Amphitheater Evolution: Maine Savings Amphitheater Takes Premium Trend Outdoors

Maine Savings Amphitheater has used its rustic location in Bangor, Maine, as a strength, becoming a regular tour stop for major artists — some of whom play stadiums in larger markets — as well as a respite for artists on the road.

“Maine’s called ‘Vacationland,’ it’s on our license plates for a reason,” says Alex Gray, founder of Waterfront Concerts, which owns and operates the 16,500-capacity venue and produces the annual Waterfront Concert Series.

That means despite the city’s population of 30,000, summertime sees an influx of tourists and other visitors, which can include NFL team owners, famous musicians and other celebrities along with the rest of the concert-going public. That also means when someone like Kenny Chesney comes through for a show, not only the fans are having a good time.

“We’ve got a 26-acre private estate that we use to host artists, where we can put them up for days,” says Gray. “We have amenities that I don’t think the traditional amphitheater has, and our people are extraordinary and really care how the artists and their families are treated. We have unique things for the children on tour and we curate experiences for them, the same as we do for the headliner. It’s boded well for us in season 16 and rolling into season 17.”

While the venue’s waterfront location and surrounding amenities have always been a positive for the venue, formerly known as Darling’s Waterfront Pavilion, and the amphitheater has been a busy concert destination since its opening in 2010, it lacked the infrastructure and amenities required for today’s concert touring world. Starting in 2019, major renovations have led to permanent seats (10,000), restrooms, club spaces and suites, which are branded for Dunkin’, Truly, Miller Lite and local auto dealer Darling.

“There is a high focus on premium, but our greatest focus was shortening lines,” said Gray, who said he was inspired by Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ commitment to ample bathrooms when building the team’s new stadium. The amphitheater now sports a 1 to 60 ratio between fan and fixture when it comes to bathrooms.

“Customers in our business stand in line, to get in the venue, to buy a beverage, to buy food, to buy merchandise,” said Gray. “What we tried to do was simplify all that and really look at best-in-class amenities as rudimentary as bathrooms and culinary side concessions. It was about really increasing the experience.”

With the work starting in 2019, the pandemic put a pause on operations but allowed Gray and architect Rob Ervin of the local Ervin Architecture to fine-tune the design. Maine’s brutal winters meant careful planning and construction timelines working around the venue’s summer concert season. The venue’s new naming rights went into effect for the 2022 season.

“We had four shows in ‘21, and did all the work that we could prior to that season,” he said. “Once that season was over, we went heavy into construction and contracting. We used different building contractors throughout the property, because there really wasn’t a firm large enough to handle all of it here.”

The work was complete in time for Dave Matthews Band’s June 2023 gig. The outlook for 2025 remains bright, Gray says, and there are plans for more premium spaces including rooftop viewing areas.

“This season was the largest in our history, and the previous high was 2023,” said Gray. Shows this year included Kenny Chesney (14,122 tickets sold, $1.3 million grossed), Lainey Wilson, Post Malone, Hozier, Tyler Childers and more.

Gray, as founder of Waterfront Concerts, also promotes shows at local venues including Cross Insurance Center, Cross Insurance Arena, Merrill Auditorium and Collins Center For The Arts.

Pollstar / VenuesNow: Maine Savings Amphitheater is offering some pretty premium experiences, but just a few years ago didn’t have permanent bathrooms or fancy Spec and Hussey seats.

Alex Gray: A lot of the amphitheaters in the country are as old as I am and haven’t necessarily had this type of investment into them. A lot are still using porta-potties and things of that nature. That’s not the experience the fan wants, and I don’t think that correlates with the ticket prices in today’s mathematics, and I don’t think that’s really what the artist wants. So again, I think (the goal is) best-in-class, probably, in the country. It’s built beyond an arena, really, to be honest with you.

There is a high focus on premium but again, I think our greatest focus was shortening lines. We increased concessions fare and we really wanted to shorten lines and we wanted to increase customer experience. We wanted to say thank you for supporting us from 2010 in a very rudimentary state with a temporary stage on a grass field, like most of these venues started in the country.
If you look at them — it was a rental stage with some porta-pots and generators — to what we are now, which is a lot of steel, a lot of concrete, amenities, golf backstage for the artist.

You’ve done some stadium-sized artists, although you’re still in the large arena capacity.
We have the same stage as the Gorge (Amphitheater in Washington). We bought it from Mountain Productions since 2013. A number of us came from the production end of the world. We can put seven trucks in our loading dock. We can hang 225,000 pounds. Bands can do just about anything they want, and that gives them the ability as a warmup into a stadium play, whether that’s MetLife or Fenway or Gillette. It gives them the ability to warm up here, kind of knock the dust off. We host a lot of rehearsals. We close a lot of tours, and we start a lot of tours because we’re an affordable market and on a non-show night, you can get a very affordable hotel room.

