now i know why it's called the magic city.

Because you can host an entire music festival and not pay anyone.
Excepting artists who had the foresight (or suspicious business practices) of demanding cash in advance of playing (like Young Jeezy), and the smaller acts who have no manager/middleman, checks were bouncing left and right in the weeks following Birmingham's "premier" music festival.
I'm not really sure where anyone expected the money to come from. You can't advertise REO Speedwagon and Styx as your headlining acts and expect to make ANY money. It seems like bad decision (holding it in June instead of, say, October) was piled upon bad decision (settling on mediocre bands booked by people who don't even live here), until the ominous end that no one ever really thought would come sent it all crashing down.
I know a few bands who got their money, but they were the smaller acts that cashed their checks the Monday after. Bands with the thousand-dollar checks were left hanging. And Bottletree, caterer of the event, got stiffed for about half the bill, leaving them unable to pay staff and recoup costs from virtually closing down the bar that weekend. So where do we go from here? Everyone's got ideas. One of the Bottletree folks airs his rant here. His, however, seems a bit narrow in focus. Yes, Bottletree has rejuvenated Birmingham's music scene. Yes, we deserve a more relevant festival lineup. But you have to live in a pretty insulated world to believe that most people in Birmingham give a flip about bands "like Wilco, Drive By Truckers, Mos Def, Broken Social Scene, Cat Power, The Roots, Vampire Weekend, Beastie Boys, MGMT, Crystal Castles, TV on the Radio, Andrew Bird, Neko Case, Grizzly Bear, Of Montreal, Sharon Jones, Nick Cave, Mastodon, Band of Horses, Les Savy Fav, Phoenix, Bat for Lashes, Lucero, Dan Deacon, Dr. Dog, Explosions in the Sky, Wolf Parade, Animal Collective". I mean, I am young, white, middle-class, and into music, and about half those bands' music I have never heard, and of the other half about 50% of those might induce me to buy a ticket. But not a $30 one.
So, everyone's got a favorite solution. What almost nobody's got is the stamina/blindness to keep a dead festival breathing for 20 years. And their check from playing City Stages.


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