GULF SHORES - When restaurateur and genuine estate developer Shaul Zislin proposed the notion of a three-day spring music festival for the public seaside, city leaders and municipal officials envisioned a way to expand the summer holiday season and expose a brand new crowd to Alabama's beaches.
Now with the public relations nightmare that is the Gulf oil spill, local leaders are pinning their hopes on this weekend's Hangout Seashore, Music and Arts Festival to tell a national audience not to count out south Baldwin County's resort beaches.
"We knew that (the festival) would be essential to our businesses that have struggled by means of the economic conditions and important to our town," Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft explained. "What we didn't know is that we would have the possibility to tell the earth that we're OK, that the reports of our demise have been completely significantly exaggerated."
Starting at noon currently, when the 1st of some 60 artists strike their initial chords, and running until Sunday night, when headliner Trey Anastasio plays his final encore, the festival will feature an eclectic lineup spread over four stages in a Gulf-front setting. Among the notable performers are Grammy award winners The Roots, John Legend, Alison Krauss, Jakob Dylan and also the Zac Brown Band.
Zislin, who explained final fall that he would spend some $3 million to place within the show, has given that pledged all earnings from ticket sales along with the total proceeds from two late-night shows at his Hangout restaurant to oil spill recovery causes.
"I usually do not want to get into specifics now, but we feel incredibly strongly about becoming capable to provide a considerable amount," Zislin stated Thursday morning.
Barring a rush of last-minute ticket buyers in the box office, everyday crowds are expected to be about 20,000, he explained. That's less than the 35,000 highest that Gulf Shores would enable, but the star-studded lineup has given the festival wide reach. Tickets have been sold in a lot more than 40 states and 3 countries, Zislin explained.
To further the exposure, festival organizers are providing no cost wireless World wide web connection and charging stations in hopes that festivalgoers will use their iPhones as well as other devices to upload YouTube videos, e-mail images to friends and otherwise marketplace the occasion and south Baldwin County.
"We see this function totally as a means to bring new persons here from other parts with the nation, where folks don't know that Alabama features a seashore, that do not know what a beautiful spot we have," Alabama Gulf Coast Convention and Site visitors Bureau President Herb Malone mentioned. "It's a tremendous chance for that."
The positive results from the festival had been already visible Thursday morning. A traditionally sleepy time of 12 months at the seashore between spring break as well as the end with the school year, Gulf Shores hummed with activity as hundreds of workers placed the finishing touches for the festival grounds, which showed no indication of the oil spill.
In the evening, a Boeing 737 chartered to ferry some 80 VIP guests from south Florida for the festival became the first airplane of that sort to land at Jack Edwards Airport.
"This will be a world-class function," Zislin explained. "All eyes will be on us, and this really is some thing we can create on hopefully for years to arrive."
View Content Source
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment