Comeback Town: A look back at the wild ride of City Stages that is still paying dividends

Today’s guest columnist George McMillan

Music legend Carlos Santana knows a thing or two about music festivals, having performed at Woodstock and headlined dozens of the very best ones over his stellar career.

After exploring Birmingham’s signature event, the ten-time Grammy winner said, “City Stages is like acupuncture. It opens up the flow of consciousness.”

George Clinton was equally impressed. The Godfather of Funk told an interviewer, “This is what I meant by ‘one nation under a groove.’”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, rarely a fan of Birmingham’s cultural offerings, pronounced it, “the best such festival this side of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.”

And no less an authority than Beatle Bob Matonis, whose quirky presence conferred instant credibility on any festival, turned up unannounced in the early 1990s and came back year after year.

Even so, it’s not unreasonable to ask—15 years after its demise—exactly what is the legacy of the event that came to represent Birmingham to the tens of thousands of visitors from around the country and, indeed the world, who sometimes travelled thousands of miles to The Magic City to experience the festival for themselves.

The answer, as it turns out, is everywhere you look.

In the late 1980s, when I was asked to assemble a team to produce a music festival in Birmingham, our downtown bore little resemblance to the vibrant, livable city center you see today. For starters, almost no one lived there. Office buildings emptied out in the early evening, leaving a veritable ghost town.

At the time, few events and attractions in Birmingham tempted people from major drive-up markets like Memphis, Nashville, and Atlanta to visit our city and practically none of them had an appeal that crossed racial and socio-economic lines.

How, then, did City Stages overcome the bias of suburbanites against venturing into an area they viewed as downright dangerous, along with the indifference of regional tourists?

The answer is that from the very beginning, we focused not merely on attracting local and regional music fans to downtown Birmingham, but on what they would experience once they got here.

From the start, we were determined that the festival would reflect the full spectrum of music and art our city had to offer—from a cappella to zydeco.

In fact, my very first initiative—as chairman of the newly formed, non-profit Birmingham Cultural & Heritage Foundation, Inc.—was to approach neighborhood leaders in Metropolitan Gardens, adjacent to the festival site, and recruit their youth choir to be the first act booked for the inaugural City Stages.

That first year, we had just four stages, but the quality of national, regional, and local acts was undeniably superb. Multiracial crowds came together in harmony around their shared love of music. Word spread quickly, and by the end of the weekend, 36,000 patrons had come through the gates.

As for security, the only incident worthy of a police report was when one “over the mountain” woman maced another. Suddenly, and irreversibly as it turned out, downtown Birmingham didn’t look quite so threatening.

For the next several years, the festival doubled in attendance with each iteration, building first a regional and then a strong national reputation as a “must see” for the committed festival-goer.

Local media outlets had been remarkably cooperative from the beginning, but now regional radio stations wanted in on the City Stages magic. Soon, we were promoting the festival to music lovers in sixteen regional markets at practically no cost.

The corporate community had likewise been supportive from the first year, but as we began to add new festival components, additional sponsorship inventory was created, which in turn allowed for a more generous talent budget. In the two decades of the event, many of the biggest names in music captivated capacity audiences in and around Linn Park.

Each summer, 2,500 volunteers came together to demonstrate to the world what a livable city Birmingham had become. Civic and band booster clubs manned concession stands. Architectural and construction firms designed and built whimsical festival gateways. Volunteers served as ticket booth attendants, site managers, and hospitality ambassadors to performers and economic development prospects.

For one magical weekend, the workaday divisions that too often divide us as a people were dissolved in a kind of musical Brigadoon the likes of which the city had never seen.

The knock-on effects were impossible to miss.

Residents and then retail businesses began to trickle back into downtown Birmingham, in search of a modern, urban environment unavailable anywhere else in our area. Before long, developers began to invest in major new commercial and residential ventures.

By the time the festival ended, in 2009, the trend was irreversible. In 2013, the Barons baseball club moved back to Birmingham—an outcome that was unthinkable when the festival began.

It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most gratifying aspects of my involvement in founding and managing the festival was the opportunity it gave me to witness downtown’s comeback first-hand.

In my years as a young attorney, I had mourned its spiraling decline. Today, from my office window, I behold a city that has been transformed for the better.

Once again, thousands live, work, shop and, yes, attend events in and around the footprint of City Stages. And Birmingham’s music scene is livelier than any time since the days of Tuxedo Junction.

Who knows? Perhaps, if you listen closely, you can still hear the lingering notes of the festival that helped give our city its comeback: City Stages, Birmingham’s world-class music festival.

George McMillan is a native Alabamian who has practiced law in Birmingham since 1970 . He’s served as a State Representative, a State Senator and as Lieutenant Governor. He founded City Stages in 1988.

David Sher is the founder and publisher of ComebackTown. He’s past Chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce (BBA), Operation New Birmingham (REV Birmingham), and the City Action Partnership (CAP).

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Invite David to speak for free to your group about how we can have a more prosperous metro Birmingham. dsher@comebacktown.com.