By Matt Wake
Twenty-five or so acts performing across two stages over two days. Two headliners.
Huntsville’s new major music festival will debut this September, officials announced tonight at an event held at Mars Music Hall at the Von Braun Center.
Huntsville announced last year it had contracted C3 Presents, producer of elite festivals like Bonnaroo and high-wattage events like the NFL Draft, to bring a legit multi-day music festival to Huntsville.
Organizers tonight said the lineup — to be announced in April, along with the festival’s name and exact dates — will be somewhat focused genre-wise, without revealing exactly what that focus is yet.
Asked for a current festival to compare it to in terms of size, festival director Ted Heinig, of C3, cited Atlanta’s Shakey Knees Festival, attended by around 40,000 fans last year. This year’s Shakey Knees lineup boasts artists such as Foo Fighters, Bill Idol, Queens of the Stone Age and Arcade Fire.
Huntsville has been without a large-scale music festival since the final Big Spring Jam in 2011. That festival was held downtown. Over its run, Big Spring Jam brought artists like Wilco, Destiny’s Child, Allman Brothers, Al Green, Hall & Oates and a young Taylor Swift to Huntsville.
AL.com first reported the city’s designs on bringing a music festival back to Huntsville in 2022.
Heinig tells AL.com when C3 came to Huntsville and first saw the new festival’s site, John Hunt Park, located off Airport Road and Memorial Parkway, “We graded it an ‘A,’ in terms of being able to come in and do a show on it. It’s just really well-laid-out. It’s got a ton of advantages: The amount of space, the hardscape that surrounds it, the ability to bring people on and off the site safely. The soccer stadium parking, which I think is on the north end. The pedestrian tunnel at the south end. It’s close to downtown and really easy to get to. It’s not a good site, it’s a great site.”
Talent at the top of the lineup is ultimately what sells festival tickets. In the case of the new Huntsville festival, that will be the headliners for each of the two days plus three or four other bigger acts on the bill.
“That’s paramount,” Heinig says. “You’ve got to have not just great talent, but you’ve got to find a way to build the synergy, and you want to offer music fans so much from top to bottom that they can’t say no. They look at the lineup and they say, ‘I want to see every band on here.’”
In terms of the reason behind the festival’s genre-focused lineup, Heinig says, “Festivals that are really successful right now are focused top-to-bottom and they’re super-serving their fans with all of the artists they like.”
September, of course, falls during college football season. Asked if C3 had concerns about launching a new festival in a football-crazed state like Alabama, Heinig says, “We have a strategy to blend football with the music.”
How many times is the launch of something new and big announced only for it later to be pushed back? And delayed again? And yet again? Not this time.
Previously, the city said the new Huntsville festival might not launch until 2025. The City of Huntsville’s first-ever music officer, Matt Mandrella, says the timetable sped up after C3 began reaching out to talent.
Mandrella says, “There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the artist community about Huntsville, and all the things we’re doing. So the talent responded in force, and it put them [C3] in the position to where they think they could have a successful festival that lives up to the expectations and experience they want to deliver, here in Huntsville this fall.”
Huntsville leaders have made good on their promise to help increase Huntsville’s reputation as a music city. In recent years, city officials have, among other things, committed to the $40 million Orion Amphitheater and a $165,000 “music audit.”
Since Huntsville’s never produced a mainstream-famous band, initially, the goal of becoming a city known for music seemed optimistic if not unrealistic. But there’s no shortage of talented musicians from this area, some of whom have toured internationally, produced/written music for superstar acts and/or been a part of major label bands. Huntsville’s also home to a number of seasoned behind-the-scenes industry pros, including roadies and guitar techs for famous artists. There’s also a new wave of local bands and solo acts worthy of a shot at the next level.
Huntsville’s music infrastructure has vastly improved this decade. In early 2020, the city’s Von Braun Center, already home to an arena and concert hall, added the 1,600-capacity Mars Music Hall. Mars filled a crucial void in the city’s venue mix, finally giving rising acts and veteran artists of a certain level a venue to perform in Huntsville, a city many tours passed over for years.
Since opening in spring 2022, Orion Amphitheater’s brought stars like Lana Del Rey, Stevie Nicks, Phish, Robert Plant, Jack White and Weezer to a Huntsville stage for the first time. In 2022, Orion was the subject of a feature story in Rolling Stone magazine. Huntsville, heretofore known mostly for its rich aerospace engineering legacy, now had a musical rep beyond city limits.
The new Huntsville festival is another key piece is leveling-up music here. Ever since Mandrella came on as music officer in 2022, the question he kept getting ask more than any other was: When are we getting something like Big Spring Jam again?
“The community really, really, really wanted a major music festival back here in Huntsville,” Mandrella says. “This was a huge initiative that we started trying to tackle from day one in the music office, and we’re just so proud we locked in an amazing partner [in C3} that can bring in a world-class festival experience that Huntsville deserves.”
In addition to adding significant cultural allure to Huntsville, Mandrella says the new festival will provide thousands of part-time jobs. Also, the festival’s vendors will be heavily sourced on the local level, Mandrella says.
“This is such an exciting thing for the city,” Mandrella says. “Personally, I’m on cloud nine. But I’m just one small piece of the team that brought this together. At the end of the day, the Huntsville community is what brought this together. The enthusiasm we have for music, to create a platform to where they [C3] felt they could be successful pulling off a major event of this scale and to invest tens of millions of dollars into the community for a two-day event.”
Even though the new festival is launching earlier than expected, according to Mandrella, the fest will debut at full strength. Mandrella says C3, “likes to come in with a bang, go big from the get go and just keep getting bigger. It’s definitely not crawl before you walk. It’s full on.”
One of the world’s biggest festival producers, C3 Presents’ portfolio includes A-listers like Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. For the new Huntsville fest, C3 Presents will oversee all aspects of production, including booking, logistics, vendors and volunteers.
Asked about the biggest challenge in getting a major new festival going in a tertiary market, C3′s Heinig says, “I don’t consider Huntsville a tertiary [market] anymore. I consider Huntsville a secondary. I think the greatest challenge for everybody in the festival business is there’s too much inventory in the landscape, so you’ve really got to find a way to stand out, and make the festival that you’re doing special and world-class and elite.” Ticket prices for the Huntsville festival have yet to be determined, Heinig says.
A New Jersey native and University of Tennessee grad, Heinig attended his first concert, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, back in the ’80s. His first music festival as a fan was H.O.R.D.E., the ’90s traveling jam-band cavalcade.
As far as what drew C3 to working with Huntsville, now Alabama’s most populous city, on a new festival, Heinig says, “One, I think the leadership of Huntsville invested in making this a success, really gave us a lot of confidence to come to Huntsville and risk it, in a really positive way. And then two, just seeing what Huntsville was doing in terms of being a city on the rise, the new music venues and how successful those have been. There’s data to support Huntsville’s heading in a really positive direction.”
Mandrella’s birthday this year happened to fall on the same day as tonight’s new Huntsville festival news. Interestingly, because of nondisclosure agreements (or NDAs) even city officials, including Mandrella, won’t know the Huntsville festival’s debut lineup until C3 releases it to the public in April. “It’s a good thing we don’t know the acts,” Mandrella joked. “Because I would probably leak them out.”