Neon Trees 

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Originally from Highland, Fox was in high school at a time when “there wasn’t really a local scene” to speak of, he says. He’d make trips north to Salt Lake City music venues such as the now-defunct Club DV8 and The Zephyr Club to see concerts, but never experienced a local show while in high school.

But in the early ’90s, when Fox was in college, Utah County experienced a ska craze with homegrown bands such as Swim Herschel Swim and Stretch Armstrong, which were influential not just in the ska community but in the larger music scene.

“The scene exploded,” Fox says. He started managing a couple of smaller local bands and began to be involved in concert promotion. “I got caught up in what was truly a movement.”

Fox’s work as a promoter as well as a manager of bands such as ’90s Salt Lake City rock act Clover eventually led him to managing music venues in the Provo area. From 1996 to 2005, he managed Wrapsody, Johnny B’s and the original location of Muse Music.

But as Fox’s role in the scene grew, the surge of music coming out of Provo was receding. By the early 2000s, Fox says, “a lot of the bigger bands had moved on. That’s the one thing about Provo: There’s always been a ton of talent, but it’s a transient town. So people come and go as they graduate college or whatever.”

In 2005, while managing other people’s venues, Fox started thinking about moving on, too, forming “bigger ideas of what I wanted to do,” he says. “I really couldn’t do it in the space with someone else that had vastly different ideas than me.”

Fox found himself at a “crossroads,” he says, and considered moving to Salt Lake City or Los Angeles. But in the end, he realized, “If I was going to open my venue, I should probably do it in the town that I grew up in.”

He had a vision for a venue that would help “bring things back to how they were in the ’90s,” he says. “I found the scene thrived depending on the quality of the venues there were.” Muse Music was slowly building a renaissance, but Fox says he thought there was a need for a venue with a larger capacity that would inspire bands to climb higher and reach further.

“I felt that creating a legitimate venue and adding a structure that stressed work ethic and growth would inspire the creation of better bands and, ideally, change the musical culture,” he says. “The original idea with Velour was to create a legitimate venue that would force bands to take things more seriously,” as well as “push bands to grow past Provo.”

Provo: Where Dreams Come True
Glenn and Allen arrived in Provo and officially formed Neon Trees in late 2005, a few months before Velour opened Jan. 13, 2006—Friday the 13th, as it happens.

In the Neon Trees Audio-Files episode—which Fox co-produced—Glenn says, “Of course, in my mind, I’m thinking, ‘This is like a big step in my adulthood. Provo gonna’s be where dreams come true.’ And I felt very Jack Kerouac about it, and I was really, really excited to take on this new adventure.”

But when the band began regularly playing shows in Provo, they found that the venue selection was sparse. “There was this coffee shop called Steamers that was sort of more for punk bands, and then there was Muse Music, which was kind of the only other venue at the time,” Glenn says in an interview with City Weekly. “So when Velour came, it was like, ‘Oh, this is legit, this feels like an actual stage with lights and sound.’ That was our goal: ‘Let’s play at Velour.’ ”

Fox had already heard enough buzz about Neon Trees that he made the decision to grant them a headlining show at Velour before hearing any of their music. On Feb. 11, 2006, Neon Trees made their first appearance at the venue—a month after its opening—with their original lineup of Glenn, Allen, Mike Liechty, Jason Gibbons and Nathan Evans. That night, Neon Trees performed with Pariah Poetic and a screamo band called The New Nervous, fronted by Book on Tape Worm songwriter/frontman Scott Shepard; Neon Trees and The New Nervous often shared stages during Neon Trees’ first year as a band.

Fox, who tends to have a tough-love approach with bands, says his choice to give Neon Trees the gig “went against my total protocol. My whole thing is making people earn what they get [and] not just give bands opportunities necessarily. But yeah, I just trusted some of the people that I’d known that had seen them.”

And Neon Trees—particularly Glenn’s captivating stage presence—delivered. “The thing that stood out for sure was Tyler,” Fox says. “Tyler has been a natural frontman [since] the second I saw him for the first time, so I expected big things out of them just from seeing Tyler at that first show.”