Riverbend 2015 online
Visit timesfreepress.com/news/riverbend to get complete coverage of the 2015 Riverbend Festival.
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There weren’t a lot of successful outdoor festivals in the United States in 2001 when Ashley Capps of AC Entertainment in Knoxville began talking with the folks at Superfly in New York about starting one on a piece of farmland in Manchester, Tenn., the following year.
Lollapalooza was around and big fundraising musical events like LiveAid and FarmAid had shown that people would pay to see multiple bands at a signal outdoor show, but would they camp out for four days?
Capps said a few years later that the big European festivals like Glastonbury, the huge 45-year-old English festival, were looked to for inspiration and some of how they did things like crowd control and staging. He also hoped that Bonnaroo would one day become a rite of passage for young people and a family reunion of sorts for more mature music lovers.