New biography explores the secrets of Shank Hall owner Peter Jest's success in Milwaukee

In today's corporate and increasingly algorithmic pop music business, it's unlikely we'll ever see another Peter Jest.

Jest transformed himself from a marginal University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student with a passion for rock music into a club owner and independent concert promoter through ambition, hard work and persistence.

Somehow, he stays in business, despite intense competition, including the Godzilla that is Live Nation Entertainment, and other vicissitudes, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which hurt many small entertainment entrepreneurs.

"We Had Fun and Nobody Died: Adventures of a Milwaukee Music Promoter" (Wisconsin Historical Society Press), written by Milwaukee writer Amy T. Waldman with Jest, will be entertaining reading for anyone who's followed local music in Milwaukee since the late 1980s. Like me, you may find yourself reading about certain shows in this book and say to yourself, Hey, I was there.

Jest, for those who may not recognize his name, is the owner of Shank Hall, a live music venue at 1434 N. Farwell Ave., and proprietor of Alternative Concert Group, which promotes concerts at various Wisconsin spots.

It's kind of an as-told-to book, though Waldman has made the excellent decision to tell Jest's story from a third-person point of view, allowing her to smoothly draw on other interviewees and documentary sources to fill out this portrait.

"We Had Fun" is a sympathetic biography, but Waldman doesn't glamorize Jest. He's often described here, especially in his earlier years, as nerdy, awkward and disheveled (full disclosure, a description that's often been correctly applied to me during parts of my life). She also reports that not everyone loves Jest; an alderwoman and two local musicians vocally opposed his license application to open Shank Hall in 1989 during a contentious Common Council license committee hearing.

From UWM to Shank Hall

As a boy growing up in Milwaukee's Cooper Park neighborhood, Jest figured out how to win concert tickets and other music merch through radio station giveaways. Between 1977 and 1982, Waldman reports, Jest won more than 1,200 prize packages from local radio stations. He made money buying blocks of concert tickets and reselling them to his Milwaukee Lutheran High School classmates. Jest also did beginner work as a runner for a local promoter, getting his first glimpse at the inside of the concert business.

Jest promoted his first concerts in 1983: a pair of Spyro Gyra performances at UWM, where he was a student. Jest founded Alternative Concert Group there as a student organization to promote concerts. For years afterward, Jest audited a course or two each semester so ACG could retain its status and present shows in UWM venues.

While Spyro Gyra was a popular jazz fusion band, no one immersed in rock culture back then would have thought that show was a hip booking. But unlike some people in the music world, and to his credit, Jest has never presented himself as a hipster or cooler-than-thou scene-maker. I reported on some of his activities in the '80s, and found him to be an earnest, excitable young guy, eager for his shows to do well but never trying to impress you with his personal taste (though he would go on to present some very hip shows, including a 2017 Patti Smith concert ).

In a case of life imitating art, Shank Hall takes its name from an imaginary Milwaukee venue in the rock mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap." Since opening in 1989, Jest's venue has survived both a damaging fire in 1992 and the pandemic shutdown of 2020-'21. (Coincidentally, Waldman's book suggests that the fire that destroyed Century Hall in 1988 opened the niche in the local scene that Jest would fill with Shank Hall.)

He has attended to an eclectic variety of visiting performers over the decades. Waldman reports that one visiting performer, noticing Jest's skin, asked if the promoter was using heroin. No, said the matter-of-fact Jest, it's eczema.

Through Shank Hall shows and outstate tours, Jest formed friendships with Arlo Guthrie, John Prine (who loved Jest's mother's cake), Leo Kottke, Leon Redbone and a few other artists. He became so close to Guthrie that the singer's daughter Sarah Lee said, onstage, "You're like a Guthrie to us."

Guthrie, Prine and their ilk were stubborn individualists who persisted through commercial ups and downs, relying on a personal fan base that they cultivated over the years. It's not too big a reach to see Jest as their kindred spirit.

If you go

Amy T. Waldman and Peter Jest will talk about "We Had Fun and Nobody Died" with Dave Luhrssen in two upcoming events: 7 p.m. July 13 at Shank Hall, 1434 N. Farwell Ave., and 2 p.m. July 20 at Central Library's Rotary Club Community Room, 814 W. Wisconsin Ave. The library requests people register for the July 20 event at mpl.org . Waldman and Jest also will speak 5:30 p.m. July 31 in a Milwaukee Press Club event at the Newsroom Pub, 137 E. Wells St

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: New biography explores the secrets of Shank Hall owner Peter Jest's success in Milwaukee