Roobound: How Bonnaroo Rises Above The Festival Glut

Danny Clinch – Bonnaroo co-founder
Richard Goodstone, Rick Farman, Jonathan Mayers, Kerry Black, Ashley Capps

Bonnaroo, for the 17th consecutive year, will greatly disrupt life in rural Manchester, Tenn. (pop: 10,142) this June 7-10. Festivalgoers can, among many other things, sing karaoke with T-Pain, attend yoga classes led by a psychic medium, dance with giant puppets in a grove filled with hammocks and/or listen to bedtime stories in a farm house just before sunrise.

“No one can accuse us of being afraid of trying new ideas,” says AC Entertainment President and CEO Ashley Capps, who in 2002 launched Bonnaroo with Superfly’s Rick Farman, Jonathan Mayers, Kerry Black and Richard Goodstone. “From the beginning, we were in many ways planning the amazing festival experience that we all dreamed of attending ourselves. And I’m not just talking about the music. … Year after year, in planning Bonnaroo, the primary guiding principle, if you will, was how can we blow people away?” 

That apparently didn’t happen as much in 2016, when, in its first year after AC and Superfly sold Live Nation a controlling stake in the festival and partnered with its festival company C3 Presents, Bonnaroo saw a “record low” attendance of 45,537, according to The Tennessean. The 28,156 drop in ticket sales and $9.02 million drop in revenue from the previous year’s event was precipitous. This, despite a lineup topped by festival mainstays like Dead & Company, Pearl Jam and a reunited LCD Soundsystem.

“The beauty of our business is there’s still a lot of magic attached to it,” Farman says of the inexact science of programming a festival. “For all the ways you can use data and try and figure out how to predict what acts will mean what, at the end of the day our business is still filled with lots of surprises.”

“I think [2016] made us think about: What are ways that we can distinguish this experience from other [festivals]?” Mayers recalls. “Because it is a more competitive environment [now].”

This year, Capps and his co-promoters aspire to blow people away in the festival’s veritable pop-up city of campgrounds, where they will be curating an arty, eclectic mix of trippy visual installations and experimental, experiential “activations.” It’s how the festival hopes to distinguish itself in a market that’s saturated with monolithic lineup posters and short on exclusive top-draw headliners. And it’s all going down outside the gates of the main concert area Centeroo, where headliners Eminem, Muse and The Killers top a bill rounded out by artists ranging from pop stars of the Spotify zeitgeist like Dua Lipa and Future, to veteran performers like Sheryl Crow and Chic featuring Nile Rodgers. Sure, fans had an opportunity to see Muse and The Killers share the bill at Lollapalooza last year, but is that the same experience as seeing them at Bonnaroo?

“There are a lot of great events out there with really strong lineups, so what makes this one unique?” says Superfly’s Mayers. “I think that is something over a long period of time we’ve really dug deep [into]: What makes Bonnaroo Bonnaroo?” 

Courtesy of Jorgensen Photography / Bonnaroo – Bonnaroo

Upon its arrival as the new millennium’s answer to Woodstock, Bonnaroo – a jam-band-centric, immersive four-day weekend of music, mud, camping and noodle dancing in the unforgiving Southern summer heat – became an icon of the American concert experience. As such, AC, Superfly and longtime collaborator, investor and Dave Matthews Band manager Coran Capshaw cultivated a homegrown subculture of hardcore ride-or-die return customers that, like Deadheads, Parrotheads or Juggalos, have their own name: Bonnaroovians.

Jason Hojenski, a prolific Bonnaroo super fan behind the 5,000-plus-follower-strong Bonnarooster Twitter and a former message board administrator of the heavily trafficked online Bonnaroo kiosk Inforoo, says it’s that idiosyncratic, welcoming communal culture that’s kept him and his fellow die-hards coming back to Bonnaroo year after year. And it’s what’s continued to define the festival even when it went mainstream in the mid-aughts, pivoting to a multi-genre model that helped lay that groundwork for the national festival circuit. “There isn’t anything like Bonnaroo at a camping magnitude,” he explains. “For me, that’s appealing. For four days Bonnaroo becomes like a city – the population of Bonnaroo is bigger than a lot of places in Tennessee.”

“The camping culture infuses the festival whether you personally camp or not,” Capps observes, explaining how he sees the commitment it requires of fans as both Bonnaroo’s greatest challenge and biggest opportunity. “We have to elevate the experience of the weekend into something that is truly unforgettable and really something that you can’t experience at just a normal concert.”

Farman adds, “What I think is unique to the opportunity at Bonnaroo is that we are a 24-hour event. The majority of people living there on site for the duration of the event, and still, when you look at the festival landscape, there’s not too many events where you have the opportunity to go super deep with people beyond just the music lineups and some other associated activities.”

For the 90 percent to 95 percent of Bonnaroovians who, according to Mayers, don’t opt for any of the festival’s multiple levels of VIP amenities, the counterculture “Lord of the Flies” aspect of braving the elements is what drives the energy of the festival.

This helps explain why this year’s Bonnaroo is Turbo-charging its offerings in the camping areas and ramped up its community experiences” department initiated after 2016’s dropoff and run by Caitlin Maloney, the department’s creative director.  What were once called “pods” is now “plazas” of which there are seven all featuring free WiFi, showers, activities and art, charging stations, a “Clean Vibes Trading Post” and more. There’s also new themed campsites ike Solo Roo’er for individuals, SheROO for women the non-binary identified and free Family Camping and Soberoo Camping.

