What more could you possibly ask for than heading to Vegas to tear it up on Halloween weekend? What if a festival the likes of Bonnaroo was going on while you’re down there? What if the lineup consisted of every act from Dave Matthews and Trey Anastasio to Beck and Arcade Fire? And between playing the tables, sluggling free drinks and dropping bills in g-strings, you can hit late night shows all over the city? Yeah, the inaugural Vegoose sounds like its gonna be a pretty good weekend.
When Ashley Capps and AC Entertainment first teamed up with Jonathan Mayers and Superfly, there were dozens of ideas floating around, one of which of course inevitably became Bonnaroo. Quickly developing from casual conversation into the premiere American summer festival, Bonnaroo has set a new precedent in the possibilities of large scale music events. Now the two visionaries are developing the Bonnaroo experience to fit within the Sin City limits. Though not just by holding a festival there, but embracing the unique experience that is Vegas, and creating a oneness, a seamless celebration of both entities. They’re both polar opposites, but in many ways they’re ironically the same.
With just a few weeks left before the hordes drop those lucky arrival quarters in the airport terminal slots, we caught up with Ashley to talk Bonnaroo and see how the last of the Vegoose planning was going.
You had already been in the industry for years when you started AC Entertainment, so what drove you to open the doors?
AC Entertainment itself started in early 1991. I had been promoting concerts since the late 1970s – I started doing it just because I loved music and I did it as a hobby for many years. Then I opened a club [in Knoxville, Tennessee], a place called Ella Guru’s – named for a Captain Beefheart song – in 1988, and did that until 1990. And that was my first fulltime foray into trying to make a living in the music business. Running a club, it was an incredible educational experience and a big challenge, and I got really tired of the night after night, the grind of the club scene and the challenges with the overhead associated. So the idea with AC Entertainment was really to move beyond the club scene, and start promoting concerts throughout the southeast.
How do you eventually come to meet Jonathan and the Superfly crew?
I met Rick [Farman] first, probably around 1997 or ’98, and that’s when we first started talking about working together. Rick came to the show that I was promoting with Bonnie Raitt – he was working some with Bonnie’s keyboard player, Jon Cleary, and we just struck up a conversation and talked about what we were doing. And unusually enough, people talk about working together all the time, but Rick actually followed up with a phone call a month or so later. So we just kept talking, and eventually I met Jon, and we continued talking about different ways to work together. And it was a period when consolidation in the business was starting to take hold and some of the managers and agents out there encouraged us to work together – they thought we had some strengths that complimented one another, and we had a similar vision in how we were approaching our business. So we started working on some smaller projects…some of which never came to fruition before Bonnaroo.
That’s a big jump – from talking about doing something like Bonnaroo to actually pulling it off. But not only did you pull it off, it was an immediate success, selling out quickly with limited advertising and becoming a highly acclaimed event of 2002. So that first year, how did you even begin to tackle the immeasurable logistics involved in an event that size?
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That was a big leap, it was a fast leap in a lot of ways, and several different things came together to make it possible. I had some previous festival experience, I had created several festivals on a smaller scale, more like a High Sierra scale, and worked a lot presenting outdoors events with Widespread Panic and the Dave Matthews Band and String Cheese Incident. And the concept for Bonnaroo was something that I’d been tossing around with several different people for a couple of years. And with my association with the Superfly guys, we started talking and taking it up another level. And the critical thing with Bonnaroo is, the scale of it enabled us to reach out to the very best people in the business. We went straight to the experts, from Robb Napior, our project manager who had worked on the Phish festival events, right on down, we just looked all over the country to find people who were the best in their field to help us pull the event off. And that’s true [for] staging and production, parking, site logistics, whatever was involved in the mechanics of making the festival work, we assembled the very best team we could possibly find. And the partnership – not just between AC Entertainment and Superfly, but our investor Coran Capshaw at Red Light Management brought a tremendous amount of experience and expertise to the festival.