How has the response been to the upgrades? Considering you’re the largest outdoor venue north of Boston, you’re offering things that aren’t easy to find elsewhere in the region.
Realistically, the community has supported us incredibly. Our premium inventory continues to be sold out annually. The math works, we can do a lot, so we’re very successful in that realm. Our biggest competition is probably University of Maine Hockey — we don’t have the Celtics, the Bruins, the Red Sox, the Patriots all in our back yard. We’re not all competing for market share in that sense.
But I don’t think we’re immune to the same problems that exist in the rest of the country. Everybody’s competing for market share. Everybody’s competing for employees. So we did a focus on premium from top to bottom for a premium experience for the artist, a premium experience for the fan, a premium experience to the individual fan who just buys a ticket on the lawn, so they don’t just see a tiny person on stage that may or may not be the artist.

You mentioned taking good care of artists and their families with surrounding amenities and a private estate. How important is it for you to educate the industry about what’s going on in Bangor?
A lot of agents and managers were here during 2020, because you could still get a steak outdoors in Maine in the summer in 2020 and you couldn’t do that in California. People who had the means moved here. A lot of the agents went to summer camp (laughs). They’ve got fond experiences on the lake, paddling a canoe on a camping trip. That’s been very helpful to us because they understand that experience. We’re able to manufacture that experience for both them and the artists at times. If it’s not a fully packaged thing where they’re carrying catering and everything else, I think we can exceed the tour’s expectations on a daily basis. It comes back to our people. Very few restaurants have an Eater magazine ranked chef, I think one of the 10 best north of Boston or Portland. Portland’s got one of the best culinary scenes on the planet.

You just don’t have that in a backstage restaurant. Artists have options and we want to make sure that when they leave this facility, that they have the very best experience within our control. Can we control the weather? No. Have we had some hot days this year? Yes. But everything that’s in our control, we’re going to do the very best to be good curators of their overall experience.

As a promoter yourself, you also buy shows in-house at the amphitheater?
There are some shows we buy on our own. I bought Luke Combs in 2022, and again this year there are some of our own. We work closely with Live Nation but also with AEG, we just did Kenny Chesney with Messina. We’re independent, but we play well with everyone.

How do you approach ticketing and pricing? Are you seeing any softening demand following the post-COVID gold rush?
We do all-in pricing, and we’re seeing that the brokers are promoting that they have cheaper tickets, but then when they drip the $50 fees onto the fan, it’s not cheaper. If you turn on price aggregation tools inside of Google, and you use any of those apps that will show you what the Raybans and Amazons are doing using AI, it’s a somewhat of a mis-indicator. I think that fanatics will pay any amount of money. It’s a difficult situation, but then you do the $20 lawn tickets, we sell a bunch of those, so there’s a lot of opportunities for people to come.

Years ago, I put a show on sale and it blew right out. I called one of my mentors, and he was like, “You’re an idiot.” He said you want a show to go to 99.7% on the day of the show, you want to leave three-tenths of a percent on the table, because that means you priced it perfectly. I still think our business is too cheap, but that’s not for me to decide. We’re in the artist’s business, we do whatever they want.

It’s really incumbent upon us as promoters to produce something for everyone. A couple of nights ago, the artist wasn’t right on the stick with the holds that they had in the 100 levels, so we were in the lawn handing out tickets so those people that bought $20 lawn tickets were all of a sudden sitting in the front. You can imagine the experience they had, and the traction that we got on social media was huge. Does that happen every night? No. Is there a guarantee that that’s going to happen? No. But it does happen from time to time. Each concert’s a one-time experience and being there with your friends and singing along and the bass shaking your chest — we haven’t figured out how to put that into people’s houses yet and shake their souls, so the concert business seems to be alive and well.

How’s the outlook for 2025 and beyond?
For us, I think it’s positive. We’ve got a lot of interest in what we’re doing. An agent / manager the other day said to me, if I could vote for venue of the year, you’d win it. As we continue to accumulate accolades, that’s great. It’s good for the staff. I think it’s very rewarding for them to see the fruits of their labor after those 22-hour days that are sometimes two, three, four, five or six days in a row. A lot of people have after-effects from what COVID did to our business, so when you win some things and you get some positive comments, those are all great. But, again, it’s incumbent upon us to just keep on it and improve upon our experience. It’s just a constant evolution, and we’re always trying to see how we can improve and reading into what the consumer says.”