The Philadelphia Story

Philadelphia may have lost a chance to become the next rock festival destination when C3 Presents withdrew its bid in late November to bring a Lollapalooza-style event to the city, but nearby Vineland, N.J., wasted no time in pouncing on opportunity when it came knocking.

U.K.-based Festival Republic, formerly Mean Fiddler Music Group and a Live Nation majority-owned company headed up by Reading, Leeds and Glastonbury producer Melvin Benn, was already talking with officials in Vineland, about 40 miles east of Philly, about staging a European-style festival. Benn also has a longtime relationship with "the three Charlies" – Charles Attal, Charlie Walker and Charlie Jones – who head up C3 Presents.

The result is a joint venture between the two companies to stage the inaugural Vineland Music Festival, scheduled August 8-10, the weekend after Chicago’s Lollapalooza, and expected to feature at least some overlapping artists. Like the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in California and its U.K. counterparts, the Vineland fest will allow camping over its three days.

The November 27th announcement resolved several issues. C3 Presents found a partner and location for its festival with the help of a cooperative city. Festival Republic found its long-sought site and a partner with U.S. festival experience, which it has history with.

And, back in Philadelphia, Live Nation regional president Larry Magid has a calendar open to possibly stage a celebration in 2008 without the distraction of a competing festival: his 40th anniversary of promoting concerts in the city.

The Vineland Music Festival, featuring an estimated 80-100 bands, will take place on more than 500 acres of lush, privately owned farmland outside Vineland in southern New Jersey. While it is patterned on the highly successful Reading festival in England, organizers say its closest U.S. cousin is Bonnaroo – but with a rock ’n’ roll focus.

"It will be a fantastic festival. I hope Vineland will earn the same status as Reading, Leeds and Glastonbury," Benn told Pollstar. "Those are the three big festivals I produce and promote. They are named after the towns they are in, they are destination festivals and camping festivals, and I want Vineland to become just that. In the rock festival community I think Reading is the most important, and that’s the model we’re bringing to America."

C3’s Charlie Jones believes the Northeast is ripe for such a festival – which was why his company had been pursuing one in Philadelphia in the first place. The Vineland location provides easy access from Philadelphia, Washington D.C., New York City, Atlantic City and Baltimore, Benn said.

"That part of the country is ready for a multi-day, multi-stage, large festival like Lollapalooza, Coachella or Bonnaroo and that’s why we’re there. It’s truly an honor to be able to work with Melvin Benn," Jones told Pollstar.

"It’s probably going to be closer to Bonnaroo than any other American festival. But the goal with this one is to take Melvin’s European camping festival and our version of downtown, urban, very customer-friendly and detail-oriented festivals and merge the two for an obvious American and European mix. That’s the goal."

According to Benn and Jones, the decision to partner on a joint venture in Vineland was an easy one. Despite a year of negotiations in Philadelphia, C3’s proposal was hitting snags in the city of Brotherly Love. And with a long friendship between Benn, Jones and Attal, it simply made good business sense to join forces across the state line in Jersey.

"We had been working with [Philadelphia’s] Fairmount Park Commission and its conservancy for about a year and we were very, very close," Jones said. "Melvin was simultaneously working on his event. Just recently, we met with him regarding the two events and his site is absolutely beautiful. It helps us accomplish more than one goal at the same time, so we formally withdrew our offer from the city of Philadelphia and partnered with Melvin."

The original C3 proposal was for a three-day festival in the Belmont Plateau area of the Fairmount parkway system, which stretches across the city. Magid favors an amphitheatre event near the Mann Center for Performing Arts for his 40th.

C3 reportedly withdrew its offer shortly after a November 14th hearing, at which the park commission heard complaints about traffic and other issues and adjourned without addressing the merits of either proposal.

Less than two weeks later, C3 was out of Philly and partnered instead with Festival Republic. Typically, an agreement to partner on an event of Vineland’s size and complexity takes a bit longer to negotiate.

"In this particular case, we’re atypical," Benn said. "Charlie Jones, Charles Attal and I met a few years ago and I liked them. In some ways it doesn’t become any simpler or any more complicated than that. Charlie Walker joined them from Live Nation and that only added to their credibility and stature.

"When we realized that we had a choice to either jump into the same market as competitors or jump into the same market as partners, we shook hands and that was it; a done deal."

Jones insists his company wasn’t out to step on any territorial toes, and the fact that C3 is partnered with a Live Nation company in the market is testament that competitors can and do work together when a project makes sense.

"There’s never been any intent to go after or harm anybody," Jones said. "We have our business model and we knew that the area was ready for this type of event and that’s why we went after it.

"There are millions of people in that area and the way that we market and sell tickets to our festivals allows us to track demographics and where people are coming from, so the kind of [shows] we are doing [don’t saturate the market]."

Magid said he is continuing to work on a proposal for a major 2008 event in Philadelphia.

"We’re basically waiting to hear back from the city on logistics – how many extra cars the adjacent roads can handle, how many parking spaces there actually are, without impeding any other institutions," Magid told Pollstar. "Then we can figure out how many people can get onto the site. Then we’ll make an offer.

"But contrary to reports, we never pulled out. We never lost interest. We’re not interested because somebody else was interested; we’re interested because we’ve been interested in the site and have done things there for years.

"We’re waiting to hear how the city and park commission are going to address these issues and then we’ll be ready to go. We want to be ready in June, which would work better for us and the city, and is closer to our actual anniversary. Then we’ll see how far it goes and if it can become an annual event."

In any event, what could have been a thorny situation has worked itself out to the apparent satisfaction of everyone involved – and to the benefit of music fans. "We’re grown up enough to know that sometimes things work for us individually and sometimes things work for us collectively," Benn said. "I think that’s what’s fantastic here – it’s an amazingly grown-up attitude.

"We can all try to put something together in the Northeast or we can actually work together on a single thing that will be a credit to the area and the industry. Above all … the fan is the real beneficiary."