Friends with Charlotte’s ‘Mr. Music Man’? He’ll happily help you meet a legend.
Within 15 seconds of greeting a visitor in the driveway of his Myers Park home, Larry Farber’s teeing up one of his famous stories about — naturally — a famous person.
And this story’s just a few hours old.
“Did you go to Vince last night?” asks the 74-year-old former entertainment booking agent, who in “retirement” oversees a long-running private-music club called Music With Friends and is a part of the group that owns and operates Middle C Jazz, a thriving uptown club that was his brainchild.
Farber is talking about Vince Gill, the noted Nashville musician and now-part-time Eagle, in town earlier this month for a solo show at Ovens Auditorium.
“You’ll love this,” he continues. “So, I get a call Monday from Rick Hendrick, and he goes, ‘Larry, years ago my wife bought me a guitar from one of Vince’s first albums. I’m going to see him Thursday — and you’re the only guy I know who can make a call and get me backstage.’”
Then Farber pulls out his phone to show off a photo Hendrick sent after the show, of the NASCAR Hall of Fame race team owner with Gill. Farber is positively beaming.
All of this underscores three truths:
1) Thanks to decades spent booking A-list legends and rubbing shoulders with powerful people in Charlotte through his live-music ventures, Farber has an astonishing cache of contacts.
2) He doesn’t just know these folks, but he has real influence — thanks to a track record of treating artists, customers and friends alike as if they’re VIPs.
And 3) Hooking people up, so to speak, warms the heart of the Charlotte native who friends refer to as “Mr. Music Man.”
We recently sat down with Farber to talk about these self-evident truths; the many pros as well as a few of the tricky cons related to those truths; the surprise success he’s had with Middle C; the struggles he’s had with Music With Friends; and more.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q. What comes to your mind when I say the word “retirement”?
I realized — and so did my family — retirement’s not in my bones. I mean, when I go to Middle C five nights a week, and I sit there and get to see these unbelievable local and national artists, I wouldn’t want to retire.
I’m also excited that we were able to move Music With Friends to the new Carolina Theatre; when that venue came on board, I knew that I could not give up that project. Plus I have friends that are doing festivals, and when they call and go, “Larry, I need your help opening the doors, making connections,” I love doing that.
So I think that I’m gonna be doing this until I take my last breath. I can’t imagine not being part of music.
Q. How do you balance old, tried-and-true-for-you methods of doing business in the live-music space with the new realities of — social media, technology, etc. — ?
I pride myself on being an old-school kind of person in this business. It’s always been about relationships that I’ve built. It could be a kid I met when I was calling on fraternities, and that guy became the CEO of some big corporation, and he’d remember me and call me to book a band for his daughter’s wedding, or a big corporate event. So I have grown with these people over the years. Building relationships, getting to know the people, really caring about them — not caring about them because it may pay dividends, but really being there — that’s incredibly important.
I know it’s morphed into all the social media. It’s the way of the world. But it’s not my way. I use it to market things that I’m doing, either at Middle C, or Music With Friends. But to me, the old-fashioned way of just creating these relationships, nurturing them — it’s that personal connection that hopefully will set the ventures that I’m involved in apart from others.
And I love to do things for my friends in general. If somebody calls me and goes, “Larry, I know you have Darius Rucker in town,” or “you have Diana Ross, can you please give me the opportunity to meet her?” They will tell me the stories of why these people are so meaningful in their life, and I’ll go the extra mile to make sure that these friends get to see these artists.
Q. How much of your life is spent just trying to do favors for people?
This is funny. My friends don’t understand that I’m not a promoter. I’m not Live Nation or AEG. They just go, “Larry’s in entertainment.” So my friends forever have called me, “So-and-so’s coming. Can you get me seats?” Now, I do know people, and those people let me call and they’ll put aside some tickets that I’ll get for my friends. But what’s happened is one friend tells another friend, that tells another friend — and I’m a person that has a real hard time saying no.
So, for example, Billy Joel and Sting were supposed to be in Charlotte in May, but it got canceled. I literally had gotten 30 tickets for friends. It took me three weeks to unravel who had these tickets, which seats, get people their money back. I thought, How can I tell my friends I don’t want to do this anymore? Unfortunately, I still probably can’t say no the next time they call me.
But that’s part of the hospitality business. And guess what? When I go to a sporting event, if I know somebody that’s the president of one of the teams and I really want something, I’ve been known to call them as well. So I understand being on the other side of it.
