Matt Swanson is San Diego’s globe-trotting uncommon denominator between Eric Clapton and Jason Mraz

Concert tour manager Matt Swanson, left, and Jason Mraz

Before becoming a tour manager, he worked as a tour ant for everyone from blink-182 and No Doubt to Jay Z and Neil Young

April 30, 2023 6 AM PT

Matt Swanson didn’t sing or play a note during Eric Clapton’s six concerts in Tokyo this month. He also won’t sing or play when Jason Mraz performs Saturday at Snapdragon Stadium on a double bill with Jimmy Buffett.

But both Mraz and Clapton rely on Swanson, the low-key San Diegan who is their tour manager, to ensure everything runs smoothly before, during and after each of their performances here and abroad.

Swanson will be on the road for a U.S. concert trek with Mraz in July and August, then with Clapton in September, including for the six-string legend’s Crossroads Guitar Festival Sept. 23 and 24 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

“Matt is a pleasure to work with,” Mraz said. “He’s well-read and a seasoned traveler, so a great conversationalist. And as a tour manager, he is the right combination of mindfulness and muscle.”

His behind-the-scenes role as the tour manager for Mraz and Clapton makes the spotlight-shunning Swanson ideally suited for his job. While he is all but invisible to audiences, he plays a key role in making everything run smoothly each time his clients hit the road with their respective bands.

“My job is to take all the distractions away from the artist so all they have to think about is the two hours they will be performing on stage,” Swanson explained.

“They know the cars to and from each show will be on time and that their guest lists for each show will be taken care of. They know when the next flight is to the next city on the tour and what time we leave for the airport. That’s my job and they don’t have to worry about any of that.”

In fact, Swanson’s multifaceted job entails much more than that.

Flashlight in hand, he leads Clapton and his band on and off the darkened stage at the start and conclusion of each performance. He does the same for Mraz and his band when he’s on tour with them.

Swanson oversees all transportation arrangements, including hotel bookings and ground and air travel, usually months in advance. He coordinates with concert promoters in each city to work out details for each show. He creates day sheets that provide each tour day’s schedule for the artist, their band and stage crews.

If a dinner needs to be arranged or laundry service provided, that’s also part of Swanson’s job. So is troubleshooting, the better to anticipate and eliminate any potential problems before they occur — or to quickly remedy them if any arise. His troubleshooting role extends to concert stages, just beyond the sight-lines of the audiences.

Each night on tour with Mraz and Clapton, Swanson stands in the wings on the side of the stage. He remains there for the duration of each performance. Should any problem develop, he is ready to spring into action.

“The one time I’m not standing up on the side of the stage is the time something happens,” Swanson said.

He chuckled when asked to elaborate.

“Jason was performing in Taipei and the whole show was going great. While Jason was playing his encore, I went back to the production office to get the towels to hand to him and the band as they walked off the stage.

“That’s when I heard on the (two-way) radio: ‘You gotta get her! You gotta get her!’ A fan had hopped on stage. I ran back to the stage. Jason’s guitar tech walked her over to me and I walked her to the local security.”

‘He’s very meticulous’

Swanson’s success as a tour manager can be attributed in large part to his attention to detail, self-effacing personality and general unflappability.

“This is my 40th year working with Eric Clapton and Matt is my favorite tour manager so far,” said bass great Nathan East, who grew up in San Diego.

“Eric surrounds himself with top people and Matt pays attention to some of the really fine details. He does so in a way that makes me appreciate his work ethic and approach to the job. He makes sure, even on our days off, that everybody is taken care of and has something to do. He’s very meticulous.”

Swanson’s praises are also sung by Allison McGregor, the head of music marketing for Creative Artists Agency, where her many clients include Clapton, Ozzy Osbourne, the Poway-bred band blink-182, and — everywhere in the world except the U.S. — Mraz.

“Matt really cares about the artists he works with and about the people d with the artists,” McGregor said, speaking from the Coachella Festival in Indio. She met Swanson in the mid-1990s when both worked for Bill Silva Presents. It was San Diego’s biggest locally based concert promotion company until relocating to Los Angeles later that decade.

“As one of the youngest of our team at BSP, Matt was asked to do a lot of things and he always jumped right in,” McGregor said.

“He helped with marketing and publicity, booking talent, and on the financial side when Bill was dealing with agents. Now, as then, Matt does everything with a really good attitude and a smile on his face. You can trust him to handle any situation.”

Silva agreed.

“Matt also worked on the management side with artists for us and has worn many hats,” said Silva, who began booking concerts here in 1979 when he was a student at UC San Diego. He and his business partner, Andy Hewitt, have exclusively booked and promoted all non-classical music concerts at the Hollywood Bowl since the 1990s.

Speaking from Los Angeles, Silva praised Swanson’s versatility and calm demeanor.

“Matt has always been a very respectful and thoughtful guy,” Silva said.

“He has a great head for budgets and making things work out financially. But he does so much more with the artists he’s involved with. I’ve watched how he’d give confidence to Jason Mraz over the years. It’s not always fun to be on the road. Matt has a great, steady hand and temperament. He knows how to navigate to keep everybody upbeat.

“In Jason and Eric, he’s found the perfect people to work with. And, in Matt, so have they.”

A degree in criminal justice

March 18, 2023: Matt Swanson at The Sound at the Del Mar Fairgrounds

Swanson’s career trajectory is an unlikely one.

The son of a U.S. Navy dentist and a special education teacher mother, he was born on a military base in South Carolina. Swanson grew up primarily in Wisconsin, where he earned his degree in criminal justice in 1994 and saw his first Iron Maiden concert when he was 12.