This year there was a larger contingent of foreign press than in years past. I assume you’re taking inspiration from the larger Euro festivals, but do you see Bonnaroo being interpreted on a global level as America’s Glastonbury?
Its funny you should mention that, because we did definitely look to the European festivals as a model for what Bonnaroo was initially created to be, and what in many ways we aspire to now – Glastonbury in particular, yes. Its an extraordinary festival, they’ve been doing it for 35 years and there’s a lot to learn there. My wife’s European, so I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe over the years and been able to attend all sorts of European festivals, from the small city fest to many of the major rock events. And certainly one of the inspirations for Bonnaroo was, “there are these incredible festivals going on all over Europe, why do we not have more of this thing in the United States?” That was one of the questions we were asking ourselves as we began to plan Bonnaroo.
In the final planning stages of Vegoose, how were you, and more particularly Superfly which has operations in New Orleans, affected by Hurricane Katrina?
For my part, I’ve been sitting here in Tennessee [basically] unscathed, so watching what people in New Orleans and down on the Gulf Coast have been having to go though has been a sobering and at times depressing experience. Three-quarters of Superfly had moved to New York anyway, so at this point, their principle base of operations is in New York City, but they do still have an office in New Orleans and a staff in New Orleans, and Rick Farman still makes his home [there]. Fortunately they were listening to the call to evacuate and moved to Baton Rouge and then to New York. But [as far as the impact on organizing Vegoose,] we just all tried to pull together and work with the hand we were dealt. So we’ve taken over some of the functions that the New Orleans office was taking care of as people have had the chance to get relocated and refocused and get back into operation, and that’s what a partnership is all about.
Hurricanes aside, have you encountered more or less complications organizing a Bonnaroo sized event throughout the city of Las Vegas as opposed to in an open field in rural Tennessee?
It’s interesting, they’re different events with different challenges associated to them. Certainly one of the major challenges with Bonnaroo is the fact that it’s a camping event. And there is a tremendous amount of work that goes into the infrastructure to support the camping of 80,000 people. With Vegas, in many ways, as far as the stadium event, we’ve got slightly more of a standard show. We’re not doing just a stadium event, ‘cause we have big stages and a lot of activities surrounding the stadium, so it has some of the same challenges of Bonnaroo in terms of what we do in the Centeroo area and the various staging components and all, but it doesn’t have the camping. But it does have all the nighttime shows. So the coordination between what’s going on at the stadium and all of the nighttime shows has actually proven to be a different hurdle, and challenging as far as the ticketing goes. We felt an obligation to let the ticket holders for the stadium events have first opportunity with the nighttime shows. And in order to create that opportunity for them, there were a lot of logistics, a lot of hoops we had to go through. So they’re both very challenging events, but in somewhat different ways.
With Bonnaroo, you have everybody in, everybody out, and all 80,000 people are together in one field for three days. With Vegoose, attendees are spread out over the entire city, presumably coming and going at different times. So how does that effect the overall dynamic of the event?
It creates a completely different experience when you’re in a city, especially a city like Las Vegas. And one of our challenges in creating Vegoose is to really lock into Vegas itself, and really create a synergy with an extraordinary city. And those factors are going to give Vegoose a completely different character than the character of Bonnaroo. And it sort of gives us, not only the opportunity, but also the license to do some really incredible things that we wouldn’t normally be able to do. It also gives the fans the opportunity to come to a festival experience and then leave and go experience Vegas itself. You don’t have to go to the nighttime shows…you can go do all sorts of things that Vegas has to offer. So what we’re really hoping to do is create that synergy where our festival is an extension of Vegas, and Las Vegas becomes an extension of the festival and they both play off of each other.
What ultimately sets these events apart from the rest of the festival circuit is the booking. Bonnaroo has always pushed the envelope, and now with Vegoose, you have Bonnaroo staples like Dave Matthews, String Cheese and Panic billed alongside Arcade Fire, Spoon and Sleater-Kinney. Are those Jonathan’s decisions to consistently widen the spectrum or a collective wish list among all of you?