What else happens is every parent that thinks their kid is the next Madonna has called me over the years. You know, “Larry, can you come hear so-and-so? Can you help me get a record deal?” And I say, “Look, honestly, your child could be the most talented person in the world, and I have a decent ear for this. But I’m not a record producer.” Well, about four or five years ago, one of (my wife) Sherry’s best friends’ nieces — a very talented actress — called and said, “My brother Charlie wants to come with his daughter to talk to you about her career.” I said, “Absolutely.”
We set up a meeting, they walk in, and the dad says, “My daughter is very talented. We think she’s good. She’s doing some local acting.” Well, she wanted to go straight from high school to New York, and I told her to pursue her dreams. Her dad was ready to cut my head off. (Laughing.)
Anyway, the girl was Reneé Rapp. She ended up on Broadway — “Mean Girls” — and had a Netflix series, is in the movies, launched a music career and performed on “Saturday Night Live,” And now, I mean, she’s got a major concert tour.
I said, “Charlie, I’m coming to that one.” He said, “You can have as many tickets as you need.”
Q. Having spent all these years working to create experiences that involve famous people, can you talk a little bit about the power and the allure of celebrity — how you perceive that other people react to it and how you react to it yourself?
When I was in my 20s, one of my very best friends — and he was a roommate of mine before I got married — was Jay Thomas. He was the big personality at Big WAYS radio. When we would go hang out as friends around Charlotte, people would go, “Oh, my God, that’s Jay Thomas!” Then Jay went to New York, was on radio there, then did some off-Broadway; next thing I know he’s doing “Mork & Mindy,” then “Love & War.” He’s winning Emmys (for “Murphy Brown”). He’s in movies — “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” And whether I went to see him in his home in Hollywood Hills, in Santa Barbara, or he came back to Charlotte, when we were out, people would, like, go nuts. But he was just a regular guy. When he would talk about those things on the phone, he would go, “I’m going to work.”
So then my career blossomed in music, and I started booking these famous artists for events. Over the decades, I’ve booked so many, many celebrities, and everybody I’ve booked has been somebody’s hero. And if somebody thinks I can be a conduit to meeting a celebrity — that’s a dream come true, and you see how excited it makes them — I want to do it if I can.
But in between all that, I was able to meet many of them as well, and get to know some of them as friends and make personal connections.
Glenn Frey. I was really fortunate to have him play with his own band, apart from the Eagles, for Music With Friends in Charlotte, and the next night, for Music With Friends in Charleston. And his producer — producer of “Hotel California,” Bill Szymczyk — lives part-time in Charlotte. We all went to the restaurant at the Ritz, and we’re sitting and talking about his career, and he’s telling stories about him and Don Henley; they were not getting along at the time, and I was getting all the inside scoop and loving it.
Aretha Franklin, who I got to sit in a dressing room and count out a lot of cash for her that she demanded. $100 bills in stacks of $1,000. Then she stuffed it all in her black pocketbook, and put it on stage, next to her, on the piano.
Tony Bennett, one of my all-time favorites that I was able to meet and bring my whole family — my mom, who at that time was in her 80s, and my dad in his 90s, and my children, all of us sitting together and creating a memory for a lifetime, taking them backstage, getting a picture with Tony Bennett, knowing that was something special.
So there’s definitely a selfish aspect to it. Middle C has been a phenomenal financial success. Music With Friends? The financial reward has been only this much, but the immeasurable reward of bringing joy to a lot of people in Charlotte, and to my friends, and to me — I mean, I don’t care that this thing hasn’t made a lot of money.
Q. Did you think when you first opened Middle C in 2019 that six years later you’d be describing it as “a phenomenal financial success”? I feel like maybe there were a lot of people in the beginning whispering, “A jazz club in uptown? Is Larry crazy?”
Yes, but that’s sort of been the pattern of my life. When I started Music With Friends, people told me I was crazy. I remember (longtime Blumenthal Arts CEO and president) Tom Gabbard — who I have the greatest respect for — said, “Larry, are you sure you want to do this? I don’t know if people are gonna pay” — at that point — “$1,500 a year per person for three shows. I don’t think that’s possible.” Well, it filled up in two months, and he was the first to call me and go, “You did it.”
The more people tell me things aren’t gonna work, the harder I work. And yes, with Middle C, people said, “You’re crazy to open a jazz club. It’s never worked long-term.”
