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Festival set to return to Manchester June 14-18

Nearly 70,000 people are expected to take to the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival grounds in Manchester for the annual event this year scheduled for June 14-18.

Festival Producer Brad Parker said the number is an increase from last year, and does not include the expected 5,000 people who will be working on the festival grounds.

“I feel like we are going to have a really strong year this year, Parker said during the June Manchester Area Chamber of Commerce Luncheon.

Parker said he wanted to take the opportunity to thank all those in the community who work so hard to make the Bonnaroo a success each year since the first event in 2002.

“I really wanted to use my time today to say that Bonnaroo takes a lot of people in this community and this county and this state to come together and make it a very safe event for patrons, as safe as possible,” he said.

Parker said the festival, which is produced by Live Nation and C3 Presents, partners with the Manchester Police Department, Coffee County Sheriff’s Department, Tennessee Department of Transportation and the Tennessee Highway patrol.

“We pull officers from every nook and cranny in the state that you can think of,” Parker said.

Parker took questions from the Chamber audiences during his presentation, with Mayor Marilyn Howard asking of the expected number of attendees, how many of those are expected to be local to the Manchester Coffee County community.

“I would say about 5% are local,” Parker said. “The last number I saw was we had people coming from 47 different states for this years’ event.”

Another luncheon attendee asked what top performers are slated for this year’s Bonnaroo lineup.

“The first name I will mention is we are lucky to be one of the few festivals that have the Foo Fighters playing in North America this year,” Parker said.

Following the death of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins in 2022, Parker said the band took a break from preforming.

“Just to show you how special Bonnaroo is in the music world as a whole, Dave Grohl made a request to his agent and said we want to be on the farm, we want to play Bonnaroo whenever we are ready to come back and play shows,” he said. “That was really a special moment for us.”

Other festival headliners for 2023 include Kendrick Lamar, Tyler Childers and Paramore.

Parker was then asked how Bonnaroo performers are selected each year.

“It really depends on who is playing, who is touring that year that the festival is happening,” he said. “Artists go on cycles where they do their own headlines and then they do festivals, so the first step is the bands that we want to play, are they doing festivals in that cycle and then that eliminates half the herd.”

Parker said there are some instances where bands will approach festival organizers about the possibility of playing, but it is rare for headlining acts to do so.

“A lot of it is a lot of luck to be honest with you,” Parker said. “It is a lot of hey, here is our dream list, lets reach out and see who comes back with a no, and who comes back with a maybe and who comes back with a yeah, we’ll do it but you will have to pay us a lot more money than you want to pay us.”

During the luncheon, a raffle was held for two tickets to Bonnaroo, which were won by Bill Nickels, who donated them to be auctioned off to benefit the Sportsmen and Businessmen Charitable Organization, Coffee County Humane Society and Manchester Area Chamber of Commerce.

The tickets were purchased by Mayor Marilyn Howard, with a winning bid of $1,600. Parker said Bonnaroo would match the amount raised during the impromptu auction.

Parker said that after more than 20 years of Bonnaroo Music Festivals, it is still important that the festival be a responsible community partner.

“I don’t even know how to express how much we care about being a part of the Manchester and Coffee County community,” he said. “I know we cause some noise and some traffic issues and all of that…and there are probably a couple people in this room that would like to have a couple choice words with me, but we try to offset that as much as we can with the amount of good that we try to put back into the community…”

“It has been an amazing 20 years, we are looking forward to trying to figure out what another amazing 20 years looks like,” Parker added.