A New Pilot for Tall Stacks

   It still comes as a surprise to many that the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra owns Riverbend.
   It may be even more of a surprise that the CSO also produces and manages Tall Stacks, Cincinnati’s periodic steamboat heritage festival, which steams into the Port of Cincinnati for its sixth incarnation Wednesday through Sunday.
In a venture perhaps unique to the CSO among the nation’s major orchestras, the CSO created Music and Event Management, a wholly owned subsidiary incorporated in 2001, to share its expertise with the community by assisting events such as Tall Stacks.
   As CEO of MEMI, they appointed Mike Smith, highly successful manager of Riverbend for the CSO (Riverbend ranks 15th in total ticket sales among the country’s outdoor concert facilities).
   In a turnaround for Tall Stacks, Smith and MEMI delivered an expanded and rejuvenated event in 2003, renamed Tall Stacks Music, Arts and Heritage Festival, reversing a downturn in its fortunes since it was founded in 1988 to celebrate the Cincinnati Bicentennial.
   “It has evolved from a volunteer effort for the bicentennial to one of the top ten opportunities for people to have a great time in this country” (American Bus Association), said Fred Craig, president of the Tall Stacks board of trustees.
Tall Stacks 06 is an opportunity to step back in time. Sixteen magnificent riverboats will dock here, offering over 350 cruise opportunities including themed cruises, sightseeing cruises and music cruises, and there will be an array of educational exhibits on both sides of the river, including “Sawyertown” (Cincinnati side) and “Steamboat City” (Newport side).
   There’ll be live music on four stages comprising the country’s largest roots festival with R & B, blues, gospel, country and heritage music featuring national acts like Roseanne Cash, Wilco and Dr. John, bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys and an array of local and regional artists and ensembles.
   Cincinnati Children’s Theater will present its 40-minute musical “Tom Sawyer” premiered in 2003, Cincinnati’s own Showboat Majestic will have a riverboat review and the Underground Railroad Freedom Center will present an exhibit “Along Jordan’s Path” documenting the African-American experience, including Cincinnati’s Civil War Black Brigade. There will be food galore, hot air balloons will glow on the Kentucky side and there will be fireworks each evening.
Admission $22 in advance, $25 onsite, children 12 and under are free – covers all five days. Tickets and information at www.tallstacks.com.
   The $12 million, non-profit event (which receives both government and sponsorship support) is expected to draw over a million people. They include 250,000 regional guests and visitors from as far away as Switzerland and Germany, said Craig, vice president of the engineering firm of Parsons Brinkerhoff and project manager on the Brent Spence Bridge Replacement Project.
   After the fourth Tall Stacks in 1999, festival organizers knew they needed a new pilot on the bridge, Craig said. Run by the all-volunteer Tall Stacks Commission, the event had lost attendance that year, falling short of projections by 22 percent compared with 1995. And even though the 95 festival had set the record for attendance (850,000), it had ended up losing money ($800,000).
   “Steven (CSO board president Steven Monder) had created MEMI to do just this sort of thing,” said Smith. “We made a presentation to the TS board after looking at their experience, their books and operational standards. They had already taken the position that they wanted to do something different with the event. They could see that interest in the core element, the boats, had sort of stabilized, so what more could they do?”
   One of Smith’s prime recommendations involved students.
“There was an educational component to Tall Stacks all the way back to 1988. There was a preview day when kids came down, saw the calliopes, saw the boats docked and had some interaction. We said why not include those kids in the entire experience? Why not partner with other assets in the community, Children’s Theater, the Underground Railroad Freedom Center?
   “It’s the best kept secret of Tall Stacks,” said Smith, who got his start working for the Nederlander Organization, original managers of Riverbend. “We have 24,000 kids pre-registered for field trips, over 300 organizations, from home schoolers to Taylor Mill Elementary. Five-hundred buses are coming down Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and 35 percent of the event site is dedicated to the two educational components.”
   (Sawyertown, including fabric weaving and animals, is based on a 4th and 5th-grade curriculum. Steamboat City, with Civil War re-enactments and tin-type photography, is geared for 7th-9th-graders.)
   Music was an enhanced focus of the 2003 event also, a natural for Smith with his accumulated Riverbend expertise.
   “The Riverbend connection, the trust, the relationship that Mike and his folks have with these people and their managements, they really play off one another,” said Monder.
   “People on the supply side of this event, the music supply side, want to come here,” added Craig. “We can paint the cartoon this is what we want Tall Stacks to be but getting from that to the list of entertainers you see here is an incredible undertaking. To bring 75 acts in five days is a real credit to their ability to attract, negotiate, contract, compensate and coordinate. Just the logistics of bringing that many acts in here is nothing short of monumental.”
The 03 Tall Stacks Festival had a $50 million impact on the area, said Craig. “Hotels, restaurants, taxes. We calculated with the Hamilton County administrator that there’s $750,000 worth of direct sales tax revenue generated by Tall Stacks. Every hotel for probably 50 miles from here will be full all five nights.”
   Organizations like Children’s Theater got a bounce, too. Subscriptions went up 40 percent after 2003 and “they added hundreds of teachers to their e-mail list,” said Smith.
   Currently, Tall Stacks is MEMI’s signature event.
   “Jammin on Main,” the popular springtime music festival, which MEMI took on in 2001, fell victim to outside events, such as the April riots that year, which forced it to be cancelled, bad weather and, ultimately, rising artist fees and declining sponsorship revenue, which led to its demise in 2005.
Jammin is “no longer in existence,” said Smith, “but that doesn’t mean it may not rise from the ashes. We look at opportunities. Also, a goal that we have at Riverbend of constructing another small performance space, a small amphitheater is a strong focus of MEMI right now.”
MEMI also runs Cincy-Cinco, the weekend Latino culture fest held at Coney Island in May.
   The CSO’s entrepreneurial enterprise was begun with the dual purpose of earning income for the CSO and utilizing the talent and expertise the organization had built up.
   “Standing backstage at Riverbend over the years we would talk about things as mundane as ‘the season is going to be over and this person is going to leave’ and ‘Riverbend is seasonal yet we’re developing all this talent, this expertise.’ The idea evolved that if we could form a little core organization to provide services to other organizations in the city or wherever, this would be good for the orchestra. We could provide opportunities for our talent to stay with us and at the same time be a service to the community.”
   Though proceeds have been modest so far, the model is in place and MEMI will “quite likely” take on new projects in the future, he said.
   “The symphony is leveraging their tremendous capability internally to help with a variety of events in the community,” said Craig. “This is, again, a situation where we’re very proud of our symphony.”