It was an evening in late 1984 when Jonathan Shank, a young kid from a suburb of Philadelphia, walked into a stadium with his family in tow, sat down in his assigned seat and experienced his very first live concert, an event that would dramatically influence the course of his life. On stage that night was The Jackson 5, performing one stop on their 55-city Victory Tour.
Shank was immediately in awe.
“There was this one moment during the show where Michael Jackson came and sat by the edge of the stage,” Shank says. “The crowd went really, really crazy.”
Although he couldn’t articulate it as a kid, Shank was deeply impacted by the experience of being in the same room with thousands of people, all enjoying live music. The energy was electric and infectious.
That experience propelled Shank, CEO of artist management and production company Terrapin Station Entertainment, to a career focused on creating experiences just like this for audiences around the world.
Shank’s parents noticed their son’s interest, and for many years after The Jackson 5 concert, the family would spend summers at the Jersey Shore, taking Shank to see groups like Chicago and Hall & Oates in nearby Atlantic City. By the time he hit his teens, Shank was venturing out to shows on his own, favoring bands of the time like Milli Vanilli, INXS and U2.
Shank attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where he majored in sociology but always looked for interesting music classes. (The university did not have business-related music classes.) When he found a course called “The History of Jazz,” he signed up immediately and started going to the professor’s office hours, telling the teacher he wanted to do something in the music business. An internship for credit was suggested, and within weeks, Shank was knocking on the doors of the House of Blues New Orleans.
“It was February 1994, and the House of Blues had literally just opened,” he remembers. “I turned up and asked for an internship, and they didn’t even have an internship program yet. I became an assistant to the assistant.”
It was a formative experience. Shank spent his time organizing artist photos and bios and taping show flyers to telephone poles all over the city. The experience introduced him to a wide variety of industry luminaries, from Bob Monroe and Bob Dylan to Dr. John and Allen Toussaint. From there, he interned for a record producer who encouraged him to move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the music business.
Less than four months after walking across Tulane’s graduation stage, Shank was headed West.
Cutting his teeth in the City of Angels
It was the mid ’90s when Shank landed in LA. He was hungry to land a job in music, producing or assisting. He would take whatever he could get, but jobs were hard to come by. At the time, live music wasn’t a huge market. Instead, money was in selling records.
“I came out thinking I was going to get a job at a record label, but what I found was that the lines were very, very long for those jobs,” Shank remembers.
Undiscouraged, he worked odd jobs and developed friendships with anyone he could find in the business. Then, in late 1997, he landed an assistant role at a boutique music agency. Shank was promoted to agent by the end of his first year, and his career took off. The business was helping acts like The Marshall Tucker Band and Jefferson Starship tour around the country. He worked with the living members of The Doors and a group that played jazz interpretations of Grateful Dead songs. And while many of these groups were favored by fans older than Shank, he had grown up with such a diverse interest in music genres that he fit right in.
“I was a very young person who was able to form relationships with some older legacy artists, and I think they just got a kick out of the fact that I knew their music, knew what I was talking about,” he says. “It showed them that maybe there was a glimmer of light, that their music was going to last for a very long time… that there would be generations of people that came even after me that would be enjoying their music, consuming their videos, watching their shows.”
In fact, Shank’s perspective was revolutionary for the time because, in the mid-to-late ’90s, the music industry was focused on pop acts like ’N Sync and Backstreet Boys—not legacy artists like Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead.
“There was nothing glamorous about what I was doing at the time,” Shank remembers. “It was just grinding. But I loved it so much because I really connected with these artists. And it taught me all about touring and how to strategically put artists out on the road.
“It really became a theme in my career of working in underappreciated and underserved spaces. If there’s a core audience there, even if it’s an audience that was there previously, you can always find a way to reignite that audience, to engage that audience, to find them again.”
Embracing fresh ideas
Shank’s career blossomed from there. By the early 2000s he was moving into day-to-day management for artists across genres—from LFO to Isaac Hayes to the band War. He was finding himself in rooms with some of the most powerful people in the business, organizing tours with megastars and lining up acts for major music festivals around the country.
Soon, he was working with Mickey Hart, a former drummer for the Grateful Dead. Shank helped connect Hart with performers to start a band and the relationships blossomed. The two are close to this day. (“He texted me this morning, actually,” Shank quips.)
Over the years, Shank expanded his reach to stars like Victoria Justice who were appearing on Nickelodeon. Around that time, there was a show on the same network called “The Fresh Beat Band,” and Shank proposed the idea of producing in-person events for the band. He came on as an executive producer, and the show—a nod to his unorthodox ideas—was a massive success. From there, he worked to bring Peppa Pig to live audiences—again, an enormous win.
Shank has done these shows with his company Terrapin Station Entertainment, which today is wildly successful. For the past few years, he’s worked to bring the Disney Jr. franchise live on tour, and this year, audiences across the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the United Kingdom are able to take in a physical show.
“Terrapin was formed out of the need to create a nontraditional entertainment company that could propel all of these brands and all of this content,” he says. “What I find is that, when you have one project that goes well, people can say, ‘Well, maybe you got lucky.’ But when you have two, you start to show a model, and you start to show how you’re building success on top of what you’ve previously done.”
Photo by Em Walis. This article originally appeared in the May/June 2025 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
