A Man Named Bear
Alyxzander Bear pulls a crisp hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and places it on his office desk. “You can have this,” he says, “if you can tell me the number of steps on the staircase between the second and third floor.” I guess 20. “So close,” he says, putting the money back in his wallet. “There are 16 steps.”
Bear knows the exact number of stairs in every staircase of the Insomniac office, and of each staircase in his house, and of those at the Long Beach Airport, the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, several Vegas nightclubs, and of just about every other set of steps he’s ever climbed. It’s just something he naturally notices and remembers. “I’ve always been very, very pragmatic,” he says, “almost clinically.”
As he looks over documents on his computer, he pulls up an image up and says casually, “That’s a photo of me and Frank, a shark that I befriended.”
Just as a DJ’s mind thinks in song structure and melody, Bear’s mind thinks in numbers and colors. He remembers the 50 state capitals, for example, by associating each with a different hue. He can tell you how many people are standing in front of EDC’s kineticFIELD by surveying the crowd and doing some quick math based on the stage measurements.
Being hardwired for facts, figures, recollection and precision is one of many abilities that qualify Bear for his role as Insomniac’s Production Director, a job he’s had for a decade. He claims to have no creativity, but while he certainly brings a high level of practicality to his position, Bear’s sage application of logic does indeed contain an element of magic. With this ability, he helps orchestrate the foundational elements on which every unforgettable moment at EDC happens.
Things you should also know about Bear: He sets every clock in his house to a different time so as to keep his brain sharp. He has six black belts in various forms of martial arts, has traveled the world as the coach of a champion martial arts team, and helped found the UFC. He declines to say how old he is, but is rumored to be in his mid-sixties. As he looks over documents on his computer, he pulls up an image up and says casually, “That’s a photo of me and Frank, a shark that I befriended.” He also has two 12-foot pet pythons, four parrots, six dogs and nine cats. He was recruited into military service out of college and served in Vietnam.
After his military career, Bear traveled the world as a bodyguard for bands including the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones. He’s never had a drink of alcohol, which, along with a calm demeanor and imposing physical stature that matches his name, made him an ideal man to do tour security. Five scrapbooks in his office are filled with dozens of backstage passes for artists including AC/DC, Blondie and Black Sabbath. The massive telecommunications company BearCom? He started that. He also founded Full Contact Sports, an action sportswear company and the sports and entertainment production company, PerforMax Productions. While he has a slight Southern accent, he won’t say exactly where he’s from—just that he was born “in a small town in the middle of no place.” When he moved to Southern California in 1977, he rode his motorcycle across the country without a map and moved into an apartment two miles away from where he ran out of gas. He’s lived in the same town ever since.
Bear is quite possibly the most interesting person that works at Insomniac, although he would never say so. As Production Director, he and his team are responsible for coordinating festival infrastructure, from stage production to sanitation, parking, permits, security, traffic and weather monitoring. Bear manages the stage labor and site operations crews for each festival. He describes his role as a combination of a sheepdog that pushes the people working under him in the right directions and a Den Mother who gets the group to work together, despite their personality differences.
“He’s extremely knowledgeable about a lot of things,” says Insomniac’s Senior Director of Operations Justin Spagg. “He really tries to be well-rounded in everything, so that he does have the answer for whatever the issue may be.” Spagg also notes that in the nearly 10 years they’ve worked together, he’s never seen Bear lose his cool.
“The only thing that makes a festival work is when everyone is putting forth the same energy to make it happen. When it does happen, that’s when I get my satisfaction. I love it when a plan comes together.”
Bear was brought onto the production team in 2005 via his connection to the now-defunct Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino. He has since watched Insomniac grow from the days when things were being done less by the rules and more on the fly. “We were more lucky than smart in the early years,” he says, “and we’ve learned a lot. We’ve been very fortunate to have the limited amount of issues that we’ve had. Now we do it 100 percent by the book.”
This “book” is an actual physical object that he has helped write. On his desk is a stack of maps and technical plans for upcoming events. Bear and the people he works with are responsible for making sure these nuts-and-bolts aspects of production are precisely executed. The production team spends weeks before EDC living onsite at the Motor Speedway, turning the stage designers’ dreams into reality. When the show starts, Bear spends his time dealing with unforeseen issues that arise, and when it’s all over, he says he gets a bit sad seeing the infrastructure come back down.
With far more festivals on the calendar now than in his early days, and with stage designs becoming more elaborate each year, the job of the production team has expanded dramatically. Bear rises at five in the morning, gives thanks for waking up at all, and then begins numbering the day’s tasks. “It usually ends up to be about 75 things,” he says. “It’s like a Rolodex in my head.”
Bear first learned the ins and outs of production in the music scene of the 1980s. He started his own company after transitioning out of the martial arts world and has worked on world tours for acts including Van Halen and Bruce Springsteen. He was there the first time an American band toured the Soviet Union and was part of legendary US festivals of the early ‘80s. Through it all, he’s witnessed the sea change of popular music from the ‘70s to today. “People say it’s electronic hippies,” he says of the EDC demographic, “but I think these kids have found a niche all their own.”
Through it all, Bear has learned that making an event work is a function of not just technical precision, but of ensuring that each person contributing their skills—from the stage builders to the clean-up crew—feels important and excited about their role. “The only thing that makes a festival work is when everyone is putting forth the same energy to make it happen. When it does happen, that’s when I get my satisfaction. I love it when a plan comes together.”
