City Life

Summer Lights—Nashville’s music festival, beer bash, high-brow arts concert, street-level dance-a-thon, face-painting fun-o-rama, and food fight—was born in 1981. It was not an easy birth. And, as things have turned out, Summer Lights has never had an easy life.

Local events planner Janelle Glasgow was one of the prime movers in the creation of the event. As she told the Scene in 1991, much of the idea for the first Summer Lights came from an event she had just produced at Cheekwood, a festival known as “A Summer Fling.” After that event, and after Glasgow was told that Cheekwood had no more interest in hosting it, the idea of something bigger, something grander, something that could be held downtown, started germinating. Glasgow paid a visit to Alice Zimmerman, then director of the fledgling Metro Arts Commission, and made a pitch for the new event. “I said I wanted to do a festival,” Glasgow recalled, with “music and food and things.”

Zimmerman was excited by the idea, enough so that she recruited the Tennessee State Museum and the Tennessee Performing Arts Center as cosponsors. It was a propitious time for such a collaboration. Richard Fulton, who was then mayor, was tantalized by the idea of restoring a semblance of life to Nashville’s dying downtown, so he jumped at the notion of luring human beings onto downtown’s streets during non-business hours. What’s more, there was something high-minded about the idea of boosting downtown and also helping “the arts.” The concept promised to add a more cosmopolitan, sophisticated edge to our country-tinged, rough-and-tumble city.

But as the event got under way, troubles sprung up like weeds. With only months to organize the festival, finances were a problem. Zimmerman personally bankrolled many of the expenditures. Meanwhile, the Metro Beer Board threw up its own stumbling blocks: The board refused to issue a beer permit, and it was left to the Donelson Rotary Club, which had its own beer permit, to jump in and sell the suds.

With the opening ceremonies for the festival only hours away, workers from Nashville Tent and Awning balked at drilling holes in the Legislative Plaza—they feared they might puncture the ceilings of the government offices below. Craftsmen complained to the daily papers that the timing was poor, because another crafts fair was being held the same weekend. Fulton had been scheduled to do the honors at the ribbon-cutting at 11 a.m. on Friday. But, when the hour for the opening ceremonies arrived, the turnout was so slim that he merely shook a few hands and left.

Nevertheless, some bright spots had shone out by the time the event had concluded. Crowd response was encouraging. And onlookers enjoyed watching as inmates from the Metro Workhouse, who were were on hand, courtesy of Sheriff Fate Thomas, to provide manual labor, had their faces painted by volunteers from The Farm, the nearby commune.

Still, the event took in only $18,000, scarcely enough to cover the $24,000 it cost. The first Summer Lights had its first shortfall. And a tradition was set.

The Lights that failed

In recent months, the “issue” of Summer Lights—its shoddy finances, its lack of definition, its poor organization, and its tendency to anger so many of the people associated with it—is once again being revisited. It is being talked about, and newspaper stories are being written about it. Changes are being suggested, but, more than likely, Summer Lights will continue, and we will have the chance to watch it fail again.

The ever-looming question is “What do we do with Summer Lights?” but it never seems to produce much change in the event. Asking the question is simply a ritual we repeat every few years.

The basic argument in favor of throwing a party in the middle of downtown Nashville is not a bad one. We put up a stage, serve some beer, add some pizza, burgers, and cotton candy, and we get a party that people ought to be able to enjoy.

But as with so many other things, the experience of too many failed Summer Lights weekends since that initial one in 1981 has given the event a negative inertia that almost dooms it to failure. It is almost as if nothing can ever be done to rescue the thing; nothing, no matter how grand, can reverse the institutional bad memory of an event with unimaginably bad karma.

In 1982 the second Summer Lights festival was thrown under the auspices of the Metro Nashville Arts Commission, which was headed by Anne Brown, one of the city’s leading all-time, rah-rah arts boosters. With Fulton exerting pressure on every Metro department head to get behind the event, Brown began building Summer Lights into something very large indeed.

