At 4 p.m. on a cool, cloudy Friday afternoon, the gates opened for the first Riverbeat Music Festival at Tom Lee Park, and leading the first customers through the gates and down Riverside Drive was Memphis’ Lucky 7 Brass Band.

As the Lucky 7 were heading south, strollin’ and blowin’ (their horns), a Mississippi River barge was pushing north alongside them. The band soon took the Beale Street Landing Stage, following up the hymn “I’ll Fly Away” with a couple of Memphis hymns, of a sort: The Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger” and the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There.”

A Memphis festival was off to a very Memphis start. 

Riverbeat Music Festival reimagines what a Memphis riverfront fest can be

And it wasn’t finished.

Pyrotechnics can take on many forms.

When the Pacific Northwest electronic duo Odesza opened the night’s final set, before a healthy audience at the festival’s Stringbend Stage, they didn’t just do so with smoke and light, but with flames and fireworks. They also added their own live horns to their mostly canned sound, as well as a masked eight-person drum corps that evoked Blue Man Group.

About an hour earlier, on the smaller Zev Pavilion Stage, Memphis guitar veteran Eric Gales created his own fireworks. All it took was 10 fingers and six strings.

Playing as part of a “Take Me to the River” Memphis soul music revue, organized by Royal Studios’ Boo Mitchell, Gales laced bracing, bone-deep riffs into the Ann Peebles’ classic “I Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody’s Home” and then erupted into a solo. Singing lead was Jerome Chism, a young Memphis singer whom Mitchell dubbed an “old soul,” and listening was believing. 

A few minutes after Gales and Chism were done, Carla Thomas, the Queen of Memphis Soul, followed, her throne on this night a black wooden stool to lean back on, one crutch for another option. But she was fierce on the microphone, doing her father Rufus Thomas’ “Walking the Dog.” At the end, Mitchell came over to assist her and seemed worried Thomas, 81, was about to fall. She waved him off. She was too busy dancing. 

Thomas and her Stax Records cohort will get celebrated with an HBO documentary series later this month. While she was playing, most of a notably young Riverbeat crowd was grooving to Mt. Joy, the Los Angeles rock band headlining the Bud Light Stage and doing their own version of the Lil Nas X country-rap hit “Old Town Road.” Or they were hugging a dormant Stringbend Stage, awaiting Odesza.

But those savvy enough to be at the pavilion for Thomas’ lone song were blessed by a moment of pure Memphis. Up close and in the flesh. No need to wait. 

Something new

“This is the Riverview Festival and I’m happy to be a part of it,” Thomas announced when she took the stage. 

Hey, close enough for something new. 

This first night of the first Riverbeat Festival was fairly subdued, marked by pleasant weather after a drizzly day had threatened rain and also by what felt like a pretty modest opening night crowd. 

But maybe modest is the new normal. 

Mike Smith, the director of management/production for Mempho Presents, which is staging the new festival after longtime tenant Memphis in May International Festival declined to bring back its annual Beale Street Music Festival to the space this spring, said that the daily festival capacity that Mempho has put on the site is 22,000.

Riverside Drive closes in preparation for Riverbeat

That’s the same capacity the Beale Street Music Festival set last spring, when it returned to Tom Lee Park for the first time since 2019, and attempted to fit its festival into a somewhat smaller, more fully designed space. It’s significantly smaller than the capacity of the music festivals staged in the park in the past.

But, like the Beale Street Music Festival last spring, Riverbeat isn’t expecting to hit that capacity. Not this year. 

“With the short lead, we didn’t have the amount of time to actually market it properly, so we’re just grateful to be able to get it off the ground, to be honest,” said Smith. “Success was almost just based on being able to have the event.”

Smith said that single-day passes for the festival have outpaced three-day passes, with each of the three days of the Friday-Sunday festival having sold between 9,000 and 10,000 single-day tickets, in addition to an unspecified number of three-day passes.

They’ll try to grow the festival to its capacity over time, said Smith, having made a multi-year commitment to stage the new festival in the park. 

Fest-goers who attended last year’s Beale Street Music Festival will notice some changes in how Riverbeat has approached using the park’s redesigned space. These changes probably deserve more than one night to be evaluated.

The biggest difference is the reduction from three major stages to two. With its large fenced-in, off-limits meadow and additional new topography, Riverbeat determined the park’s southern lawn wasn’t a good fit for a major stage. In seeking a different festival use for that space, they landed on what’s been branded Whateverland, a tented DJ space augmented by a Ferris wheel and carousel. 

The new park’s central pavilion was turned into a beer garden for last spring’s festival. It’s now a secondary stage, a version of the older fest’s “blues tent,” minus the seating or as specific a genre commitment. 

The smaller Beale Street Landing Stage adds another new secondary performance space, one dedicated to local acts, giving attendees a fresh blast of Memphis music as they enter through the main gate at the north end of Riverside Drive.

Concessions seem to be fewer but more local, with Gus’s Fried Chicken frying fresh on site, joined by Corky’s Ribs & BBQ and Memphis festival standards MEMPops and Pronto Pups. 

Riverside Drive to close — but Tom Lee Park will stay open — during most of May

Smith said the festival isn’t necessarily expecting bigger crowds Saturday and Sunday, with single-day passes at similar rates across all three days. 

But the character of the festival may change. Friday headliners Odesza and Mt. Joy drew an enthusiastic young crowd but are also perhaps less familiar to a broader audience than some of the acts to follow on Saturday and Sunday, including the major hip-hop reunion of 1990s icon the Fugees, Grammy-nominated country star Jelly Roll and sure-shot blues/jam festival favorites Robert Randolph & the Family Band. 

Editor’s note: Kevin McEniry, a member of the board of Memphis Fourth Estate, the nonprofit that owns and operates The Daily Memphian, is founder and master producer of the Mempho Festival and Mempho Presents, which is putting on the Riverbeat Music Festival and SmokeSlam.