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Mark Baker

Written by Matt Kalkhoff

After literally changing the face of the gay party circuit earlier this decade with his legendary groundbreaking soirees held during Orlando’s Gay Days, prolific party producer Mark Baker took a few years off to rest, reflect, recoup and recharge. Now he’s back with a brand new party concept for Central Florida’s first major dance-music festival held over Memorial Day Weekend: World|Vibe Orlando.

Following five years of consistently (and incredibly) topping his own extraordinary creativity with parties that included Colosseum, Magic Journeys, and Stars, the Circuit impresario finally maxed out on ideas. In 2005, he sold his Disney-bejeweled party scepter to Johnny Chisholm and retreated from the spotlight to focus on his other career, directing television commercials. He still produced the occasional corporate event (at least until the economy went south). Now he’s back producing parties, this time inspired by sexually ambiguous (i.e., mixed) mega-events like Miami’s Ultra Music Festival, Los Angeles’ Electric Daisy Carnival and Montreal’s Black & Blue.

While Gay Days has always focused on its gay male audience, World|Vibe Orlando is less about lifestyle and more about the music—House music, to be exact—and will cater accordingly to that genre’s diverse legions of devotees. “It’s not a totally different audience,” Baker assures. But a different one nonetheless. Headliners include DJs Boris, Chus & Ceballos, Oscar G, Jonathan Peters, Roger Sanchez and a host of other established and emerging talent.

This is a big step for Baker, who made his name taking big chances. Back in 1982 he moved from Toledo, Ohio, to Orlando and began working for Walt Disney World at the Hall of Presidents on the technical side of the animatronic show. After attending his first Circuit party in 1996, he recalls thinking, “I can do that.” After a couple of false starts, he finally hit his stride in 1998 with a late-night affair called Magic Journeys. Originally held at Front Row during Gay Days, the party later moved to Arabian Nights to accommodate thousands more revelers and expanded to several nights throughout the weekend.

It was the award-winning Colosseum party he threw at Hard Rock Live with DJ Abel that really put Baker on the international party map. “It was like a hybrid Circuit party,” Baker says. “It’s an entire evening put together with shows that interconnect. With my background in television, I thought of doing it like an entertainment show with a progression, a script for the entire night. It was a more thought-out entertainment experience.”

By 2002, the Sunday night crowds had far outgrown Hard Rock’s 3,500 capacity, so Baker moved it to Friday night and replaced it with the Stars Party at Universal Studios Islands of Adventure, with the ability to accommodate 6,000 revelers. Along with the daytime Groove parties at Universal Studios, Gay Days became Baker’s baby for several years. He also branched out to the hot (and hotly competitive) Miami scene with White Dreams at the Miami Seaquarium during White Party and a Winter Party event at the Ice Palace.

From Gay Days to World|Vibe

While at the top of his game, Baker decided to sell his company and the rights to his Gay Days parties four years ago to Johnny Chisholm. Eventually, he says, he realized, “You can’t really top yourself. I had done it for five years, and you kind of run out of new ideas. There were some pretty creative components to what we’d done, but I thought we had taken it as far as we could. I thought it was a good time to step away and go on to do other things.”

He takes a grand and all-encompassing approach to producing events in order to live up to his personal motto, “Beyond belief is where this party begins.” “We know Gay Days weekend is a very competitive market,” Baker acknowledged during an interview back in 2002. “If you don’t have the biggest, best thing, probably the next year you won’t be around. So we just make sure that all our parties are the best.”

To accomplish this, he would assemble a core team of more than a dozen people to coordinate the weekend. “The people we hire are really great special events people,” he explained. “They’re very technical people who have worked for a lot of theme parks. They take the week off and come work for us. We have an individual project manager for each of the parties, and a dedicated technical person who handles all the technical stuff. They’re not people that do other jobs like Realtors or something else during the week—they do special events all the time, and that’s all they do.”

Now operating under the moniker of Mark Baker Creative, Baker has teamed up with Envibe Entertainment, which is run by his good friend and House music aficionado Steve Milo, and Groove Travel for his World|Vibe Orlando venture. Among the many considerations behind the creation of this new party weekend were the weakened economy and what he sees as a shift in the interests and expectations of a key constituency: “What’s interesting about the gay demographic is, the younger you go, the less interested those people are in exclusively gay parties. It’s just not such a big deal to anybody.”

Baker also saw World|Vibe as an opportunity to do something new and entirely different. “As a promoter, when you go to Ultra and there’s 30,000 people standing in the middle of a field, you do kind of go, 30,000 times $85 is...” he says as his voice trails off, with the unspoken question: How do the numbers add up? “I love the creative, but you’ve got to make it run as a business. I think that’s why I got sold on this project more so than some of the other ones I’ve been presented with. I thought, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of potential here.’”

At the same time, the current economic climate demands competitive pricing and affordable packages. “My gut is, we’re being very realistic,” he says of his low break-even numbers, which are based on average ticket prices of $45 to $55. “Everybody’s trying to find new ways to make money. This weekend attracts a whole different audience that probably wouldn’t come to Disney. So here’s a chance to bring in some new business. We were able to negotiate with the venues and hotels because everybody in the entertainment [and hospitality] business is hurting right now. There are people now giving us deals who two or three years ago would not have given us the time of day.” Baker’s “Be Here” page on his website, WorldVibeOrlando.com, lists one- to three-night travel packages, including hotel and tickets, ranging from $235 to $550.

Time and again Mark Baker has proven himself a remarkably creative innovator who has consistently set many of the trends that other event producers and party promoters will eventually follow. With World|Vibe Orlando, he seems destined to continue that magnificent legacy. One can only imagine what he’ll dream up next.

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