The Temptation Of Superfly

Thirty minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve, the intoxicated throng at Tipitina's, New Orleans's legendary rock club, start chanting. "we want the funk! we want the funk!" Guys with shaggy hair and girls in $50 flip-flops direct their plea to Galactic, the beloved local quintet that's playing its first gig in the Big Easy since Katrina. Even the often-sonorous NPR has come to broadcast the occasion nationally. "I didn't think this could ever happen again, but here we are and it's great!" exclaims one ponytailed reveler. When Galactic hits the stage, it launches into a rib-splitting riff, which sets the tank-topped twentysomethings to squealing in boozy glee. At one point, the saxophonist reaches into the crowd and extracts a large cardboard sign scrawled by the radio producers. He holds it above his head and the club thunders with approval. It reads: you are live.

It's a bittersweet moment, at once a celebration of life and a salute to those who succumbed to the storm. But for Rick Farman, Galactic's comanager and one-fourth of the indie-music production company Superfly Productions, the return to N'awlins is pure triumph: "They kicked ass last night!" shouts the thin-bearded 29-year-old, double-fisting a beer and a tequila backstage with his girlfriend. "They had great numbers."

The past nine years have been super for Superfly. What began as four Deadheads plastering the Tulane campus with flyers for local jam bands has matured into the full-service production shop behind the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, the world's highest-grossing, which takes place each June on a sprawling patch of Tennessee farmland. Tonight's post-Katrina headbanging is but a brief return to the sweaty after-hours ethos of Superfly's early incarnation. These days it's all about volume of a different sort: scores of bands, tens of thousands of people, millions of dollars. The numbers have become an end in themselves.

Boys 2 Men

Before the guys behind Superfly kicked off their Birkenstocks, they were a bunch of scruffy kids promoting shows in the bleary, steamy bars and clubs of New Orleans. Superfly made its name in the late 1990s by throwing all-night concerts for the legions of collegians who annually descend there for Jazz Fest. The vibe was gritty, spontaneous, and wholly authentic; musicians from different bands would jam together at shows that started at 2 a.m. and raged until sunrise. Soon, people were flocking to Jazz Fest as much for Superfly's after-hours scene as for the daytime festival itself. "Those shows put Superfly on the map," says Tom Chauncey, the president of Partisan Arts and booking agent for Ben Harper and Jack Johnson. "You would simultaneously call to place your act in Jazz Fest and in one of Superfly's nighttime shows." From 1997 to 2000, Superfly hit its stride; its yearly gross, it says, skyrocketed from around $200,000 to more than $1 million.

But without its own venue to collect the bar revenue--a critical profit center for promoters--Superfly took a pummeling from corporate giants such as the House of Blues. By 2001, the operation had already plateaued. So the gang hit on the idea for Bonnaroo: "We didn't have an amphitheater," recalls Jonathan Mayers, the quartet's prickly strategist, now 32. "So we went to a farm."

As ideas go, the notion of setting a three-day festival 60 miles outside of Nashville--featuring a bunch of bands that had never come close to the FM dial--verged on the insane. But Superfly, which also includes sponsorship wrangler Rich Goodstone and Web guy Kerry Black, was convinced that if it could somehow coalesce the entire diaspora of lightly employed, musically rabid fans, it would have the makings of a franchise. It cobbled together a business plan (paying its accountant with concert tickets), hooked up with Ashley Capps, a regional promoter in Tennessee, and pitched the idea to Coran Capshaw, the powerful manager of the Dave Matthews Band.

Capshaw went for it (he and Capps retain stakes in Bonnaroo), and rumors promptly began circulating online, where jam fans already had an intricate network of sites and blogs for exchanging tour dates, bootlegs, and show reviews. Sensing that cultish, post-Phish types would perform the promotional legwork on their own, Superfly went so far as to pocket its $100,000 advertising budget, bypass Ticketmaster, and throw the tickets up for sale on its Web site. By the end of the day, it had sold more than 10,000 tickets by word of mouth alone; a couple of weeks later, it hit 70,000. It had hoped to sell 40,000.

"Our entire promotional campaign was basically 'Don't come,' " says Farman, the group's de facto CEO whose biggest fear was that non-ticket holders would crash the party (a big problem at the original Woodstock). Bonnaroo One grossed around $9 million; a year later, Rolling Stone would proclaim it the "American rock festival to end all festivals."

Farman, who chipped in $6,500 of his bar mitzvah money to get Superfly off the ground, still marvels at his own success: "We were just a bunch of kids who had never even done an outdoor show. And there we were, producing the largest music event in the country." Last year, Bonnaroo raked in $13.4 million, making it the third-highest-grossing music event in the world after U2 shows in London and Dublin.