TALKING WITH TEAM CAA: EATON AND ROSKIN

We're following up our conversation with CAA music topper Rob Light by throwing a few questions at key members of his team. We asked Darryl Eaton and Rick Roskin, Co-Heads of Contemporary Music in L.A., to discuss the fallout of the pandemic and their professional chemistry.

You two CAA lifers started in the mail room and have been working together for almost 30 years. You’ve seen a lot over the years, but have you ever seen anything like what happened over the past 15 months?

Roskin: Absolutely not. We’ve had to cancel shows, rebook tours and deal with natural disasters and personal traumas, but never has an entire industry been so completely upended as the touring business has over the past year. It immediately became clear that the pandemic was going to have a monumental effect on the touring department and that we would have to make some difficult moves to provide stability for the company, our people and our clients. Throughout this traumatic time, the goal was to remain an island of calm in extremely stormy seas while providing opportunities, information and strategy to not just weather the storm but thrive, grow and keep an eye on future success.

You come from different backgrounds and lifestyles and have handled different artists from different genres, and your success rate is quite high. To what do you owe this great run?

Eaton: As Roskin likes to say, “Darryl is a Mac and I’m a PC.” We have completely different styles, attitudes and thoughts about almost everything. We discuss and debate every move and often argue, but it’s always to get to the correct result, not any one personal objective. We have been brought up in the culture of “If you take care of each other, great things happen.” We’ve always tried to live by that motto and always try to push our colleagues and clients to their highest possible level of success in keeping with that philosophy. Our job is to build, support and help talent, whether artists or associates, achieve their greatest potential. Nothing gives us greater satisfaction than seeing that success come to fruition.