Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Music City
El Dorado — Arkansas’ original boomtown — will gush music this weekend as MusicFest’s 30-year anniversary coincides with the opening of Murphy Arts District
EL DORADO — This place knows booms. Oil booms, mostly. This week, another kind of boom will happen.
Starting Thursday, the grand opening of the first phase of the $100 million Murphy Arts District and the 30th annual MusicFest get underway downtown with a sold-out concert by Grammy winners Train along with British-born opening act Natasha Bedingfield at the sparkling new Griffin Music Hall.
Missed out on Train tickets? Fret not. Thursday night’s show is just the beginning of four days stuffed with country, rock, hip-hop and classic rock. It’s all one big party to usher in the new arts district and celebrate three decades of MusicFest.
On a mid-August morning, arts district chief marketing officer Bob Tarren stands on the Griffin Music Hall stage in the building that was once the Griffin Auto Company and is on the National Register of Historical Places.
“Imagine, in about six weeks, holding a microphone on this stage will be Ludacris, Migos, Train,” says Tarren, who has worked for the Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburgh and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Right now, though, the stage is a construction zone, as men in hard hats continue to work on the hall as well as the attached restaurant/cabaret and the amphitheater next door.
“We’ve got an army of guys working,” Tarren says. “I’m amazed at how it evolves from day to day and week to week.”
The headlining concerts will take place at the 2,000 capacity music hall and the adjacent 8,000 capacity amphitheater.
The free MusicFest, celebrating its pearl anniversary, will bring in local and regional music acts to the downtown square and will feature — deep breath — children’s activities in the Kids World area, a steak cook-off, America’s Got
Talent finalists the Acrodunk Extreme Dunkers, zip lining, a beer garden, the
Miss MusicFest Pageant, food vendors, crafts vendors and more.
So, yes, things should be booming here all weekend.
MAD JAMS
Friday night amphitheater headliners ZZ Top — Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard — are 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members who started cranking out their signature brand of Texas blues ’n’ boogie in Houston in 1969. The trio has released 15 studio albums, including classics like Tres Hombres, Fandango! Deguello, Eliminator and others.
Ithaca, N.Y., pop rockers X Ambassadors first got together in 2009. Their debut studio album, 2015’s VHS, included the massive hit, “Renegades.”
And kicking off the music Friday will be Robert Randolph and the Family Band, who are fronted by pedal steel guitarist Randolph and crank out a potent mixture of funk and soul. Their new album, Got Soul, which features appearances by Anthony Hamilton and Darius Rucker, came out earlier this year.
For the late-night show Friday, Grammy Award-winning Atlanta rapper Chris “Ludacris” Bridges hits the Griffin Music Hall Stage. He has released nine studio albums since 2000, including his latest, Ludaversal, in 2015. He has sold more than 19 million albums in the United States and also has appeared in the Fast and the Furious film franchise as well as in a recurring role on the TV series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Saturday’s amphitheater shows lean toward the country side of the dial with another Grammy-winning headliner, Brad Paisley, whose clever songwriting and wicked guitar skills have been featured on 12 studio albums. His most recent, Love and War, was released this year.
Also on the bill are Mammoth Spring native Ashley McBryde, whose latest single is “A Little Dive Bar in Dahlonega.” She was named one of Rolling Stone’s 10 New Country Artists You Need to Know and made her emotional and well-received debut at the Grand Ole Opry last month.
Chase Bryant’s latest, the energetic track “Hell If I Know,” was released in August. Multi-instrumentalist Hunter Hayes, whose self-titled 2011 debut yielded the monster hit “Wanted,” also will perform.
The Saturday music hall late night show will feature Atlanta hip-hop chart toppers and “dab” dance originators Migos. The trio — Quavo, Takeoff and Offset — formed in 2009 as the Polo Club before becoming Migos in 2010 and releasing its first single, “Versace,” in 2013. Migos hit mega-pop star heights earlier this year with the single “Bad and Boujee,” from the album Culture.
Another Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and the man Bob Dylan called America’s “greatest living poet,” Smokey Robinson, will close the party Sunday with a performance
backed by the South Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.
Robinson, a Detroit native, formed the Miracles while he was still in high school. Their song “Shop Around,” written by Robinson, became the first R&B hit for Detroit label Motown. Among Robinson’s most famous songs are “You’ve Really Got A Hold on Me,” “The Tracks of My Tears,” “I Second That Emotion,” “Tears of a Clown” and many others.
Tarren says that concertgoers are welcome to take blankets into the amphitheater. Chairs, he says, must be low-seated beach chairs.
MusicFest will feature two stages of free tunes starting on Friday with groups like Dash Rip Rock, Moonshine Mafia, Trout Fishing in America, Alchemy, Dazz & Brie, Jeff Coleman and more.
Beth Brumley, executive director of Main Street El Dorado, says teaming MusicFest with the Murphy Arts District opening was a no-brainer.
“It’s still downtown,” Brumley says, “and we wanted to celebrate their grand opening with them and make it one big event. For us, it was go big or go home.”
In the evenings, ticketholders can mosey over to the amphitheater and the music hall to take in the headlining acts. Friday and Saturday concert tickets, sold through the Murphy Arts District, range from $35 for amphitheater shows to $25 for the ages 18-and-up late shows with Ludacris and Migos at the music hall. Sunday’s set with Smokey Robinson and the South Arkansas Symphony Orchestra at the amphitheater is free.
This year’s MusicFest will start sooner and stay open later, Brumley says, with bands playing until 8-9 p.m. and college and NFL football on big screen TVs.
“There will still be stuff going on and then people can walk over to see Brad Paisley or Ludacris,” says Brumley, a former MusicFest chairman who has lived here since 1994.
The festival, which expects a crowd of about 30,000 for the weekend, is also hoping to attract fans who come for the Train and Natasha Bedingfield show and want to hang around El Dorado on Friday and beyond.
“We typically haven’t started until 5, but this year we will start at noon on Friday,” she says.