Behind battle over Apache Lake Music Fest
The Apache Lake Music Festival was at the heart of an impassioned socialmedia campaign last week that had supporters calling for a boycott of Apache Lake Marina & Resort.
Producers of the annual festival announced on Tuesday, June 15, that the marina and resort’s new owners, Brandon Tackett and Tylor More of Mesabased Augeo Group LLC, had decided to hold their own Apache Lake Music Festival this year after failing to reach an agreement on how ticket sales would work.
Two days later, the new owners shared a Facebook post that said they would be holding their own music festival at the secluded spot deep in the Superstition Mountains, but wouldn’t be using the name that’s come to mean so much to fans of Arizona music.
In a post that started “To be clear...,” the new owners, who purchased the property in January, said their festival, to take place in October, would “be very different from previous years” and announced that they were looking for a charity to which they could donate the proceeds.
Supporters of the original festival continued calling for a boycott in the comments on that post.
Brannon Kleinlein co-founded the festival in 2010 with the support of the marina’s then-owners, the Schuster family.
“It sounds like they have kind of folded on trying to use the same name,” Kleinlein said. “But it could all have been avoided. Easily avoided.”
It’s just business, as far as resort owners are concerned
To Tackett, it’s just business.
“It’s not that complicated, really,” he said.
“I mean, this stuff happens in business all the time. From our perspective, we just couldn’t get to an agreement with Brennan that made sense for us. So we decided not to have him as the promoter for this year.”
They do plan on calling their festival something completely different.
“We’re still kicking around some ideas,” Tackett said.
They also plan on having different types of music.
Tackett said he’s never been to one of Kleinlein’s festivals.
“From what I understand, it was very indie rock and lots of local artists,” he said. “I think what we’ll be doing is maybe something a little bit more mainstream or country western.
They’ve already tested the waters with some country shows.
That type of music “seems to play well with the boat owners and kind of the consistent traffic that we have out at the lake,” Tackett said.
“Our hotels are sold out every single weekend. The rental fleet’s booked every weekend. We’re just adding musical talent, etc., to kind of add more attractions and show that we’re reinvesting in the experience.”
Name of the event was at center of dispute
Kleinlein has no issue with the current owners curating and putting on their own events.
His only problem was the idea of someone else using the brand he spent a decade building.
“If you didn’t want to go with us, if you wanted to run your own event and separate yourself and do your own thing, this is not a problem,” Kleinlein said.
“Just do the smart thing. Call it something different. They knew all the details, knew it was founded by us and brought out there by us. For them to think they could just take the name and use our momentum? Of course, we’re gonna have issues with that. And obviously, our fans are, too. They made themselves loud and clear on that.”
Kleinlein said he believes his supporters’ social-media campaign was the reason the resort decided not to use the festival name.
“It was overwhelming, the amount of support we had on our end,” Kleinlein said.
“And also, it just didn’t look good. So I think the owners saw that pushback and probably realized they were gonna have a tough time if they went through with it, using the name.”
As for the backlash, Kleinlein said the new marina owners brought it on themselves.
“If they would’ve come out of the box right away and said, ‘Hey, we’re doing something new. We weren’t able to work out a deal with with the ALMF guys, but we’re gonna put our own event and call it something different,’ I don’t think they would’ve had near the kind of pushback,” Kleinlein said.
“I wouldn’t even have supported people giving them a hard time. That’s their right to do their own event. But just the way they went about it was, I think, in bad taste.”
Two sides couldn’t agree on how to handle ticket sales
The disagreement that led to talks between the festival producers and the new marina owners breaking down was over ticket distribution.
Kleinlein wanted to maintain what he said is a “pretty standard deal,” whereby in exchange for assuming the costs associated with producing the event, the event’s promoter takes the ticket sales, while the venue makes its money off of what it sells.
That’s how it’s done at Kleinlein’s club, Last Exit Live, in downtown Phoenix.
“It a typical deal,” he said. “And that’s basically how our deal was structured for the last 10 years.”
The first time Kleinlein met with the new owners was in February. At that point, he said, they were open to maintaining that arrangement. At a second meeting, they suggested something closer to a partnership with tickets sales going through the venue’s website.
Kleinlein didn’t want to lose control of the festival
“I said, ‘I can’t do that,’” Kleinlein said. “That’s basically handing over our festival.”
Tackett said, “It wasn’t making sense for the whole property, what we were gonna generate. We kicked around a bunch of ideas. He was very amiable and open to discussions, and then we kind of gave him an offer and he just turned it down and said that wasn’t gonna work for him.”
Kleinlein said he tried his best to talk them into doing things the way the former owners did, to see if they could make it work.
As he recalls the conversation, “I said, ‘Look, we bring a lot of people out here. You guys have plenty of opportunity to make money.’ They’ve looked at the numbers. That place has been open since the ‘70s. And their biggest weekends ever are the weekends that we had Apache Lake Music Festival out there.”
That second meeting was in March. It ended with the owners saying they’d get back to him.
So Kleinlein waited.
Finally, in April, Kleinlein reached out, pushing for an answer one way or the other.
“That’s when I got an email that said, ‘We’re going to proceed with some version of Apache Lake Music Festival,’” Kleinlein said. “‘But we can’t agree to you taking all the ticket sales.’”
It was the first time Kleinlein got an indication that the resort owners planned to use the name.
“That’s what stood out to me,” he said. “And I was like, ‘That’s fine if they don’t want to work with us, but heck no, they’re not gonna use the name that we created for the event that we put on. It’s our reputation and our legacy.’”
Despite the disagreements, Tackett said, “There’s nothing personal here. I think he’s a great guy. He’s in the scene. He runs his own venue, I believe, full
time. He knows what he’s doing. In fact, I told him that we’re probably gonna fall on our face, and maybe we cooperate next year.”
Tackett added, “With how things have soured since then, that’s probably not gonna happen.”
Kleinlein said he reached out to the owners prior to announcing that any event at the marina billed as Apache
Lake Music Festival in 2021 was not the real deal.
He also warned them that his tightknit community of fans would not be pleased, and there would be backlash..
“So I tried to reason with them, saying ‘Why not try to use your own name and start your own legacy?’ And they were pretty adamant that they felt like they had a right to use the name.”
Tackett said he understands why fans of the long-running festival would be very upset about the situation.
“That was an event that they looked forward to every year,” he said. “But unfortunately, with the economics of running something so remote, I don’t think people understand just how expensive it is to get any goods down that road every single day. I know everybody thinks we’re just money hungry. We’re just trying to run a business that’s gonna be successful and stick around for generations to come.”
For now, he said, the backlash appears to have largely subsided.
“If you really go through the comments, there’s about five people that were really stirring the pot,” Tackett said. “It wasn’t a huge amount of negative attention.”
It also wasn’t the first backlash they’ve experience since taking over the marina and resort.
“We had already gotten some negative attention earlier in the year for raising hotel rates and some of the other stuff,” Tackett said.
“People love this lake and they’ve been coming for decades. So you know, they feel a sense of ownership in it. And I can understand that mindset.”