On Aug. 1, a national music festival called On High is bringing Slightly Stoopid, Big Boi, and a stack of other acts to Riverfront Park. This is one of the biggest concerts we've landed at that spot in over a decade. And it's arriving at the exact moment the city has quietly started asking whether our downtown riverfront could be worth a lot more to Salem than it is today.

So let’s connect the dots between a promoter betting real money on Salem and a city councilor trying to get the city to bet on the same thing.

I got on a video call last week with Abby Gerald, the senior marketing manager for Rise Up Selects. That’s the company behind On High and the Reggae Rise Up festivals. They put together festivals all over America. 

I wanted to know why they decided Salem was a great fit for this festival.

Here’s what she said.

One of their talent buyers, Brandon Brooks, is from Eugene. He thought Salem was underrated and kept pushing the team to look at Riverfront Park. They'd already tested Oregon with a festival in Redmond last year and liked it, so they took the swing.

When Slightly Stoopid's team was gauging interest in the tour Salem lit up.

"They said it was the market that was the most excited about it from any market in the country," she said.

Now, that's a promoter relaying what a band's team told her. It's not a hard attendance number. 

I asked how it's gone working with the city on a first-year event. She said Salem has been "really, really great" to work with. A big part of whether Salem can host bigger stuff comes down to whether City Hall makes it easy or hard. 

A promoter saying the city was easy to work with is exciting.

Here's why this isn't just a concert story. Two hours east, Bend has spent 20 years turning a riverfront amphitheater into the region's signature venue, and a few years ago it faced the exact problem Salem is staring at now.

Bend's amphitheater, then the Les Schwab Amphitheater, now Hayden Homes, kept losing touring artists because its stage was too small. So in late 2020, the venue started a privately funded rebuild to "right-size" the stage: taller, bigger, built to land the acts it had been missing. 

According to Central Oregon Daily, the general manager said flatly that the venue had lost out on artists due to stage capacity, and that fixing it would let them book "an even broader and more varied lineup." The new stage went up to 62 feet with nearly 1,840 more square feet.

That's the same argument Salem's downtown boosters are making right now, that the venue needs physical work to be bookable. Bend just made that bet first.

And the payoff is real. Per a 2015 Visit Bend intercept survey, each concert at the amphitheater brings roughly $1.2 million into Bend's local economy. One show. The mechanism is simple: out-of-towners book hotels, fill restaurants, and spend downtown, and the city collects lodging tax on top of it.

One honest note: that $1.2-million-per-concert figure comes from a survey tied to Visit Bend, the local tourism bureau, so treat it as the optimistic end of the range rather than gospel. But even discounted, the direction is clear, and Bend believed in it enough to rebuild the stage with its own money.

The gap, stated plainly: Bend's venue holds about 8,000 and runs 50-plus shows a summer. Salem's Gerry Frank | Salem Rotary Amphitheater, opened in 2021, holds 3,000 to 3,500. We're not Bend. But Bend shows what a riverfront stage can do when a city decides to invest in it, and Salem hasn't started.

Here's the part most people haven't connected to the concert.

Back in April, Ward 1 Councilor Paul Tigan got the city to take a first step toward studying whether that amphitheater could be upgraded into a bigger downtown draw. A quick translation, because the government language buries this: the vote happened at the Urban Renewal Agency, which is just the City Council wearing a different hat, in charge of a pot of money that by law can only be spent fixing up specific districts like downtown. So Tigan's move spends that money, not the general budget that pays for police and firefighters, to hire a consultant to study amphitheater improvements.

Why is this worth your attention? First, they talked about the amphitheater as an economic development question, not a parks project, the same lens as this whole piece. 

Second, the city isn't treating the amphitheater as a one-off. A city staff report bundles it with other downtown ideas (public restrooms, a possible "ambassador" program, sidewalk and lighting work) under a single "Vibrant Downtown" banner, because there isn't enough money or staff to chase all of them at once.

Here's what Tigan told me he's after:

I'll flag the obvious: that is a councilor pitching his own idea, and pulling events away from Northeast Salem has tradeoffs for that part of town that a downtown-first pitch tends to skip. 

It’s all worth watching.

I didn't want this to be all officials and studies, so I texted Mykelann Harris, who owns Mykie's downtown, and asked flat out whether riverfront events actually help her.

"Yes they are helpful! I wish they would use the riverfront for MUCH more events. There should be an event going on every Thursday–Sunday in the summertime in my opinion."

That's the whole argument, from someone whose register actually rings on event nights. When something big happens at Riverfront Park, downtown can tell. The question Salem's only now starting to answer is whether that happens four times a summer or forty.

I put a poll in last week's newsletter (July 9) asking a simple question: what kind of events would you want to see at Riverfront Park? 147 of you voted. Here's how it broke down:

Put the top two together and it's not close: about 8 in 10 of you want the riverfront doing more, and live music is the single biggest draw. Only 5% wanted less.

One honest caveat on that number: this is a poll of WHS readers, people who already opted into a Salem newsletter, so it measures what an engaged, event-curious slice of town wants, not a scientific read on all of Salem. 

But it's a real signal, and it happens to point in the same direction as everything else in this piece: the concert, the councilor, the business owner. 

The appetite is there. The question is whether the city feeds it.

On High is one show, and one show isn't a strategy. A first-year festival in a town famous for buying tickets at the last possible second is a real gamble for the promoter. None of it is guaranteed to come back.

But Abby told me the whole point is for On High to become an annual Salem thing, with a new lineup every year. If it works, Salem will finally have a real example to point to when that city study lands: not a hypothetical, but an actual crowd, actual vendors, actual hotel nights.

The demand showed up before the plan did. 

The city's taken its first small step. 

And on August 1, the riverfront gets to show us what Salem's living room could be if we decided to furnish it.

- Jacob Espinoza