Irving Azoff Tells Classic Neil Young, Joe Walsh Stories; Says What He Really Thinks About Pandora, StubHub, More

On Wednesday at the Billboard Touring Conference, Billboard editorial director Bill Werde moderated a long Q&A session with Live Nation CEO Irving Azoff that touched on nearly all areas of the music-biz veteran's career, both past and present. In this 12-minute video excerpt, you get several highlights, ranging from hilarious stories about touring with Neil Young and Joe Walsh to his current, no-holds-barred opinions about paperless ticketing, StubHub and Pandora. Andrew Hampp's article about the session is pasted below, but for some classic, undistilled Azoff, just click "play."



Irving Azoff doesn't tweet anymore, thanks to Live Nation lawyers who asked the candid chairman to keep mum in social media ("I don't think it's fair that they let Nathan [Hubbard] tweet and not me.") But an hour-long keynote chat with Billboard editorial director Bill Werde at Billboard's Touring Conference on Wednesday, he had a whole Twitter feed's worth of opinions, stories and frank assessments of the music industry's past, present and future.

Check Out All Our Coverage of the 2012 Billboard Touring Conference and Awards Right Here

He began by sharing a few tales of how he got his start under the wing of the late promoter Bill Graham, who invited a young Azoff up to the Fillmore in San Francisco to check out a show. "I go to meet him backstage, which in those days was on the left side, and I went up to the door and my name was not on the list," Azoff recalled. "They said, 'You'll have to go find Bill.' So I go in front of the Fillmore and there's Bill with his arms folded. I said 'Bill it's me Irving' and he says 'There's a guy cutting the line.' So he goes up and he kicks him in the ribs, like you'd see in a movie, and had the police cart him away. And then he walked up and said, 'hey it's really nice to meet you now let's go see a show.'"