Jackson Free Press

A major addition to the Jackson metro’s music offerings is coming in spring 2018, but this time, it won’t be in Jackson.

The City of Brandon held a press conference Tuesday, Aug. 16, at the Brandon Municipal Complex, announcing details about the Brandon Amphitheater at The Quarry, which will be located across the street from a new sports facility and seat between 8,000 and 8,500 people. After the conference, city officials led attendees to a groundbreaking ceremony at the project site on Boyce Thompson Drive.

The $20-million project’s running and biking trails and baseball complex, which will feature six astro-turf fields, align with the City of Brandon’s push to upgrade its amenities, including the recently completed expansion of the tennis courts at City Park and the ongoing improvements to Shiloh Park.

The Brandon Amphitheater, on the other hand, seems like a less obvious addition to the recent development projects until you look at the history behind it. The plans began more than three years ago when Brandon residents voted to pass a 2-percent food and beverage tax that would exclusively go toward improving the existing parks and amenities, as well as developing the city’s tourism economy.

Following the referendum’s passing, the City of Brandon evaluated different sports facilities around the South that could provide an example for the project. These included complexes in Oxford, Miss., Meridian, Miss., Vidalia, La., Germantown, Tenn., Chattanooga, Tenn., and Elizabethtown, Ky.

The City began to consider the idea of adding a music venue to the project after seeing the economic growth that resulted from Southaven’s Snowden Grove Park, which features a baseball complex and the BankPlus Amphitheater, which can seat about 7,000 people. However, Brandon Mayor Butch Lee says he had some reservations as they looked at other amphitheater examples.

“I’ll be quite honest with you,” he told the Jackson Free Press. “We looked at a couple others that were seating of 2,000 to 4,000, with grassy hills and that kind of stuff, and with the other amenities around those at the time, you’d have porta-johns for restrooms, you’d have beer tents set up, you’d have all that kind of stuff in a fairground-type venue. For me in particular, I just couldn’t see spending tax money on building something like that. I just couldn’t do that.”

Then, in 2014, the architect on the Brandon project, Jamie Wier of Wier Boerner Allin Architecture, connected with an architect who worked on the Oak Mountain Amphitheater in Pelham, Ala., who suggested they come look at that facility. While there, they met Gary Weinberger, a partner of Red Mountain Entertainment, which organizes major festivals such as Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis, Sloss Music & Arts Festival in Birmingham and the Top of the Hops Festival, which takes place in Biloxi, Orange Beach, Ala., and Charlottesville, Va. Red Mountain also constructed and handles booking for the Oak Mountain Amphitheater.

“(Weinberger) was one of two or three people who actually built Oak Mountain,” Lee says. “And at that time, there was no development in or around Pelham, and going forward 20 years from that, you could see where the whole town began to prosper with restaurants and retail sales and hotels and that kind of stuff. It began to migrate around that facility.”

From there, Lee and his scouting team began visiting other amphitheaters in the vein of Oak Mountain, including the Orange Beach’s 9,900-capacity Amphitheater at The Wharf and the 8,400-capacity Tuscaloosa Amphitheater. The latter location ultimately became the inspiration for the Brandon Amphitheater at The Quarry, which the City of Brandon will own and for which Red Mountain Entertainment will handle booking and event promotion.

Lee says: “After we visited the amphitheater in Tuscaloosa, it became evident that if we’re going to build one, then we’re going to build one like that, that’s got all these amenities, reserved seating, plenty of clean restrooms, a VIP restaurant and lounge, an appropriate place for the crews and artists to come in, with green rooms, changing rooms and all those types of things, quality (audio and visuals), and easy access in and out with paid parking.”

Once they had decided to move ahead with the plans and knew what qualities they wanted in the Brandon Amphitheater, Lee said they felt the property on Boyce Thompson Drive would be a perfect fit for the project, though the city did need to move about 60,000 yards of dirt last year to bring down construction costs.

“We had preliminary construction estimates in the $28 million range, and that was just a no—too much,” he says. “So we backed off of that, we did a lot of the work ourselves, we paired it down from 10 baseball fields to six baseball fields, we made some changes in the amphitheater, and we got it down in the $20 million range. So that became palatable.”

For more information, visit brandonms.org.