Interstate 24 carries traffic through the heart of Manchester, Tennessee. But on June 21, 2002, the highway turned into a parking lot. The cause: Bonnaroo.

In the 14 years since, the music and arts festival has streamlined the traffic plan with police and city planners. But that Friday’s snafu was front-page news in The Tennessean, which recently wrote that “some longtime locals and commuters still shudder when the fest returns each year.”

Bonnaroo now attracts close to 100,000 people annually. By contrast, the Green River Festival in Greenfield is small — attendance is expected to hit about 13,000 this summer, as it did last year. But make no mistake: it’s growing, and each summer brings a new set of opportunities — and growing pains.

The Green River Festival, which celebrates its 30th anniversary July 8-10, has become a key summer destination. Hosted by Greenfield Community College, it is packed with dozens of bands, local food, hot air balloon rides, and plenty of room to stretch out on the grass or stroll hula hooping through boulevards of blankets. For fans of blues, folk, Americana, and indie rock, it’s a field of dreams.

But if you build it, how many will come?

Bolstered by some big plugs in the national press last year — from Rolling Stone, USA Today, and The New York Times — the festival is attracting visitors from increasingly distant parts of New England and the country, says Jim Olsen. Olsen is the president of Signature Sounds in Northampton, and he became director of the festival when the record label took over from the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce in 2014.

He says that although ticket buyers are concentrated in the Connecticut River Valley, according to data from last year’s ticket sales, people came to the show from at least 17 states.

“This started out as a super small, county fair sort of thing,” says Olsen, who has been in charge of booking the musical acts since the festival launched in 1986. But by 2014, “the festival had grown to the point where we need some infrastructure improvements. Eventually the chamber decided it didn’t want to be in the festival business anymore.”

Ann Hamilton is the president of the chamber, which is based in Greenfield, and she remembers that hand-off in leadership as “very smooth,” given the fact that Signature Sounds had already taken on increased responsibility for the festival’s marketing and music production over the previous 10 years (the chamber remains responsible for organizing the balloon rides).

“It just became too big an operation for us,” Hamilton says.

Over the last couple of years, under the direction of Signature Sounds, the festival partnered with Ticketfly, moving ticket sales away from what Olsen calls a “homemade” operation. Last year, the festival introduced beer and wine sales, and added a third day of music.

In 2014, the whole weekend sold out. In 2015, Saturday sold out. No matter how sales go this year, it’s clear that the festival is pretty close to capacity, especially given the limited availability of hotel rooms in Franklin County. “Those sell out months ahead of time now,” Olsen says. “After that, people are scrambling.”

That’s why the festival is introducing a major new component this year: camping. And even though Rome (or Bonnaroo) wasn’t built in a day, the announcement still begs the question: Is Greenfield about to become saturated with a muddy, messy throng of tourists?

Olsen is hard-set on preventing that, and he thinks the location of the camping — two and a half miles away by shuttle bus, at the Franklin County Fairgrounds — will help avert any disasters. “Camping only gets tricky,” he says, “when you can’t separate the camping from the festival itself, and you’re attracting a demographic that mainly wants to party.”

At many big festivals, swaths of land commandeered by the boozy unwashed often end up looking like a battleground from Braveheart — based, at least, on this writer’s hazy memories of college. But Lynne Bertrand, the Signature Sounds staff member in charge of camping, wants the campground to be more than an unsupervised satellite operation. “It needs a vibe, with its own food and music,” she says. “It needs to be a microcosm of the festival itself.”

That will mean dedicated food vendors doing breakfasts and late-night snacks, she says, as well as a small camp store and live acoustic sets by festival artists each morning before the festival officially starts. Bertrand says the festival is limiting RV camping to 30 spots, but is not planning to cap the number of campers. She expects 500 campers. So far, about 300 are confirmed.

“We have to think of this as a local festival as much as a national festival,” she says. “When my team and I are out making sure people know about this, we start up in the Hilltowns, postering where basketball hoops are pointed out to the streets because there’s no traffic. We go really local before we get the wider word out. This is home, and these are the people the festival is for.”

If Bertrand has a motto, it’s probably to prepare for the worst but expect the best. She says that she and other staffers will be up all night with an ear open to trouble at the campgrounds. But the presence of so many little kids and families, she says, “really centers the festival.”

That and the music, she adds, only half-jokingly. “I’ve been to rough-crowd festivals, and they have their own appeal, but this isn’t that. It’s hard to listen to Tedeschi Trucks and then go make trouble.”

Olsen argues that when festival crowds get too rowdy, the real problem is simple: the festival isn’t taking good enough care of them, and lacks a good enough system to keep people safe, relaxed, and entertained. That’s why he takes pride in Green River’s “incremental” growth.

“One of the saddest things you see is speculators who just decide they’re going to start their own Bonnaroo and go from zero to 90,” he says. “There’s a lot of consolidation in the concert business right now. You see festivals trying to get acquired by these big companies, like Live Nation, and then cash out. That’s never been our goal.”

That’s why Olsen wants to stay at GCC. The campus has built-in benefits, like 1,200 parking spaces and permanent dressing rooms behind the main stage, but its acreage also limits the festival’s growth.

“There’s a certain beauty in not trying to expand,” he says. “I think it would lose a certain charm. Right now it captures the flavor of this region so well. I don’t ever want to lose that. We want to keep doing it as best we can, and make it the best small festival in America.”

 

Contact Hunter Styles at hstyles@valleyadvocate.com.