Jonathan and I do the booking, but we all talk about it, and everyone has input. Every single one of us is psyched to have Beck and the Arcade Fire playing this festival because we love those bands. And others…the Shins, Devendra Banhart, Sleater-Kinney, obviously Spoon, and The Flaming Lips have been at Bonnaroo, although in many ways they probably belong more in that world then they did the Bonnaroo world, at least until they played Bonnaroo.
Well that 2003 Flaming Lips performance is the quintessential example of a band you more or less first introduced to a predominately jam audience. It’s a great depiction of your abilities to effectively cross those lines and blow the doors off preconceived borders.
Well I love to hear you say that, because that’s what we want to do. From our perspective, people don’t fit really neatly into these little boxes that the world likes to put them in, in terms of their taste. Our concept from the very beginning with Bonnaroo was to be a “music” festival. And for us that meant a lot of different things. And from the beginning, we were experimenting with different concepts…the first year we had a gospel tent with the Blind Boys of Alabama, The Campbell Brothers, the second year we had Sonic Youth, and we’ve always pushed the envelope in different directions. And we’ve tried to do it methodically, but we’ve done so with the belief that the audience that attends these events is open to different types of musical experiences. And being in Vegas as opposed to a field in Tennessee, it gave us even more license to open up the concept of what that festival was going to be about.
From a programming standpoint, we always look to artists who are great live performers. We’re always looking to that great live concert experience, and that can mean different things with different artists, but the artists you’re going to see at Vegoose, and the artists you’re going to see at Bonnaroo 2006, and hopefully at all the proceeding Bonnaroos have shared that one characteristic. Many of them make really great records, but where they really shine is in live performance.
There are always rumors floating around before the lineups are announced, but Radiohead and Pearl Jam are two headliners that continually surface. I assume they are getting calls every year?
There have been ongoing discussions with many different artists for years, and sometimes because of people’s schedules and different things, it takes a long time for a conversation to yield fruit.
You’ve had great successes, but you’ve also endured the various issues that prevented Bonnaroo Northeast from happening, as well as the more recent Zooma Tour cancellation. What did you take from those experiences?
This business is about risk. You’re always conceiving new ideas and you try to put them together and you do your best in the planning stages, and sometimes something just doesn’t quite work the way you wanted it to, and the way that it looked like it did on paper. Its hard to talk about specific lessons that are learned, but everything is a learning experience. We’ve learned a lot from the successes of Bonnaroo, because Bonnaroo is never perfect, especially behind the scenes. And we’re constantly looking for ways to improve the festival and make the overall festival experience better. Zooma was the first attempt at a tour, and we worked really hard with artists and managers and agents and promoters across the country, to create a tour that was going to have a very special synergy. And when it all came down to it, that synergy wasn’t quite there for whatever reason.
You mentioned that Bonnaroo is first and foremost a music festival, but you’ve also incorporated a great deal of arts to the experience, from the comedy tents to the Mardi Gras parade. Can we expect those types of elements integrated into Vegoose?
We’re going to have some very special things in Vegas that are really going to surprise people, and knock their socks off. That’s been part of the Bonnaroo aesthetic from the beginning, in that we really strive to exceed everyone’s expectations. We want to surprise people. We don’t want to be just another festival and we don’t want it to be all about music. We want to create the most extraordinary festival experience that we possibly can. And I think the element of surprise is something that makes the experience more fun and more memorable. So we’re definitely looking at Vegoose for that. The combination of the fact that we’re in Vegas and its Halloween weekend…there’s a lot to inspire us there.
Well it’s hard enough ever going to bed at Bonnaroo…how the hell do people put themselves to bed at Vegoose?
Do people need to sleep? (laughs) Yeah, I’m amazed at what a little adrenaline can do. But Bonnaroo is so exciting to me, that I don’t think a whole lot about sleeping that weekend…and I imagine Vegoose will be very much the same.
