While Five Nights in Chattanooga was not the official first Riverbend, it did start people talking about how a festival like Riverbend could be used to attract large numbers of people to downtown and the venues it offered. The Nightfall series shares a similar origin.
The downtown area at the time was far from the vibrant place it is today, and people were looking for ideas to bring people back. While neither of those two events can lay full claim to the revitalization of downtown, they did and continue to play a big role.
When the first Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival was announced in 2001, people around the country questioned the wisdom of hosting such an event on a working farm in Manchester, Tenn.
Seriously, why put on a festival with national and international-level talent on a 700-acre piece of land about halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga? The property had no electricity, no water, no sewer system and no easy access.
As more details came out and people learned that Bonnaroo was going to be a four-day camping event dominated by jam bands, even more people questioned the wisdom of staging a “hippie-fest” in the middle of rural Tennessee.