By 1984 the Summer Lights Foundation—later renamed the Greater Nashville Arts Foundation—was chartered as an income-producing adjunct to the Commission. That meant the Foundation could sponsor Summer Lights and make money from it. That money could then be used to fund activities of the Arts Commission.

By the time 1988 rolled around, Summer Lights was serving up bluegrass, jazz, the blues, the high arts, street sculpture, food booths, and just about everything else imaginable. The event had a full head of steam. Unfortunately, it did not have a very clear understanding of what it was. It did not have the precise focus of a Jazz Fest in New Orleans, or a Jazz Festival in Montreal; despite what many hoped it would become, it was far from becoming a remake of Charleston’s Spoleto U.S.A.

Whatever it was, Summer Lights turned into a train wreck with the election of Bill Boner to the mayor’s office. Previously, Metro Government had plugged holes in Summer Lights by subsidizing many of its expenses. But either Boner thought the event ought to start making money on its own, or he simply didn’t care what happened to it. By the end of the 1988 festival, Summer Lights—which had made $100,000 the year before—was $200,000 in the hole. At that point, the politicians got involved.

Metro Council let it be known that it was tired of helping out, and the festival’s organizers were required to post expensive bonds for the use of city streets. Disputes arose over whether Summer Lights would be able to use its prized Deaderick Street site once again. To reduce the tension, and to assist Brown in some of the event’s more political maneuvers, an outside manager was brought in. New blood, it was thought, might help produce a better Summer Lights.

As 1991 rolled around, the trumpets blared, and in walked “The Wonder Company,” an event-planning firm that had produced the opening of the Donald J. Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. The Wonder Company was supposed to provide Summer Lights with the element of showmanship that it so sorely needed.

Within months, however, The Wonder Company had been dubbed “The Blunder Company.” That year Summer Lights lost another $200,000.

It was not too long after that fiasco that Brown departed the Arts Commission and the Greater Nashville Arts Foundation. In the wake of the fiasco, the two entities went their separate ways. The Foundation retained control of Summer Lights; the Arts Commission hired a new director and went about the business of promoting the arts in Nashville.

Up for bid

Soon, Summer Lights was under the direction of a private company headed by local music promoter Steve Pritchard. For the next few years, the event managed to get by. But in the end, it encountered more problems—not just with turnout, but also in terms of some awfully bad timing with regards to the weather. To make matters worse, corporate sponsors, still bruised from bad experiences with previous Summer Lights festivals, were leery of pitching in.

And so the debts began mounting again. In recent months the Greater Nashville Arts Foundation has filed for bankruptcy, and the mayor’s office has started soliciting ideas about what to do with Summer Lights. The most recent proposal comes from the Nashville Symphony Guild, which has offered to take over the festival and merge it with its 43-year-old Italian Street Fair fundraiser.

Once again, everybody seems to have an opinion about Summer Lights. Some want a big arts festival to showcase the myriad of talent that exists here in dance, theater, the visual arts, and music. Some want the same kind of showcase, but on a smaller scale. Some want to move the festival out of downtown. Few have brazenly advocated letting it die a dignified death.

Frankly, it would make perfectly good sense to put the poor thing out of its misery. The essential mission of Summer Lights in the early ’80s was never about music, or food, or the arts. It was about throwing a big downtown party and inviting the entire city. The fact is, Nashville downtown in 1997 is a far cry from Nashville downtown in 1981. Every night is a party now. People have plenty of reasons to come downtown, with or without an outdoor music festival.

Since Summer Lights was established 16 years ago, Nashville’s music scene has exploded. Tin Pan South, the NEA Extravaganza, Dancin’ in the District, and ongoing events at venues like The Ryman Auditorium and the downtown Arena have simply blown Summer Lights away. And when it comes to parties, the city has seen the rise of countless events that more than make up for whatever any citizen feels will be lost if Summer Lights expires.

Maybe some people really will feel a loss if Summer Lights goes away. If someone wants to adopt it, that’s fine. But the city shouldn’t spend any money on it at all. Nashville, frankly, is a lot bigger town now than Summer Lights can handle.