Gary Tovar

Gary Tovar is known as a music promoter and marijuana smuggler in the US. He named his music concert business Goldenvoice Productions, after a strain of marijuana that users said gave them a feeling of being spoken to by angels. Tovar is no longer involved with smuggling but acts as a consultant to Goldenvoice, which now operates the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival that has been compared to the Glastonbury Festival and is the most profitable music festival in the US.

Tovar was born in Los Angeles and began smuggling illicit goods as a 14-year-old when he brought fireworks into the US from Tijuana in Mexico. Influenced by someone referred to as LaRue, who was connected to Timothy Leary's Brotherhood of Eternal Love, Tovar's involvement with marijuana began in the late 1960s, with his sources for the seeds that he distributed including US servicemen on furlough from the Vietnam War. His organization was such that he was able to guarantee a market and a distribution network for the growers to whom he sold the seeds. The strains that he imported included Thai stick and Acapulco Gold. He earned many millions of dollars before being arrested by federal drug agents on March 9, 1991. He fought conspiracy charges from Los Angeles County Jail before being imprisoned in October 1992 for seven years on four counts relating to trafficking from Arizona.

Tovar's interest in music promotion developed in 1981, when his younger sister told him that the police were stifling the development of punk rock music in southern California. This was three years after he and his sister had attended the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco to see the last concert performed by the Sex Pistols. The punk rock genre was not popular with promoters or authorities, mainly because of its association with violence, but Tovar believes that "We had every right to perform and every right to this culture" and he was not perturbed when put under pressure by the police. He considered punk to be the successor to the ageing hippie ethos and he caught an anti-establishment adolescent wave, saying that "The hippies were getting old and turning into yuppies. They behaved toward their children as their parents had to them." The business was at first called Golden Voice, with the words later being concatenated.

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