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courtesy of Peter Newcomb
Ronnie Baker Brooks at the St. Louis Bluesweek Festival
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by Peter Wochniak, courtesy of Big Muddy Blues Festival
Big Muddy Blues Festival
The music festival scene in St. Louis is expected to get bigger next year, yet whether it will be better is a matter open for discussion. We conducted numerous individual interviews about the city’s deal with Los Angeles–based talent agency ICM Partners to stage two large festivals in 2015 (one country and one rock),as well as the related (and unrelated) chan-ges in the regional music-and-entertain-ment scene.
Why do you think the city agreed to a deal with ICM Partners for two exclusive big festivals on Memorial Day and Labor Day next year?
Scott Ogilvie: My impression was that the motivation was to land a large event for downtown consistently for several years and to have that event promoter compensate us for the space they were using, which is something that normally does not happen with most events. Typically, we get paid a nominal fee or no fee for just about every event large and small that happens in the city. Tara Pham: My impression is that the Board of Aldermen made this decision very quickly, because itwas excited to get an extra $400,000 a year in its budget. But that should be a drop in the bucket if they are thinking larger. I hope the money doesn’t disappear into the abyss.Jeff Rainford: When they said they wanted a big event in St. Louis, an event that if it comes to fruition will be on the scale of a Lollapalooza, we want that kind of a big event in the city. That was our interest. We would do it because we want people to come to the city of St. Louis, whether it’s from the surround-ing suburbs or from throughout the Mid-west. Jeremy Segel-Moss: They were try-ing to rush it through. Our first reaction—and it’s similar to the reaction we have now—is that it’s just a bad business deal for the city of St. Louis. If an out-of-town company wants to come and do mega festivals—a country festival and a rock festival—the cityjust goes with that. That’s a real frustration for us.
When events move from downtown to Chesterfield, is that a sign of an issue with downtown or just a sensible spread of festival options to other areas of the region?
Rainford: The idea that if you have a thing that is called Taste of St. Louis in Chesterfield, you can’t have another food and music festival in the city is ridiculous. The other thing is, when you hold it in Chesterfield, you’re holding a different event with a different au-dience. My guess is, the audience is much, much smaller, but also probably wealthier. It’s probably less diverse. So it’s a different event. Some people will like that. Lots of people won’t, but some people will. It’s just a different event. Segel-Moss: Bluesweek was a good show, and the music was outstanding all week long. We had a good show of numbers, but not at all what we saw downtown. Bluesweek in Chesterfield is not Bluesweek in the heart of downtown St. Louis. That’s two different shows. Stacey Morse: It’snot pitting one against the other; it’s ex-panding the experience of the arts and giving new audiences better access to these great programs.
Do you think the 20-year exclusive contract for festivals downtown on Memorial Day and Labor Day—with its noncompete clause that grandfathers in current festivals, but that puts a cap on new festivals—will affect local talent or smaller festivals?
Pham: Most festivals, when they start, are small. Major production companies start them with the intention to grow bigger. If they know there is a cap to how big they can grow, then I think it will deter them from coming to St. Louis. Frankly, I think if they want to come to this region now, they won’t be coming to the city; they’ll be going to the county. Despite the mayor’s intentions in other realms, I think this decision sends a message that St. Louis is not a friendly place for entrepreneurship; it’s not a friendly place to start something different, something in-dependent. Ogilvie: You’d have to be putting on a very large music event for that noncompete clause to apply to you. It covers from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and it covers all the dates in between and it covers the whole city, not just downtown. A lot of aldermen, including myself, were concerned about the noncompete clause. It’s also what most of the public interest came from. But I’m comfortable about how it was revised. Rainford: A few years ago, the mayor said to me, “Let’s lighten up on the rules in order to get more events in the city.” We did loosen up the rules, and we’ve had a dramatic increase in the number of events being held in the city, I must say, two or three or four times more. We have focused on the answer to holding an event in the city is “Yes” until it’s “No”… It means we are really trying to make it easy for you to hold your event in the city.
With the two major festivals expected for downtown next year focusing on country and rock, do you have any concerns that some audiences are being excluded?
Segel-Moss: There is a whole other asp-ect to this that gets bumped around—blues is primarily black music. It’s taking that culture and putting it in Chesterfield, orreplacing the festival in downtown St. Louiswith a country festival, that really dismisses a major part of the city’s heritage and culture, and that continually happens. Ogilvie: I am certainly not a music-industry professional, but I know that country music is a big draw, and there are a lot of successful country-music festivals out there, so it does not surprise me they want to do that here. I think rock encompas-ses everything else, except maybe opera. Rainford: If somebody is saying, “We don’t want country music in the city,” that’s as bad as saying we don’t want another kind of music. That’sridiculous. I don’t think you can draw any kind of conclusion about the musicuntil you have the music. Pham: The way ICM proposed this was as a rock festival and a country festival, which I highly doubt will be very inclusive to the black community of St. Louis. I see a rock festival and a country festival as being exclusive. It’s a great plus that they said they would include a 20 percent local talent guarantee; that is a huge win. LouFest, which is smaller than these festivals are slated to be, definitely does not meet that quota. That’sunfortunate.
What do you think is the net effect on the metro area of the changing concert scene?
Morse: I’m not sure; it’s yet to be seen. I think it’s good to have major events going on in various parts of the region, so that a diverse mix of people has access to these cool concerts and other events. I think it’s really important for the city of St. Louis to still maintain a presence and a high profile with major events around town, but the fact that some of these events can be moving around regionally just develops a greater audience base and possibly adds new audience members into the mix. Ogilvie: My neighbors, every year, drive to Chicago for Lollapalooza and take their kids with them. I think that it’s cool now they can just go downtown and see the same event. They don’t have to travel 300 miles to do it. In the future, if you live in Peo-ria, Illinois, you have a good choice to make: You can go to Lollapalooza in Chicago and check out the IKEA, or you can go to St. Louis and see the ICM music festival and check out our IKEA—tough choices for Peorians.
THE PANEL
Stacey Morse
Former Executive Director,Chesterfield Arts
Scott Ogilvie
24th Ward Alderman
Tara Pham
CEO, CTY; Former ManagingEditor, Eleven Magazine
Jeff Rainford
Chief of Staff,Mayor Francis Slay
Jeremy Segel-Moss
Member, The Bottoms Up Blues Gang; Vice President, St. Louis Blues Society
