This opacity leads to problems that bands and artists never even consider, like what happened to Emmanuel Gat. An Israeli choreographer living in France, Gat almost missed his Boston performance this past March because, after successfully completing the paperwork, the US consulate refused to give him his visa, which requires two stamp-less pages on the applicant’s passport. He didn’t have two free pages, and frantically sent away for a new passport from Israel, received it, got a new appointment, jumped on a plane, and landed at Logan a breathless two hours before his first performance.
Local venues are not amused by this type of customs daredevilry, as they have a serious financial stake in the ability of the scheduled bands to make their shows. Randi Millman has been booking manager for T.T. the Bear’s Place in Cambridge for more than 10 years, and says that, in the past year or two, visa troubles have plagued bands more and more, so much so that she now gets nervous when international acts book her club. “I don’t want to not book stuff from England, Scotland, Sweden, but I’ve been hesitating,” she says. “I really stress that they need their immigration in place.”
When a band cancels a show because of last-minute visa issues, “we’re essentially screwed,” says Millman. All the money she has spent on promotion, advertisements in newspaper and radio, might as well have been set on fire. “And 10 times out of 10,” she says, “you know that night is going to be a train wreck, so you’ve lost money that way . . . I have to pull something out of my ass at the last minute, and there’s never enough time to promote it, and it’s never good.”
Steve Ferguson, agent for the View, has been forced to cancel two of their tours at the last minute, a call which was not easy to make. “If effects dozens of people,” he says. “It’s kind of like a domino effect. Everybody suffers.”
Avoiding America
“Nine times out of 10,” Ginsburg says, “[problems with visas] are probably attributive to some level of incompetence.” He says this not as judgment, but as fact: Gat is, I imagine, as knowledgeable about the intricacies of US immigration law as Ginsburg is about contemporary Israeli choreography. If Gat had worked closely with an immigration lawyer or a company like Traffic Control Group, he might have known that he needed two free pages in the back of his passport, but he didn’t, and it’s these types of un-dotted i’s and uncrossed t’s that delay visa applications far beyond the point of relevance.
This is why many artists choose to hire specialists, piling additional costs onto an already expensive process. The P1 visa, for example, is for a group that’s been together for more than one year. If they’ve been together for less time, Ginsburg says he might try to work the system by getting the guitarist or frontman in on an O1 visa — for an individual with extraordinary ability — and have the rest of the band under an O1S visa, as the broadly defined “support staff.” I point out that immigration law seems to require some artistry on his part. “Oh yes,” he replies, “I’ve often said it’s less of a science than an art.”