I mean, I saw the risk. I didn’t want to take my life savings to open it. So I went to literally 20 people — people that I had booked events for, had become my friends through business, a few personal friends — and they each gave me $50,000 to $100,000 to get it started. They just said, “We believe in you. If we get our money back, great; if we don’t, we understand.”
Then Covid hit us. I mean, we’d been open for two months. I was like, Oh my gosh. Bad timing. But we hung in there (with virtual concerts and by keeping his and investors’ cash in reserve), and a year after we got back up to 100% capacity, in 2022, I was able to pay everybody back in full. Since then, it’s been a really, really good return.
Again, I thought I could make money with Music With Friends — I was wrong. I thought Middle C would be just a place for me to go “retire,” get to hear the great musicians — you know, a passion project. But it’s become both that and a financial success. I wish I owned more of the club than I do. (Farber says his stake is “about 10%.”) I’ve called my partners over the last few years and said, “Would you be interested in me maybe buying you out?” And they go, “Nope.” (Laughing.)
But I’m grateful for the people that believed in me when it was a long shot.
Q. Meanwhile, you’ve alluded a couple of times now to Music With Friends struggling. Can you elaborate?
Honestly, it was a big leap of faith even back when I started the club in 2007, asking people to pay $1,500 a year for three shows — $500 a show (including pre- and post-show cocktail parties) — and you don’t know up front who the artists will be. That was a lot to ask people. So I was really hesitant to go up, because I was afraid that people who had taken the leap initially would go, “Well, now I just can’t afford it.”
Q. Go up ... ?
On the dues. I made one change, several later, and went from $1,500 to $1,800 a season, and never changed it after that. Meanwhile, food was going up, labor was going up, talent costs were going up. Finally, what I had to do this year, for the first time, was go from three shows to two shows, so that I could keep the cost the same, but not compromise the experience. Because what was happening in the last few years is I was having a harder time getting what I call “A-Lister-legends” with my budget.
I was at a crossroads. But the thing that kept me going — I promise you, more than anything — was when I walked into that new Carolina Theatre. I looked and went, I’m not stopping now. Not when I can have it at a place like this. And I am really, really excited to say that the threshold I needed to break even, we’ve met that this year.
Q. Because you haven’t broken even every year.
Oh no. No. And in some of those other cities we’d expanded to (Charleston, Houston and Nashville, now all defunct), I lost money. The truth is, during the heyday of Charlotte’s Music With Friends, when it was making money, I was using that and subsidizing some of the other clubs. That was not a smart business move.
Q. I want to go back to the notion of part of this being for selfish reasons. Have you ever overspent on an artist because you wanted to meet the artist and see them perform an intimate show?
Yes. Sheryl Crow, back in the first couple years. I really wanted her. Big favorite of mine. She was at least $50,000 to $75,000 more than we had spent. And I loved that I got to meet her and get to know her. But what I realized is, No, Larry, stay within your budget. Be disciplined.
Funny story: (Hall of Fame golfer) Fred Couples was there that night, and he said, “If you introduce me to Sheryl Crow, I’ll take you anywhere in the world to play golf.” So I introduced him. He loved it. A year later, I was at the Masters with a member of Augusta — “behind the ropes,” as they say — and there’s Fred Couples, holding court under a tree, talking to his buddies. And I’m not afraid to go up to anybody, after all the years dealing with celebrities. I went up and I said, “Fred, you remember me? I’m the guy that introduced you to Sheryl Crow.” He put his arm around me, and tells these other golfers about meeting her. He’s going on and on — and finally I said, “I’m really glad you liked it. But where are we gonna go play golf?”
We obviously never went and played golf together. But that was my sort of inside joke with him.
Q. What is your stake in Music With Friends?
Sherry and I own that, totally. There’s no partners. Yeah, the one that’s not making money’s all mine.
Q. Well, I think at this point I know the answer, but: What would you most like to be remembered for?
Connecting people. I mean, I get joy — I get emotional — from being able to give experiences, whether that’s for Rick Hendrick, or Fred Couples, or a friend of mine, or a customer. I love helping. Not helping because I expect something back — I’m not a transactional person — I just do it, and if it comes back to me, so be it.
That’s what I’ve taught my boys is that you do it for the right reason, and if good things happen because you did it, great. But don’t do things just because you think somebody’s gonna do something for you. If you do it for the right reason — to make someone else feel good — it always comes back in one way or another. It really does.
This story was originally published August 19, 2025 at 5:29 AM.
