Harrison Sears behind the control area at a Fenway Park concert. Photo courtesy of Sears

Arts & Culture

This SHA Alum Handles Fenway Park’s Celebrity Artists

Harrison Sears (SHA’24) has helped the teams of Paul McCartney, Bad Bunny, and Noah Kahan get ready to perform at the iconic ballpark

Harrison Sears looks out at Fenway Park’s baseball field from behind his brown-tinted sunglasses as he sits in one of the stadium’s seats. The massive stretch of green before him will completely transform in a few days. Tourists moseying around the ballpark’s some 37,000 seats will become excited concert fans, the impeccably maintained grass will turn into a concert floor, and a massive stage will cover the corporate signs on one of the stadium’s green walls. 

Fenway Park is preparing for the last three shows of this year’s concert season: Pearl Jam will play on September 15 and 17 and Post Malone—touring with a new country album—will hit the iconic Boston venue on September 18. 

Sears (SHA’24), who graduated from BU with a hospitality administration degree in May, works for the Boston Red Sox as an assistant in the concert department. In this role, he promotes the stadium’s concerts through social media, provides tours of the ballpark to visiting artists, and helps facilitate Fenway Park’s transition from ballpark to concert venue. It’s a job that gets him out of a cubicle, he says, and among the likes of Paul McCartney, Bad Bunny, and Noah Kahan.

“I grew up a Red Sox fan,” Sears says. “So being able to work here—and have the Red Sox side of things and also be in the music business—it’s the greatest gift.” 

It also runs in his blood. His maternal grandparents were close friends of members of the American rock band Grateful Dead and helped manage the group. In fact, when Sears’ grandmother gave birth to his mother, Sears says, band founding member Bob Weir was in the house with them, strumming his guitar as the baby was born. Weir and band lyricist John Perry Barlow would later name the poignant song “Cassidy,” after Sears’ mother. 

Today, Sears’ parents run the Rex Foundation, the group’s charity organization, which is named after Sears’ maternal grandfather

Not surprisingly, the music business furnished many a Sears family dinner table conversation during Sears’ childhood in San Francisco. “I was always very into music,” says Sears, who played the keyboard, bass guitar, and saxophone growing up. “In any sort of way, I just wanted to be around it 24/7.” 

That continued when Sears moved across the country to study at BU. He started working at the Red Sox concert department the summer before his junior year and has been at the iconic venue ever since.

Fenway Park opened more than a century ago, in 1912. But its first major rock concert happened relatively recently, in 2003. Larry Cancro (CAS’77), Fenway Concerts and Entertainment senior vice president, remembers when the ballpark was testing the waters and trying to find a way to bring major concerts to the venue in the early 2000s. 

After an extensive search to find the perfect first act to kick off Fenway Park’s concert venture, Cancro met with George Travis, Bruce Springsteen’s right-hand man, who was planning the artist’s tours at the time. When Travis expressed interest in Fenway Park as a venue, it was immediately clear who would inaugurate the ballpark’s future stage: the Boss himself. 

“Within two weeks we had the first two shows set,” says Cancro, who has worked with the Red Sox since 1985. 

After Springsteen, more high-profile clients started booking gigs. There were the Rolling Stones in 2005, who performed at Fenway Park on one of the largest stages ever constructed at the time, Cancro says. Then it was Roger Waters performing in 2012, with a show that kicked off with a Spitfire plane crashing into a white wall on the stage. 

Pulling off these ambitious concerts in a ballpark requires a great deal of planning, Sears says. Concerts are booked about a year in advance. To protect the field’s plush grass during a show, he says, crews cover the entire field with 85,000 feet of white plastic. 

The stage is built in about three days, a process that requires 60-ton cranes, semi-trailer trucks, and around 300 people. After the show, crews immediately begin tearing it down, taking only a single day to make the field baseball-ready again, Sears says.

“There’s no end to the amount of stuff you have to do,” as Cancro puts it. But performing in the ballpark’s amphitheater-like space also comes with its benefits. He still remembers when Jimmy Buffet walked around the building before his 2004 concert there. 

“This is perfect,” Cancro remembers him saying. “I’ll be able to see every face in the crowd, and everyone in the crowd can see me.” 

Of all the concerts to hit Fenway Park since Sears started working there, one still stands out in his mind: in 2023, Dead and Company—a newer edition of the Grateful Dead—performed at the venue. 

For Sears, it was “the greatest thing ever. I never thought I’d be working with a band that my family helped manage for all these years,” he says. 

The last time he’d seen all the Dead and Company band members together was some 10 years ago, as a little kid hopping on road cases and hanging out backstage during their shows. So when the band arrived at Fenway Park and Sears got to be the one to tell them, “I’ll be taking care of you guys today,” it was a full-circle moment, he says. 

Accordingly, Weir opened the weekend with the song “Cassidy.” The shows went on to be Fenway Park’s highest attended up until that point, Sears says. 

As the stadium prepares to host Post Malone and Pearl Jam to close off this year’s concerts, he is as ready as ever to welcome the unpredictable yet dynamic industry that immersed his childhood in music. 

“You really never know who you’re going to meet and what’s going to happen,” Sears says of the artists that walk through Fenway Park’s doors. “But we’re always here to take care of them and make sure they have a good time.”