The question on everyone’s lips this Monday after the 2023 Beale Street Music Festival is “Well, how was it?” The answer, from my perspective, is “It was okay.”
After the pandemic disruption was extended into a construction delay which moved the festival to the fairgrounds in Midtown, BSMF returned to a Tom Lee Park that is very different than it was in 2019. I’ve attended the Beale Street Music Festival for the better part of 30 years, and this year was unlike any other I’ve experienced.
Tom Lee Park has been transformed from a flat flood plane to a modestly hilly area spotted with with copses of trees, split by winding concrete paths. The official opening of the park isn’t until Labor Day weekend, and things were still very much under construction. Several areas with freshly planted trees were roped off from public access, and people seemed to respect the restrictions for the most part. The paths were a welcome addition to many people I spoke with, but several pointed out that being on your feet for several hours on concrete is much harder on the joints and bones than walking on turf — or more accurately to the historical Memphis in May experience, mud.
The forecast called for rain all weekend, but nothing beyond the lightest of drizzle ever came down from the threatening clouds. The newly installed turf and landscaping seemed to hold up very well under the onslaught of tens of thousands of boots and flip flops. (Seriously, don’t wear flip flops to a music festival.) But the ultimate test, in the form of a rainy weekend, never came.
But could the new Tom Lee Park handle a real crowd? On Friday before I headed down to Tom Lee for the first time, I said we’d find out the answer to that question about 8:45 p.m. on Saturday, when GloRilla took the stage. I was right on that account. Official attendance figures are not available as of this writing, but Memphis Travel’s Kevin Kane was pre-spinning low numbers to Channel 3 on Friday. But the Saturday night audience for GloRilla stretched the central Bud Light stage to its limits.
It was GloRilla’s homecoming show after blowing up in popularity over the last year, and she got a hero’s welcome. Raw charisma is more important to a rapper than any other performing artist. There are a lot of people who can spit fire bars in a recording studio, but who wilt under the glare of the stage lights. GloRilla is a fighter. She will not be ignored in favor of your phone. Backed by a 30-foot inflatable gorilla which seemed to embody her fierceness, she surround herself with six of the best dancers in Memphis — and this is a city with a very, very deep bench of dancers. Dripping in jewels and a shiny gold outfit, GloRilla grabbed the crowd out of the gate and roared through bangers like “Internet Trolls.” When she paused to monologue about the difficulty of being a woman shut out of the hip hop boys club, and ended with “we kicked the door in!”, everyone in Tom Lee Park believed her.
From ground level, and later the bluff, the new park appeared to handle GloRilla’s horde of fans without much trouble. The biggest innovation in crowd movement turned out to be the walkway that now runs the length of the river bank, which served as a kind of freeway for people going from one stage to the next on the long, park. The weekend provided three great sunsets, and on Saturday, people were lined up along the path to take selfies with the river in the background.
The biggest challenge to the Beale Street Music Festival’s attendance may be simple timing. This year, the festival fell on the second weekend of New Orleans Jazz Fest, which, judging from its A-list lineup, is much better capitalized than Memphis In May. To make things worse, this was the weekend Taylor Swift made a three-night stand in Nashville. Since the Swiftie fandom is the closest thing we have to a monoculture in 2023, the vast majority of Memphis’ younger, musically inclined folks made the trip to the Music City this weekend rather than checking out The Lumineers in the new Tom Lee Park.
They missed some good sets on Friday night, beginning with Memphis gospel duo The Sensational Barnes Brothers, then moving directly to The Bar-Kays. (One of my favorite things about being a long-term Memphis music fanatic is watching yet another audience lose their collective minds when The Bar-Kays remind them about “Freakshow On The Dance Floor.”) Earth, Wind & Fire paid tribute to Memphian Maurice White during their high-voltage vintage funk set. Then the crowd at the Zyn Stage swelled for 311, the ’90s cult band that has found the key to long-lasting success is just making sure you throw a great party every night.
Aside from GloRilla’s rapturous reception, BSMF ’23 never reached those heights again. The most puzzling addition to the bill was a band called Colony House who replaced White Reaper on the Volkswagen stage on Saturday. MIM had more than a week to find a new act after the lead singer of White Reaper broke his collarbone, but instead of picking up the phone and calling any one of the dozen of hungry Memphis rock acts who could kill on 30 minutes notice, they chose to spend the money on a mushy mess of warmed-over worship band music from the ritzy Middle Tennessee enclave of Franklin.
It didn’t help that Colony House followed Living Colour, the legendary ’90s prog-punk pioneers who haven’t lost their edge. Guitar god Vernon Reid and throat-ripping vocalist Corey Glover provide the band’s formidable one-two punch. Early songs like “Open Letter to a Landlord,” which takes on gentrification, and their smash “Cult of Personality,” which pretty much explains the Trump era of American politics in four minutes, are, if anything, even more relevant today than when they were written. The Beale Street Music Festival may have evolved, but some things never seem to change.
