Luke and Jolene Chevalier are the husband-and-wife team behind How To Concerts in De Pere.
Maybe it’s not hard to grow up loving live music and performance when you’re named for a Dolly Parton song.
“I think my mom always said ‘We liked the name more than the song’ just so people wouldn’t say I was named after Dolly’s homewrecker,” says Jolene Chevalier, founder and talent buyer for How To Concerts in De Pere.
During the past 10 years, Chevalier has built up How To Concerts alongside her husband, Luke, the company’s business manager. As a “middle agency,” the Chevaliers and their small but powerhouse team help college campuses and other organizations book popular musical acts, comedians, speakers and other performers, ranging from budding artists to big stars, for their special events.
To be successful, How To Concerts must carefully navigate the expanse between top professionals in the music industry and college students or campus staff who are sometimes put in charge of managing a concert but maybe have never actually worked with a live event. As such, education is one of the agency’s core focuses. It’s why the business has “how to” in its name; it aims to transparently walk its clients through the process of booking a performance: how to start, how to plan, how to book, how to prepare.
Part of working with students, for example, is teaching them proper backstage etiquette. They might not know you aren’t supposed to take pictures during a sound check, for example, or that you shouldn’t randomly walk up and ask an artist for an autograph backstage. “We often coach people to say the backstage is an artist’s home and treat it that way, even though it’s your space: It’s their home for a day, and their green room is their bedroom,” Jolene says.
When his college campus, Missouri S&T, hired How To Concerts to book a concert for its St. Patrick’s Day celebration, Devin Chiaramonti says he “literally knew nothing about how to put on a concert,” but another student who had managed campus events gave him Jolene’s contact info. “He just said, ‘Email this person; they’ll help you with everything.’”
Jolene walked Chiaramonti through the process and gave him deadlines for tasks or assignments to keep things running smoothly. The experience “completely changed my college career,” Chiaramonti says. “The skills I learned were invaluable, the biggest one being communication.”
Jolene says a great thing about working with college campuses and their students “is that they’re on top of the latest trends on TikTok or Instagram. They can kind of gauge what’s blowing up.”
That’s given How To Concerts the chance to connect campuses with artists who were on the cusp of fame. It happened that way with Noah Kahan, and with Billie Eilish, who only ever booked three college shows before she hit it big: two of those were booked by How To Concerts.
Growing up with music
Jolene grew up in Luxemburg, the youngest of six in a blended family, a mile down the road from where her dad and uncle operated a farm. Her parents loved music, but farm life didn’t leave a lot of free time. Still, Jolene grew up singing in the church choir with her mom, aunts, cousins and her grandmother.
“One of my aunts even held an annual hootenanny,” Jolene says. “She played autoharp, my other aunt played guitar, and my mom sang the alto part to their soprano vocals, and we as kids got to sing along. I was then very active in choir and band throughout school.”
Jolene’s mom passed away when Jolene was just 10 years old, and “when my dad got remarried, my stepmom insisted we all go see ‘Phantom of the Opera’ at the Weidner,” Jolene says. “It was a big deal for us as we had not had any ‘fancy theater experiences’ until then. I was moved to tears because I loved it so much, and that started the trajectory toward the stage in general.”
Jolene began her undergraduate journey in the theater department at UW-Stevens Point, all set to become a famous actress. Quickly, however, she realized she preferred the organizational aspects of theater.
It was during this time that Jolene found a day job in the campus activities office and worked some local festival events as well; that’s when she met Rick Gorbette, a middle buyer from Event Resources Presents, backstage during a concert. He later called to offer her a job, and she worked with Gorbette from 2008 to 2016, until she decided to open her own agency.
“That was the hardest career move I’ve ever had to make,” Jolene says. “It felt like breaking up with my family.”
Planning a future
The move took some nudging from Luke, but he and Jolene both knew there was only so far Jolene could advance at the family-owned Event Resources Presents.
