Mempho Music Festival's Ambitious Second Year: Revitalizing The Home Of Sun, Stax and Rib Racks

Patrick Hughes – Mempho Music Festival 2017
Jason Isbell performs

The second-year Mempho Music Festival kicks off tonight, topped by Beck, Phoenix, Post Malone, Janelle Monae at Shelby Farms Park in Memphis, Tenn., for the weekend.

The site is 4,500 acres in the middle of the city’s metro, more than five times the size of Central Park in The Big Apple, and has just undergone a $70 million redevelopment.

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The festival was launched last year by Diego Winegardner of Big River Productions, who has worked in finance in the New York area for the last couple decades but felt the urge to bring a major event to his hometown.

Talent buyer for the event is Madison Entertainment’s Roger LeBlanc, who was just named festival buyer of the year at the IEBA Awards and is part of the KAABOO team with events in San Diego, Cayman Islands and a new one happening next year in Dallas at AT&T Stadium, teamed with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones.

Mempho is capped at 20,000 capacity per day.

– Diego Winegardner
Big River Presents

Winegardner talked to Pollstar about the vision for Mempho, the importance of growing organically in an event’s early years, and getting the community on board.

Why Memphis? Why a festival?

Music festivals have to have an identity, a set of principles, a core DNA that’s unique to them or it’s going to be hard to distinguish themselves from other festivals around the country. I grew up around Memphis, Tenn. I was immersed in that great, rich musical history and legacy.

Thinking about Memphis’ place in that American music history , my collective experiences growing up in this town and now this incredible setting, I thought Memphis deserves a world-class music festival.

What’s the vision for the lineup?

The culture and the DNA of this to me has to have equal parts current, fresh new music, a platform for all the great local Memphis talent and artistry there today and at the same time we always tip our hats to that Memphis history.

This we’re going to tribute legendary Royal Studios where Al Green recorded all his hits. There’s so much of that Memphis thing that we want to be sure is in the Mempho DNA, because we want people from around the country to come visit and experience that music history. Being the birth place of blues, soul and rock ’n’ roll – it’s very unique that any city can lay claim to that.

How about this year’s headliners?

Having Nas there with Post Malone is pretty cool. Nas is arguably on the Mt. Rushmore of hip-hop, definitely one of the top 10. It’s really cool to have them back to back. Janelle Monae, I’m super excited to see her perform. Obviously Beck’s reputation speaks for itself – he’s been winning Grammys since mid-‘90s and is an ageless, timeless performer. Phoenix does an amazing show, they destroyed Governors Ball a couple years ago. There’s an overall vibe, a funk/soul/rock thing that merges together in a nice way.

The first few years of any festival are notoriously difficult. Care to weigh in on the challenges?

Ultimately, particularly when your’e starting out, festivals tend to take a while to survive on their own. Typically you need to be thinking 3-5 years to really stand on its own. If you make it that far, it doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods but certainly you have a higher chance to succeed.

Certainly you need to be very careful not to dig yourself too large a hole in the early years, and need to really be mindful how you grow the festival. We try to grow as organically as possible. Without the local community behind it, it’s going to be really hard to grow externally and just get people to show up. Once you build that strong baseline in the early years,then you can expand. Getting to that point is not easy. There’s a lot of community outreach. It’s almost like politicking, really. You have to go and win each audience member pretty much.