Apart from avidly attending heavy metal shows — Judas Priest and UFO were also early favorites — Swanson had no musical inclinations. Nor did he ever imagine a career like the one he has.

“After I got my degree, I thought I’d eventually become a lawyer,” Swanson recalled.

“If anyone would have told me when I was a senior in high school that someday I’d be doing what I do now, it would have been like telling me I was going to take a trip to the moon! It was totally not on my radar.”

Weary of the cold winters in Wisconsin, Swanson moved to San Diego in late 1993 after a friend enrolled at San Diego State University. He got a position here as a Staff Pro concert security guard.

That job enabled him to have several backstage conversations with employees of Bill Silva Presents, including McGregor and music marketing veteran Kira Finkenberg. Impressed by his enthusiasm and disposition, they suggested he apply at the company as an unpaid intern.

“That’s where it started,” Swanson said. “I owe my entire career to Bill Silva for taking a chance on some farm kid from Wisconsin.”

Swanson proved himself so quickly as an intern for Silva’s main talent buyer, John Wojas, that he soon became his paid assistant.

“Being my intern was a job no one in this industry would want, but Matt was great,” said Wojas, now the senior vice president of talent at AEG Presents, the world’s second largest concert and live events producer.

“When we started doing concerts at ‘Canes in Mission Beach, Matt would sell tickets in the box office and then (financially) settle the shows at the end of the night,” Wojas continued. “He also helped me work up offers to agents for concerts we were booking in San Diego, Boise, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. That led to him becoming a tour ant on the road for a lot of big acts and then a tour manager.

“Matt is very good at details, he’s very patient and he never gets rattled. If there’s a problem, he doesn’t panic or overreact. He deals with it professionally and is calm under pressure. That has served him well as a tour manager going out on the road, where you have to deal with last-minute surprises — especially after COVID with all the safety protocols.”

Swanson’s first big gig as a tour ant was with blink-182. The band’s manager, Rick DeVoe, had worked under the umbrella of Silva’s company.

Happy to be out of the limelight, despite being in such close proximity to it, Swanson flourished. He was hired to go on the road as the tour manager for David Bowie, Neil Young, AC/DC and other top artists.

“When I was on a stadium tour with AC/DC in Europe I was one of five ants, so there was no interaction with the band,” Swanson said. “I met Bowie a couple of times. I talked to Neil’s manager everyday, not Neil.

“On the opposite end of the spectrum, when I was the ant for blink’s co-headlining U.S. tour with No Doubt, Mark (Hoppus) and Tom (DeLonge) from blink were very involved in the day-to-day running of things and wanted to know everything going on. I think that was because they had gone from playing Soma (an all-ages San Diego music venue) to Coors Amphitheatre in one year. They wanted to know where all the money was going.”

From ‘American Idol’ to R. Kelly

The disparity between different tours by different acts was best demonstrated to Swanson in 2004.

After completing his gig as the ant for the national “American Idol” tour, he hit the road on a co-headlining concert trek by R. Kelly and Jay Z. Kelly is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for various sex crimes.

” “Idol’ was a bunch of kids on the road, some with their parents or chaperones, in a very controlled, corporate setting where everything was done to the ‘t’,” he said.

“Jay Z’s camp was fantastic and really understood the business. But the R. Kelly side was all over the map, with money flying out the door. We had to cancel concerts because R. Kelly didn’t show up or was four hours late. You’d just throw your hands up in the air ....”

Swanson offers a business-inspired analogy in which the artist is the owner of a company, the tour manager is the CEO, the production manager is the COO, and the tour ant is the CFO.

His transition from tour ant to tour manager for Jason Mraz was a natural evolution. Silva, who managed Mraz from 1999 to 2017 and helped propel him to stardom, paired the singer-songwriter with Swanson. The two clicked almost instantly.

Swanson’s tenure with Clapton began in 2010 when he was hired to be the guitar legend’s tour ant. He became Clapton’s road manager two years later. In 2021, Clapton’s previous tour manager retired. Swanson was asked to replace him.

Clapton and Mraz are his only two clients, despite offers from McGregor and other music biz forces to work with a number of superstar acts.

“I asked Matt four months ago if he’d step in for a major tour, but he declined,” McGregor said.

Why did Swanson decline?

“It’s a lot of travel for me,” he replied.

“When I come home from Eric’s six April concerts in Japan, I have three days off. Then, I go to Vegas for a show with Jason, then back to San Diego for Jason’s show with Jimmy Buffett at Snapdragon. After that, I go to London for Eric’s two all-star Jeff Beck tribute concerts at the Royal Albert Hall.

“I’ll be with Jason for the rest of the summer because his new album comes out June 23 and his tour starts in July and runs through August. Then, I’m home for a couple of weeks before leaving for rehearsals for Eric’s fall U.S. tour.”

Swanson lives in San Diego with his wife and stepson, Dylan. His wife, Lea, is a talent buyer and the finance director for AEG Entertainment in San Diego. They met here 16 years ago when both were working with Wojas for Viejas Entertainment.

“The best thing about my job is I get to see amazing artists every night while I’m working, and that never gets old,” Swanson said. “I still love going to shows and I love Jason and Eric’s music, which makes it even sweeter.

“The downside is the time away from home, because when I’m gone, I’m gone. But when I’m home, my time is very much my own. I’m not going to the office from 9 to 5.

“I will work with Jason and Eric until they ask me to step down. It’s my dream gig and I’m super blessed and very lucky. There’s no one else I’m longing to work for.”