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Relativity Travel’s Peter Scher Dead At 70

Peter Scher
Peter Scher, left, with Kiss and Sound Broker's Jan Landy
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SÃO PAULO, Brazil (CelebrityAccess) – Concert industry veteran Peter Scher, who served as a tour manager for the likes of Lou Reed and Barry Manilow, and later launched a Relativity Travel, a travel agency catering to touring artists, has died. He was 70.

Scher
Peter Scher

Scher’s death was reported by a longtime colleague who said that he died at his home in Brazil from complications of COVID-19.

Scher, who was born and raised in New York City, landed his first industry gig as a gopher at Sound Blast 66, a concert at Yankee Stadium featuring Ray Charles, The Beach Boys, and Stevie Wonder, among others.

After getting his first taste of the concert industry, Scher began spending time at the iconic Fillmore East, where he filled in, doing whatever was necessary when they venue was short-handed.

Scher then managed to parley his experience at the Fillmore into a gig as a tour manager, supporting artists such as Barry Manilow, Tanya Tucker and Lou Reed while they were on the road.

“I asked myself, ‘What am I good at?’ The answer was logistics. I had booked or coordinated travel for many groups,” Scher told Travel Weekly’s Phyllis Fine in 1999.

In 1983, he made a career move to booking travel for rock tours, first at Hoffman Travel, and later at his own boutique travel agency, Relativity Travel, which he launched in 1991.

With offices in Los Angeles and New York, Relativity Travel boasted a client roster that included Bon Jovi, KISS, and also handled travel for film and television production.

“I couldn’t just sit there and do ordinary corporate travel. That’s not my personal style,” Scher said.


Of course, catering to traveling celebrities can be demanding and requires a particular attention to detail as well as a willingness to be available to clients at all times.

“They make a lot of changes, and the changes they make aren’t always rational. It could be a whim. They could say, ‘I was talking to one of the guys, and we decided we want to be [booked in a hotel] near the beach,’ ” Scher told Fine in the 1999 interview. “You can’t say to them, ‘I just spent two days booking you someplace else!’ You have to be somebody who can go with the flow.”

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