Features
The Juice Is Loose: Chicago’s Summer Smash Festival Expecting 30K Per Day This Weekend
Courtesy Summer Smash Festival – Carnage
Summer Smash 2019, which like this year featured Carnage on its lineup, has grown from a one-day festival drawing 11,000 people in 2018 to now expecting up to 30,000 per day for three days at Chicago’s Douglass Park Aug. 20-22.
Pent-up demand has been apparent at the major U.S. festivals post-lockdown, with success stories like Lollapalooza, Rolling Loud, Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits Music Festival and still others proving music fans are eager and willing to get back out for major outdoor music events.
It may not be a surprise that long-running bellwether events have put up strong onsales and gone off without a hitch amid much uncertainty, but others have built their brand and grown at a time when little physical activity was even possible.
Take Summer Smash Festival, which is happening at Douglass Park in Chicago Aug. 20-22 with top hip-hop talent like A$AP Rocky, Lil Baby and Lil Uzi Vert and expecting 30,000 fans per day in just its third year. Over 80 artists are confirmed, including Gunna, Lil Yachty, Don Toliver, Carnage, Lil Tecca, City Girls, and more, as the event has quickly grown from 11,000 tickets in one day on two stages in 2018 to hosting some of the most popular artists on the globe.
That doesn’t mean it’s been easy.
“We’ve run into pretty much every wall that you can run into,” says Summer Smash co-founder Cole Bennett, the person behind Lyrical Lemonade. He’s a music video director and content creator working with artists from Eminem to NLE Choppa to Machine Gun Kelly, whose new “papercuts” video debuted a week ago and has more than 3.2 million views. In many ways, Bennett brings the juice to Summer Smash, which is produced alongside Chicago indie SPKRBX Presents.
Courtesy Summer Smash Festival – Playboi Carti
at Summer Smash 2019
“Both festivals so far, we had artists that didn’t show up and last year we had a storm on our last day and we had to clear out the entire festival for three hours,” he adds. “We still managed to get every artist on stage that day. We’ve had to deal with just about every barrier you can think of, it’s just about knowing how to react in those situations and how to adjust and be ready for those audibles. … We have a loyal and understanding audience that gets that.”
– Cole Bennett
Cole Bennett, the person behind Lyrical Lemonade, lends his juice to the festival, as video director for major stars and a social media influencer in his own right. He’s pictured with hip-hop heavyweights Eminem and Dr. Dre, along with actual heavyweight champ Mike Tyson.
Independent festivals are notoriously expensive. It can take years of operating in the red and millions of dollars of investment to turn one into a sustaining entity, which is where experience and credibility come into play.
“Starting a festival from scratch is extremely difficult,” says SPKRBX founder Berto Solorio. “With us being independent and not having any corporate backing or major investors, we’ve always taken our profits and reinvested them in the festival. It takes money to scale, but specifically I’d like to credit the ability to do something so risky on just the recognition of the Lyrical Lemonade brand. It’s one of the most recognizable brands in hip-hop, the channel has 18 million subscribers and I think 7-8 billion views or more, every single video has ‘Lyrical Lemonade’ in the corner. When you have that kind of brand recognition, the risk is a little lessened, because you don’t have to start the brand from scratch, the recognition and trust is already there.”
With the pandemic putting 2020 on hold, this year’s event may have some unusual hurdles to overcome. The recently updated Summer Smash COVID vaccination / negative test policy resembles the one used by Lollapalooza in the city just a few weeks ago and the one Live Nation is further adopting for its festivals and venues. Solorio says refunds can happen on a case-to-case basis, with the option to roll over tickets for ‘22, which he says he expects to be bigger and better than ever.
In recent years, the hip-hop festival scene had become known as the place to see up and comers before they get huge and price themselves out of all but the largest festivals. Times appear to have changed, with large-scale hip-hop-leaning festivals now keeping some of the world’s biggest superstars in their prime.
“Everyone’s seen the quick ascent of hip- hop within the global music industry,” Solorio says, adding that R&B/hip-hop is the most popular genre not only in the United States but maybe the world for the first time ever now. “We were lucky to enter the market at the right time when the demand was so high.” A festival like theirs still needs that reputation for rising talent though, and Summer Smash does in spades, with 2019’s event featuring now-superstars like Megan Thee Stallion, Jack Harlow and DaBaby on the undercard and the late hometown hero Juice WRLD on the main stage.
SPKRBX Presents – Berto Solorio
Pictured right, at Summer Smash 2019.
Bennett adds. “With a lot of the videos I do, I love working with younger artists and seeing what their potential is and what they can become. The interesting thing with the festival is getting to watch that translate over to the live space, where we get to book an artist when no one knows about them yet, see them on that bottom line, and then two years later they’re a headlining artist. It’s fun to be able to incorporate and mesh the super low-key underground talent with these big superstars and see how that shifts over time and watch the cycle continue.”
Bennett and Solorio are staunchly pro-Chicago, with the event taking place near Lyrical Lemonade HQ at Douglass Park, also home to Riot Fest and in the city’s somewhat hard-scrabble west side. The event has been embraced by the city and attracts fans from all over the country. This year’s Summer Smash features an outer space theme, which means fans can expect extraterrestrials onsite, related art installation and signage adding to the concept and taking fans out of this world.
While Chicago born and bred, the Summer Smash team has visions of expansion, much akin to contemporaries at Rolling Loud, whom Bennett says he considers more peers than competitors, with mutual admiration on both teams.
Not wanting to get ahead of themselves, and clear to note that Summer Smash is a Chicago-specific event and brand, Bennett says ‘22 could see multiple events.
“If we find the perfect spot and find the perfect scene and perfect situation, then the answer is yes,” he says, adding that the team prides itself in being independent but that a partner or major investor could be appropriate sometime down the line. “But if anything doesn’t feel right or it feels rushed, then we’ll wait for the right time. The thing about us and what we do is we never rush anything, and make sure we do everything the best we can, and if we’re not able to do that, then we wait until we can. Ideally, yes, always want to be full throttle and pushing the needle whenever we can, but at the same time we have got to be patient and make sure it’s done perfectly, because that’s the way we do things.”