MusicFest Changes Its Tune

The Beale Street Music Festival turns a corner with a new booker, more music.

by Mark Jordan

he divorce between the Beale Street Music Festival and Mid-South Concerts became final Tuesday when officials with Memphis in May, the festival’s organizer, announced that Memphian Fred Jones’ Summitt Management and Florida-based Cellar Door Concerts would be charged with booking acts for next year’s event.
The introduction of the festival’s new talent buyers was just one of the announcements made at a press conference at the Hard Rock Cafe Tuesday. In addition, MIM executive director Wes Brustad said that the 1998 BSMF will expand to six stages, with the Memphis Music Tent and Gospel Tents becoming separate venues lasting all three days of the festival. In addition, a World Music Tent, featuring music from the MIM honored country, will be added, the Blues Tent will be doubled in size, and a giant video screen will be set up on one of the headliner stages.
Nationally recognized Cellar Door, whose credits include work on tours by the Eagles, U2, as well as events for the Super Bowl, will be charged with identifying acts for the two main stages. Final booking decisions will be made MIM’s executive committee and Brustad.
Jones’ Summitt Management, which organizes the city’s largest single-day special event, the Southern Heritage Classic, will be chiefly responsible for booking the blues and gospel stages. He’ll do so in consultation with the Blues Foundation, whose Handy Awards ceremony on the Thursday before the BSMF has become a sort of unofficial springboard to the event.
“Every decision we’ve made has been to make this festival the best and biggest in the country,” Brustad said Tuesday. “This year we’re taking another leap.”
Two things that will not change will be the festival’s ticket price and its policy allowing pass-outs and re-entries. In recent days, downtown merchants were upset to hear that MIM was considering not letting festival-goers come and go from the festival grounds, a move that would adversely affect their business.
The installation of Summitt and Cellar Door as talent buyers brings to an official close the seven-year relationship between Bob Kelley’s Mid-South Concerts and the BSMF that saw big-name acts like Bob Dylan and Van Morrison push the event among the elite of national festivals.
The rift between MIM and Mid-South developed last month when Brustad asked Kelley to take a smaller role in organizing the BSMF. Kelley’s Mid-South Concerts, long the dominant concert promoter in Memphis, has produced, booked, and promoted the festival since 1990, with MIM picking up most of the tab for staging the event and Mid-South underwriting it. In exchange for its expertise in drawing entertainment to the festival, Mid-South has split the festival’s revenues 50-50 with MIM.
But when Kelley and Brustad met recently to renegotiate Mid-South’s contract for the BSMF, the MIM executive director asked Kelley to relinquish his other roles and act only as the talent buyer, a move which would pay his company only a modest flat fee compared to the as much as $750,000 it’s estimated to have earned annually under the revenue-sharing agreement.
The reason for the change, says 1997-98 MIM president Sally Shy, is the organization’s need for a greater share of the festival’s revenues to help fund and expand MIM services.
The move away from the Mid-South partnership would put the organization of the BSMF more in line with similar events around the country.
“It’s very unusual to have an event where you split the income like that,” says Bruce Skinner, president of the International Festivals and Events Association, a Washington-based organization for the special-events industry with more than 2,400 members, including Memphis In May.
“The two most common ways it is done is that one, [the sponsoring organization] has someone on staff book the talent, or two, it hires an outside promoter to book the talent and pay them a flat fee,” Skinner says. “The biggest and better festivals will have someone on staff.”
For his part, Kelley says he intends to go ahead with plans to stage his own music festival within a month either way of the BSMF. He says he has already identified a location and is researching names for possible copyright infrigments.
Though Summitt and regional promoters like Cellar Door put on occasional shows here, Kelley and Mid-South Concerts have been a major force on the local concert scene for 25 years, a dominance that could come back to haunt the festival’s new bookers.
“Memphis is a very unique market,” Kelley says. “I think you have to live here to understand it, and even then you don’t always understand it. … [Cellar Door] has done a couple of shows here that I thought were winners and weren’t.”
But with a nationally recognized promoter like Cellar Door and a booker with the local savvy of Jones on board, MIM officials say they aren’t worried.
“I think you’ll find with a festival the caliber of Memphis in May, the artists want to play it,” says Dan Barnett, vice president of special event for Cellar Door. “They’re not going to care as much who is booking it, as long as it’s someone they know and trust and as long as it’s an event with the reputation of the Beale Street Music Festival.” n

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