money to get some basic infrastructure in place."

"What I refer to as the big bang was in 1988 with Bob Dylan," Trisler said.

The Gorge's reputation had been growing thanks to positive word-of-mouth and dates with stars like Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson and Gregg Allman. But Dylan - even at a relative downturn in his career - was on another level.

Kinnear and Trisler made a "big bet" on the classic rock/folk legend, procuring a "first-class stage" that was set up "just in time to open doors" before the supporting artist Tracy Chapman - an unknown singer-songwriter when the gig was booked,butwho had a No. 1 hit with "Fast Car" by the time the show came around.

"That was what put that place on the map. We did 16,000 people when it probably could've held maybe 12,000," Trisler said, chuckling over some lessons learned the hard way that night. "That's why I knew at that point that we were onto something that was going to be special and big, because the people supported it."

The date with Dylan might have elevated the Gorge's mystique with Northwest music lovers, but it was a 1992 gig with Jimmy Buffett that put the rest of the industry on notice.

"Demand was insane," Trisler said, recalling how the 12,000 tickets they initially put up were "gone 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."

By his own admission, the short-lived bleachers weren't exactly the greatest addition.

"Those horrible aluminum bleachers were so hot in the sun that people were burning their rear ends as they sat down," Trisler said. "But it worked. That show got the attention of the industry."

Having the mayor of "Margaritaville" 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 that, back then, separated the hillside from the lower bowl. Roughly 100 people were treated for injuries, The Seattle Times reported at the time.

"There was an energy - still to this day I've never seen anything like it," Trisler said of one of his toughest days on the job. "Pearl 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. … There were compound fractures; it was so ugly. What should have been this really awesome experience - the music was great - turned into this carnage. Fortunately, nobody died, but there were some real serious injuries."

During that offseason, MCA Concerts blasted away that basalt rock cliff with dynamite and smoothed it out into a gradually sloping grass hill. That's when the Gorge as we know it today physically took shape.

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.

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.

"Born and raised PNW, Washington state girl, that venue's been in my soul and in my life since I was a child," Carlile said in 2021, on the cusp of headlining the Gorge for the second time. "So, when I'm there, my whole life flashes before my eyes."

Surely, she's not alone.

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