In the concert industry, Scher, CEO of Metropolitan Entertainment and the largest independent music promoter on the East Coast, is something of a legend: Along with Ron Delsener in New York, Don Law in Boston and the late Bill Graham in San Francisco, Scher virtually invented the concert business, nurturing it from a helter-skelter operation in the early '60s to the multibillion-dollar business it is today. Scher's office is decorated with Grateful Dead gold records and classic posters from Jefferson Airplane. But this is no nostalgia act: His company owns three amphitheaters on the Eastern Seaboard, produces concerts by the likes of D'Angelo and Brian McKnight and runs a small record label, Hybrid Records.

On this summer day, however, Scher sits in his company's headquarters, a sprawling three-story Victorian in Montclair, N.J., and tries to adjust to the new facts of his business. Or, more precisely, to one new fact: the impending buyout of SFX Entertainment, the largest concert promoter and venue owner in the U.S., by Clear Channel Communications, the country's largest radio station owner.

SFX and Clear Channel's impending union represents a profound shift of power in the rock 'n' roll concert business. Clear Channel, which announced its purchase of SFX for $3.2 billion in stock in February, is expected to consummate the deal at an SFX shareholders meeting in New York this Thursday. In March, Clear Channel announced its intention to purchase a rival radio chain, AM/FM, for $17 billion, giving it control of more than 900 radio stations across the country. The Department of Justice cleared the deal last week, asking only that Clear Channel sell 99 of the stations to satisfy antitrust concerns (formal FCC approval is expected to be forthcoming).

After one profligate, $20 billion quarter, the company is poised to become the primary conduit through which Americans are exposed to popular music. Scher and other independent promoters like him will face a competitor with a near-lock on the venues, the tours and the radio play and promotion that provide the life-blood of live entertainment. The coming merger of these two enormous media properties will effectively reduce Scher to a vastly outgunned underdog in a business he helped to invent.

In a sense, it already has. In three short years, SFX has come to dominate the American concert industry, applying corporate marketing strategies to rock and other live entertainment on an unprecedented scale. In the process, it has been squeezing out a diversity of different players -- booking agents, promoters and radio programmers -- those who once were the hidden forces behind the concerts, responsible for marshaling the artists, the venues and the radio play.

Even by pre-Clear Channel standards, SFX is huge. The company owns 200 concert halls across the country and represents more than 40 tours this summer -- many of which it owns outright -- as well as a host of Broadway shows; it also serves as talent agent to sport stars such as Michael Jordan and Andre Agassi. The bands it represents are the biggest and most profitable in the business, from N'Sync to Tina Turner; in June, it purchased the entire Pearl Jam tour, which now plays almost exclusively SFX venues across the country.

While SFX may be huge, Clear Channel is voluminous: In addition to its radio holdings, the company owns 19 television stations, more than half a million billboards, and a new domain address, .cc, based in the Cocos-Keeling Islands, that it promotes with a blanket ad campaign on its own radio stations.

The new Clear Channel-SFX combine promises an unprecedented level of concentration in an industry that once thrived on the creative tension between radio programmers, concert promoters and artists. Clear Channel is taking over a company that has already destroyed the unspoken system of relationships and loyalties that long characterized the live music business. In the new world of one-stop concert production, booking agents have been castrated, already-successful bands are offered fantastic sums in return for centralized control and less well-known bands are left with fewer places to hone their sound.

Today, Scher looks at his former peers and competitors and sees just one corporate logo: SFX Entertainment, which purchased Delsener-Slater, Don Law, Bill Graham Productions and dozens of other smaller promoters over the past three years in a tidal wave of cash and stock buyouts. Scher's colleagues, many of whom launched bands like the Velvet Underground, Bruce Springsteen, Talking Heads, Blondie and countless others through a legendary combination of favors, wiles and muscle, are now part of a company which played the Brady Bunch theme at a simulcast meeting in April to introduce the former independents now working under SFX's corporate umbrella. That in-house broadcast featured the grinning faces of nine formerly independent promoters (from St. Louis, New York, San Francisco, Houston and elsewhere) in split-screen, nodding at each other as the Brady Bunch tune ran with lyrics tweaked for the occasion: "Here's the story of a bunch of companies ... That's the way we became SFX."

"Being independent now means something different every year," says Scher, sitting in his office surrounded by rock memorabilia. "Three years ago, there was no SFX: We were all independent. Two years ago, SFX was of a certain size, and there were still a lot of us left. Now they're in with Clear Channel, and independents are anybody who's not with them ..."

"Will this new entity come in and play nice with the neighbors?" Scher asks sardonically.

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