The population of Nashville swelled by over 100,000 people one week in June. Hoteliers, restaurateurs and others watched happily as people poured in for the perfect live-event storm of the week-long CMA Music Festival, which sprawled across numerous stages with massive NFL stadium LP Field as its locus; the Bonnaroo festival, which took place in Manchester, about 60 miles to the south but had the Nashville airport as its main funnel; and finally a visit by the Rolling Stones to LP Field days after the CMA shows concluded. But what really shined was how well the city’s storied touring infrastructure handled what would have been a huge load even in New York or Los Angeles.
One Big Weekend
The CMA Music Festival was called Fan Fair when it was started in 1972 as a way to get country-music aficionados out the hair of radio programmers in town for an annual confab that also attracted lots of music stars. Where 25,000 fans were considered a sell-out in 2000, CMA Music Fest (it was renamed in 2011) now pulls in 65,000 or more per year. It’s grown, but so has Bonnaroo, which has been pulling between 80,000 and 90,000 attendees a year for the last decade to see about 100 bands per event. The CMA event showcases nearly three times that many acts between 10 stages, including at LP Field, which hosts six headliners per night for four nights.
Between them, the two events attract as many as 150,000 people. However, this year, for the first time since 2012 — when both events were somewhat smaller — both CMA Music Festival and Bonnaroo took place over the exact same dates, June 11 through 14.
Under normal circumstances, when the events happen on alternate weekends, it can strain local sound, video, lighting, backline resources in Nashville, arguably the biggest single concentration of those services anywhere in the world. Put the needs of close to 200 performers and over 150,000 fans in the same region, and the stress is magnified.
“It required all resources available,” noted Everett Lybolt, general manager of Sound Image’s Nashville office, which deployed an L-Acoustics K1 system at LP Field for the CMA shows, as well as several smaller systems, including a VUE Audiotechnik al-8 system at the Walk of Fame stage and a JBL VerTec 4889 system for the Plaza stage, both located in the city’s visitor-saturated downtown. Then there were about a dozen portable systems used for fan-club events, such as the Band Perry’s show at the Rocketown venue, which used a VUE Audiotechnik al-4 system.
Covering the event’s Chevrolet Riverfront Stage with a NEXO STM rig — as well as three other stages — was Nashville’s Morris Light & Sound. (See separate news item on page 16.)
Sound Image had 39 touring acts working from Nashville that same weekend, but was able to provide enough SR elements to meet the heightened demand of the local shows. What helped significantly is the sense of community that exists within Nashville’s pro audio business. At LP Field, during the load-out of the CMA shows and the load-in of the Stones, Sound Image and Clair Global crews literally passed each other on the ramp, stopping once for a group photo. “There’s always been great cooperation between the companies here,” Lybolt says. “We’ve always worked well together.”
Clair Global had its Clair i-5 rig in with the Rolling Stones. Clair GM Scooter Hernbeck points out that the company also did live sound for the CMT Awards show a week earlier, and deployed systems for several fan-club shows, including for Luke Bryant and Eric Church. “There are lots of smaller companies in town and they all did a good job on all of these shows,” he says.
The SR provider at the main “What” stage at Bonnaroo was Eighth Day Sound, with d&b audiotechnik J series used there, as well as providing d&b Y and T series boxes at the Comedy Theatre and a d&b E8 system at the press tent. The company came in fully self-contained but, as Eighth Day director of touring services Owen Orzack pointed out, it was through a very busy BNA airport.)
Record Recordings
This year’s events also were the best documented in history. At Bonnaroo, audio guru Hank Neuberger’s Springboard Productions had several trucks live-streaming the Dave Matthews Band, the Allman Brothers, the Black Crowes, Bob Weir and Widespread Panic on the main stage. At the CMA shows, one of Music Mix Mobile’s five trucks was parked underneath the stands at LP Field tracking the audio for what will be edited into a broadcast show on ABC in August, with video recorded by a Denali truck parked nearby and connected via MADI.
M3 co-owner and chief engineer Joel Singer says as the shows have become more complex and the technology platforms more diverse, the goal is to find ways to streamline the process. “Some bands are coming in with the new DiGiCo consoles and they’re not carrying splits, so we have to do MADI splits with them,” he explains, using M3’s recently acquired DirectOut MADI routers.
Still, the stages have more channels than ever. Singer counted 112 channels of Grace Design preamps coming into the truck — and notes that the sound checks have to stretch to make sure that FOH mixers and M3 mixer Jay Vicari all get the time they need. “We’re hearing the same things they’re hearing out there, but they know the inputs better than we do,” Singer says. “If we hear some distortion, we have to check to make sure that it’s not just supposed to sound that way. Sometimes they’ll push the P.A. to excite the crowd, but that can compromise the recording because it’s getting into the mics at the back of the venue. When the artists hear it later, they’ll say something.”
And More to Come
It was a big week, and if the Rolling Stones, CMA’s many stages and Bonnaroo’s new-zip code equivalency wasn’t enough, Nashville had one more big deal to reveal: less than a week after the last power chords faded, LP Field was renamed Nissan Stadium. See y’all next year, when both Bonnaroo and CMA Music Fest once again line up on exactly the same days.