“From my perspective, I see how talented and how much of a hard worker she is, and I could kind of see how something like this could happen,” Luke recalls. “And I just wanted her to have that opportunity to test [her] own boundaries and see how far she could take it.”
With three small children, it was a daunting prospect at the time. The day she quit, she went to their lawyer’s office to sign the LLC paperwork, then drove to the day care to pick up her kids.
“I hadn’t taken a breath, and so I got to the baby room to pick up my eight-month-old, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna need a minute,’” she recalls. “And they’re like, ‘Have a seat. What do you need?’ I’m like, ‘I just quit my job.’ And they’re like, ‘OK, do you need some water?’”
That was in April 2016. The Chevaliers went into fall 2016 with 23 events and into spring 2017 with 41 — including Blink-182. The number of events continued to climb.
How To Concerts gets paid when the events happen, so “no money came in until the end of August 2016 … I remember being handed that first check, and I could have cried, because it was like, ‘I am gonna get paid for this. It is gonna work,’” Jolene says.
Two years into the business, How To Concerts hired its first employee, talent buyer Jake Ostrow. That was in May 2018, and Jolene’s and Luke’s fourth child arrived in June 2018, prompting an expansion to an office on Main Street De Pere. “It was really growing exponentially,” Jolene says. “In 2019 we did just some really amazing events.”
And then the COVID-19 pandemic shut down live events everywhere.
‘The graveyard of shows’
At a concert with The Band CAMINO in Arkansas on Feb. 29, 2020, Jolene bought a T-shirt that she ended up wearing frequently in the months that followed. “I was just clinging to the last live show I had been at,” she says.
Now the agency, which depended on live events to operate, suddenly had to pivot. “I spent 15 hours a day canceling shows,” she says. “It was so stressful … My eardrum burst.” The agency closed its Main Street office and moved back into the house, isolating with Luke’s parents; Ostrow moved out of state to be with his girlfriend and worked remotely.
“We had so many cool shows booked in spring of 2020,” Jolene says, calling it “the graveyard of shows that would have been.”
One example, the Black Pumas. Others included T-Pain, Walk the Moon (“Shut up and Dance”), 3OH!3, Lil Jon, Yung Gravy and actor Ken Jeong.
Jolene worked to guide clients through the unprecedented time and tried to find a way to keep the doors open. They asked clients if they’d pay for the work the agency had done up to that point. “We had a thermometer on our marker board in our office that we erased and turned into a life raft, and we would mark it in with any little bits that people were willing to pay us,” she says.
How To Concerts quickly figured out that many of the events could still work virtually, but it wasn’t initially an easy sell.
“At the time, everybody was like, ‘Oh no, no way. You know, this is gonna be a three-week thing,’” Jolene says. A little while later, the artists changed their tune and circled back. Some events were pre-recorded and played virtually; some artists could stream right into a Zoom window from a studio, Jolene says. How To Concerts would have to ensure the video and sound were synced up. “I have to say, those [virtual concerts] were soul sucking for a person that loves live music. Soul sucking,” Jolene says.
They also shifted to different kinds of events. A stand-up comedy show doesn’t really work on Zoom, Jolene says. “So we would have [comedians] host Bingos or trivia, because you still get their personality, you tell a joke or whatever. Instead of waiting for laughter, you just call the next number.”
Some favorites included actors Brian Baumgartner or Oscar Nuñez hosting “The Office” trivia. “We had ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ queens do Drag Bingo, which was so fun,” Jolene says. “We did so many of those.” Bradley University hosted an unscripted Q&A session virtually with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Fox 11 Living Chef Jyll Everman offered about 120 cooking classes for campuses around the country, with groceries often provided by the universities — another way to support students during the pandemic.
“We just came up with people that made sense, that were not break-the-budget expensive, but were really effective,” Jolene says. “And people would show up.”
Sometimes events were fully remote, and other times students could gather safely in an auditorium with the artist or event on the screen.
“[Universities] still have all this student engagement money, and if you’re not keeping those students out of complete isolation and darkness, you’re not doing your job, either,” Jolene says. “So they were looking for solutions of, ‘How can I create joy and connection?’ So we’re like, ‘OK, this is what works.’”
