You may not know the name Superfly. But you probably know at least one of the music festivals they’ve started. They’re behind Nashville, Tennessee’s Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival and San Francisco’s Outside Lands Festival.
For the last three years, Superfly has had its eye and ear on Colorado for its next project.
“Denver is one of the best music markets -- if not the best -- in the entire country,” said Superfly co-founder Rick Farman. “Pound for pound, I think it’s arguably the best and on par with New York and LA, San Francisco and Chicago.”
But liking a scene and finding a place to drop an annual three-day music festival are two very different things. So it’s not surprising that it’s taken all this time to find a location that works.
It was a tough conundrum. Superfly needed space. A lot of space. Enough space to fit 30,000 to 60,000 people each day. Also, Farman said they really wanted to avoid asphalt; the ideal location needed to have lots of trees and grass.
“We proposed a number of ideas that they were not interested in; they proposed a few that we didn’t think would fit,” said Katy Strascina, executive director for Denver’s Office of Special Events. That’s the group Superfly had to first convince that they could put on a festival in the Mile High City without making it a mountainous headache.
Several sites were offered up, including the National Western Center, which is currently undergoing a large-scale renovation, and the area around Denver International Airport.
Strascina admitted the airport maybe wasn’t the best idea. “The flights overhead would really interfere with the festival itself,” she laughed.
Enter Overland Park Golf Course.
“We think that the contours of it, the location of it -- you know, golf courses have a lot of basic setup that works well for a festival,” Farman said.
After three years of research, the City of Denver and Superfly agreed the 140-acre park -- heralded as the oldest, still-running golf course west of the Mississippi -- had just about everything both sides needed.
It’s an idea that might sound crazy to some, but not to Farman. The course’s hills create natural places to put up multiple stages, and the park encompasses the outdoor lifestyle that they want to highlight with the festival.
The city liked that it was not in the heart of a residential area, Strascina said. Only one side of the park has people living adjacent to it. The other three sides are bound by industrial warehouses and a busy highway.
“Knowing that it was going to be less impactful for residents was really important to us,” Strascina said.
To make sure, for four months Strascina, along with Denver’s Parks and Rec department, gathered community input via public meetings and surveys. Big concerns included noise, trash and traffic.
While negotiations have not been finalized, Superfly has already committed to making the festival a “non-car” event. That means no parking in nearby neighborhoods, and a push towards shuttles, public transportation and biking.
As for the course itself, tens of thousands of music fans tromping over it for three days probably isn’t great. But Strascina said the contract will include provisions that Superfly fence off sensitive areas, including the greens and wildlife habitats. The group also has agreed to return the grounds to their pre-festival state. If Superfly’s other events are any indication, maybe even better.
“As we have heard from San Francisco that the event organizers always put their Golden Gate Park back into better condition than they left it,” Strascina said.
Superfly hopes to base Denver’s festival on San Francisco’s Outside Lands Festival. Strascina attended the event last year to check things out and said she was impressed with how well it was organized, as well as how clean the park was kept.
“We certainly aren’t going to put our trust in amateurs, and these are our parks and we’re not going to hand over our park for it to just be destroyed,” Strascina said.
During the next three months, the Office of Special Events and Superfly will finalize negotiations before presenting it to City Council. If the contract is approved, Farman said the yet-to-be-named festival will debut in September 2018.