But happy campers’ allegiances aren’t blind. And in an era of city-centric festivals, where older and/or more general-interest music fans have increasingly more convenient options, the immersive Bonnaroo experience is a tougher sell, especially when so many of those festivals feature many of the same artists up and down their bills.

“The older fan base, they sort of stopped coming to Bonnaroo because of the whole Live Nation thing,” Hojenski says. “When you have a corporate takeover like that, there’s going to be some animosity against the festival. Some people were saying they sold out.”

Kenny Rodriguez / House of Yes / Bonnaroo – House of Yes Indeed!
A pop-up version out of Brooklyn’s House of Yes, a circus-and-cabaret themed party, is one of many extra-musical experiential offerings at this year’s Bonnaroo.

Noting infrastructure improvements like brick-and-mortar shower and bathroom facilities and other investments to the Bonnaroo site, Farman says fans shouldn’t fear his and his co-founders’ corporate partners. “I think most people recognize, especially those who’ve been attending the event, that the quality of what we’re doing has really only improved in a positive way since Live Nation and C3 became involved,” he says. “I kind of liken it to a great team adding a superstar player. … We have the resources of Live Nation on so many levels, whether it just be financial or marketing or data insights, just so many things that an organization like that can bring to the table.”

Bob Roux, Live Nation’s president, U.S. concerts, tells Pollstar the company tries to stay out of promoters like AC and Superfly’s way when it comes to the creative direction of its festival assets.

“A big part of Live Nation’s success in the festival space, and a key reason we’ve been able to scale to over 100 festivals globally, is because we take a hands-off approach and let our festival founders continue to manage and organize the great events they created,” Roux explains. “If and when an event wants support with access to capital, talent, sponsors or other resources, we’re always standing by. The beauty of this model is that it allows Live Nation to continue to grow our business, while each individual festival continues making the right decisions for their brand, artists and fans. It’s a win-win.”

But Mayers says Live Nation and C3 have assumed dominant roles in building Bonnaroo’s recent lineups.

“Live Nation, over the past two years since the partnership, has taken much more of a leadership position on programming,” Mayers explains.

“I think Superfly and AC are certainly on the committee, but I would say now it’s led by Live Nation. Now, again, it’s a living, breathing thing, right? How that may change in the future, I don’t know, but that’s been the case over the past couple years. … C3, over the past couple years, have been really leading the submission of offers.”

“Initially it was me and the partners at Superfly [booking the festival],” Capps says, “and it grew after that to sometimes being an almost unwieldy number of people. And then when Live Nation and C3 came into the mix, you know, there’ve been even more voices in the process, and I think these days we’re starting to zone in on it a little bit differently. … In a way, in the last couple of years, because there have been so many voices in the mix, we lost a bit of that curatorial vision that characterized Bonnaroo in the past. So we’re openly discussing how we get that back.”

One only-at-Bonnaroo element of the festival’s programing that remains a staple of the lineup is the Superjams, where the unexpected consistently seems to happen. “The placement of artists on particular stages, even to see what magic could be created, that is something we think a lot about,” Farman says of making moments like one that went viral in 2012 when reclusive R&B icon D’Angelo made his first onstage appearance in over a decade, joining a one-off house band led by Questlove.”

Among this year’s unique offerings are a satellite installment of the Grand Ole Opry, set to feature country legends the likes of 

Del McCoury and Bobby Bare, cream-of-the-crop modern twangers like Brothers Osborne and Nikki Lane, along with Old Crow Medicine Show, the act that played Bonnaroo’s opening set in 2002. The shindig will be broadcast live on terrestrial and satellite radio, something the Opry hasn’t done remotely since a similar event at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2005.

Also worth catching will be Into the Great Wide Open, a Superjam tribute to Tom Petty featuring a house band led by members of My Morning Jacket and VHS or Beta, with guest vocalists like Cage the Elephant frontman Matt Shultz, who will be curating an all-weekend-long interactive art party he’s calling Happy Roo Day in the campgrounds.

Speaking of the campground events, Hojenski has observed a lot of excitement in the Bonnaroo online fan community over the extra-musical experiential installments debuting at the festival this weekend. He points to examples like a pop-up version of 

circus-like Brooklyn dance club House of Yes, the left-field film and visual programming schedule of Tiny Cinema and the ambient anti-rave venue Tonalism – which features an all-night spate of ambient music DJ sets in a tripped-out barn where festivalgoers are encouraged “to bring pillows, cushions, or blankets to lay down and listen,” according to the festival’s site – along with The Ville, a celebration of musical, cultural and culinary options from nearby Nashville.

“In the past, there hasn’t been a lot [to do] in the campgrounds,” he says. “I think it’s going to be a game-changer. … Going into next year, if they book better acts, I could see this thing selling out, between the combination of the activities going on and the music. … I believe the younger generation that is now being the focus and coming into Bonnaroo – they want the whole experience. They want to go and do karaoke with T-Pain, stuff like that.”

Capps is also optimistic. “I think we’re at an interesting time in the evolution of the festivals,” Capps says. “You’ll undoubtedly see some that will fade away, but the beautiful thing I think is the social experience that they help to nurture and foster is something that fans have really embraced. … As far as the future of festivals go, I’m very, very bullish about that.”