Jolene attended every virtual event to stay connected with clients, occasionally attending multiple events on multiple screens simultaneously.
“I think we were worried about the health of the music industry,” Jolene says. “Like, how do you come back from this? There were some agencies that broke up. … We wondered how many of our colleagues were going to be left at the end, like how is this going to change the industry?”
Live events started opening up again about fall 2021, and because TikTok had taken off during COVID, How To Concerts started booking performers like Tai Verdes and Claire Rosinkranz, who had become popular with college-age fans.
“We were booking artists that had never performed a live show,” Jolene says. “Terrifying.”
How To culture
It worked out, though, and in spring 2021 Jolene and Luke hired another employee, Amber Olson, who was with them until Oct. 2024. Jake moved on in January 2023, and now the agency’s team includes Client Support Manager Jen Buhrow and Entertainment Operations Coordinator Alanna Tisler.
Both Buhrow and Tisler say they’re working their dream jobs in an industry they love. Plus, “Jolene is a big advocate of life comes first,” Buhrow says. “So she’s always checking and making sure that we’re taking care of ourselves.”
It’s a culture that extends to clients, she says. “We’re not the ones who are sending all caps emails to an agent saying WE NEED AN ANSWER RIGHT NOW, which is what a lot of those agents see,” Buhrow says. “I think a lot of our clients see that genuine care and ‘Midwest nice’ that has helped them to trust us.”
Meredith Jones Long, a music agent with Creative Artists Agency in Nashville, says her agency seeks to work with trustworthy partners like Jolene who have the experience to manage all of the components needed to ensure both artists and fans are in a safe environment, as well as those who can gracefully manage the (occasionally unreasonable) requests made by clients.
“Because she’s worked for so many years with so many different bands, she also knows the level of needs for an act as they begin to grow … She will never throw her arms up and walk away from something if she’s frustrated,” Jones Long says. “It goes back to the trustworthiness or the reliability of her work.”
Additionally, Jones Long says, “as a woman in the music industry, it makes me incredibly proud to know that Jolene started her own company and has continued to thrive. The fact that she has a very successful company after 10 years … it’s incredible to see.”
Local stages
How To Concerts has booked acts for Green Bay’s igNight Market, Gather On Broadway and the city’s Levitt AMP original musical series.
“Something that I’m still passionate about is original music,” Jolene says. “And Green Bay is a difficult market, because cover bands rule around here. But original music has always been kind of a passion of mine.”
Jolene has a “tremendous eye for identifying source and talent that really elevates the overall music scene here in Green Bay,” says Brian Johnson, president and CEO at On Broadway, which has been working with How To Concerts for about eight years.
When working with regional and sometimes national acts, “you’ve got to have someone who’s really plugged into that scene, who knows how to route your artists, who knows exactly where they’re performing, who knows their managers, and can really help navigate that landscape, which has grown increasingly complex even over the past eight years,” Johnson says.
Dylan Bram, program advisor for student engagement and campus life at UW-Oshkosh, works with How To Concerts on the university’s year-end Bye Gosh celebration. UWO has brought in artists such as Hoodie Allen, Bryce Vine, Chase Matthews and Hot Chelle Rae as its headliners. Bram says Jolene is “very upbeat, positive, quick to respond. She’s an incredibly hard-working individual. We always value what she brings to the table in terms of just getting it done and working on behalf of our institution.”
Bram also says it’s helpful that How To Concerts is just 45 minutes up the road and can be present “to help mitigate whatever might come up, if there’s discrepancies between the artists and us,” he says. “Or if nothing else, just to be there to support our events and help our students as they’re trying to learn the industry and see how things work for a concert.”
It’s additionally helpful to be walked through the contract step-by-step from the beginning to the end of the show and “what the artists expect of us, and what we expect of them,” Bram says. “Having that negotiator in the middle to serve both parties is incredibly valuable.”
