The Year’s Biggest Concert Belongs to a Christian Rapper

One day in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, concert promoter Dan Fife was stuck at home when he came across a photo in Pollstar magazine of Mads Langer, a Danish singer-songwriter, performing at a drive-in theater.

The image of the socially distanced show gave Fife an idea. His company, Awakening Events, typically promotes about 350 concerts a year. But at the moment everything was at a standstill due to the coronavirus. Eager to get his employees back to work, Fife and his team tracked down about 335 functioning drive-ins across the U.S. and mapped out a potential tour.

Then he called TobyMac, a 56-year-old Christian rapper and former member of the group DC Talk. The artist had won seven Grammy Awards and was once named the top Christian act at the Billboard Music Awards. His annual “Hits Deep” tour was typically Awakening’s biggest draw, selling 253,715 tickets and generating more than $9 million in sales in 2019.

The logistics seemed tricky at first. But soon thereafter, Fife went to a drive-in in Arkansas to see “Back to the Future” for his wife’s birthday. Looking at all the cars, Fife felt a blast of inspiration. He didn’t want to stage concerts where people sat in their vehicles and listened on the stereo. He wanted them bring lawn chairs and tailgate, just like they might at a regular outdoor show.

TobyMac, whose real name is Kevin McKeehan, was excited to get back on the road. Together, they hatched “The Drive-In Theater Tour,” designed to pop in and out of small towns like Beaufort, South Carolina, and Carthage, Missouri.

Fife staged his first drive-in show in June 2020, on a compact stage hardly big enough for TobyMac’s nine-person band. Over the next few months, they honed their routine, limiting attendance to 500 or 600 cars. They brought in cameras and projected the live performances onto the drive-in theaters’ oversized screens, creating a big-show feel.

“Having the screen as a backdrop made that small stage disappear,” Fife said.

It worked.

By the end of 2020, “The Drive-In Theater Tour” had sold more tickets in North America than Ariana Grande, Shawn Mendes and Bob Dylan. During the first half of 2021, it was the best-selling tour in all of North America, racking up $2.93 million in sales across 64 shows.

“This is their moment in the sun,” said Andy Gensler, executive editor at Pollstar, the concert industry trade publication.

The success inspired Awakening to launch additional drive-in series, and the company boasts six of the best-selling acts in the country this year. Fife’s company ended the first half of the year as one of the top promoters in the world, trailing only New Zealand’s Eccles Entertainment, whose stadium shows have been largely unhindered thanks to a low number of coronavirus cases.

It might be tempting to view Awakening’s success as a byproduct of Covid skepticism — a bunch of Christian Trump supporters, in rural America, all too eager to congregate publicly after, say, listening to Fox News’ roster of conservative coronavirus deniers and critics of vaccines.

But throughout the pandemic, Fife employed safety measures that would make the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proud. Awakening created a tight “tour bubble,” consisting of two buses, each filled with about 10 people. They avoided hotels and local crews. Outside guests were forbidden. Food was ordered from local restaurants and cautiously picked up curbside. On show days, anyone interacting with outsiders was required to wear a face shield, N95 mask and gloves. Tickets were scanned through car windows.

They staged months of concerts with no positive tests until May of this year, when someone caught the virus while away from the tour on a break.

“We got everyone tested, and we built a really strong tour bubble,” Fife said.

Fife grew up in Searcy, Arkansas, a devout fan of rock bands Styx, REO Speedwagon and Van Halen. In 1989, friend and local promoter Barth Grayson asked him to help with some shows, and he got his first job in the industry, working as a security guard at a Steppenwolf performance.

Later, while attending college, he worked at a local car audio store that sold concert tickets. The owner got him into marketing, and he started helping his friend promote shows at the local rock station, slathering any wall he could find with posters. Eventually, while working at KKYK in Little Rock, Fife noticed that the radio industry was consolidating and becoming more corporate. The same for the concert promotion business. In 2004, he decided to create his own company.

Fife started by promoting a couple shows a year in Conway and Little Rock, with dreams of one day making it to Memphis or Nashville. But soon artists were gravitating toward his business, and his acts were spreading out to Ohio and Indiana. One day he woke up and was booking Madison Square Garden in New York and the Forum in Los Angeles.

When Fife first heard about coronavirus, he was on the road with TobyMac in Minneapolis. A few days later, he got word that shows were shutting down in the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest. It sounded like a big city thing.

“Nobody knew,” he said.

On March 13, 2020, Fife was preparing for a TobyMac show at Simmons Bank Arena in Little Rock and asked the general manager, Michael Marion, if they needed to postpone. Answers were tough to come by. Fife was loading all the equipment into the arena when Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson gave a coronavirus press conference. One of the reporters asked Hutchinson what he planned to do about the TobyMac concert.

“I looked at Michael and said, ‘We can’t have this,’” Fife recalled.

At the time, TobyMac was out on the bus. When he got back, he sat down with Fife and his manager and decided to postpone the show. (It’s now supposed to take place October 6.)

Going forward, Fife isn’t looking to drive-in theaters to sustain his business. He plans on resuming conventional touring at the end of September.

At its peak, prior to the pandemic, Awakening ranked among the top 10 or 15 promoters in North America, at best, and among the top 30 in the world. Now, he’s on top.

“We had to do what no one else is doing,” he said.