Organizers of the inaugural Hangout Music Festival have released the first wave of performers for the new three-day event, set to bring a major touring festival to the beach in Gulf Shores for the first time.
The festival is scheduled for May 14-16, 2010, on the sand at The Hangout, the popular restaurant and entertainment venue on the Gulf Shores public beach. The initial lineup includes bluegrass and country star Alison Krauss, mash-up DJ Girl Talk, R&B singer John Legend, the Zac Brown Band, the Black Crowes, guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela, Gov’t Mule, Michael Franti and Spearhead, reggae artist Matisyahu, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and Ozomatli, among others.
Organizers followed up with a second round of additions, bringing in Guster, Brett Dennen, Keller Williams, Jerry Jeff Walker, ALO, the Whigs, OK Go, Orianthi, Pnuma Trio, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears, Toubab Krewe, Matt Hires, A.A. Bondy, Rachel Goodrich and Moon Taxi. The full festival is expected to feature roughly 60 acts once the complete bill is announced.
Three More Acts Join the Bill
As the festival’s May dates approached, organizers announced three additional performers: Robert Randolph & The Family Band, known for their high-energy pedal steel guitar shows; New Orleans-rooted guitarist Papa Mali, appearing with his band Friends; and the Honey Island Swamp Band, a Louisiana roots-rock outfit with a growing Gulf Coast following. Organizers also said additional late-night performances, beyond the main daytime and evening schedule, would be announced separately.
The late additions leaned heavily into the festival’s regional roots. Papa Mali and the Honey Island Swamp Band carried New Orleans and Louisiana flavor onto a stage barely two hours from the city, and Robert Randolph’s sacred-steel church tradition added another Gulf-adjacent sound to a bill that ranged from bluegrass to dance music. The late-night announcement promised a second, smaller tier of shows in the evenings after the main stages closed — the kind of programming that fills a resort town’s bars and clubs and keeps festivalgoers spending across the whole town rather than only on the beach.
Lineup Grows to Include National Headliners
By the spring of 2010, the confirmed bill had expanded well beyond the festival’s first two waves to include Trey Anastasio and TAB, Ben Harper and Relentless7, the Flaming Lips, Ray LaMontagne, Jakob Dylan performing with Three Legs featuring Neko Case and Kelly Hogan, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, the Funky Meters, North Mississippi All-Stars, Davy Knowles & Back Door Slam, Needtobreathe, and Jeff Austin & Friends featuring Larry Keel, alongside a run of regional and emerging acts including El Cantador, Kristy Lee, Roman Street, Kirsten Price, Wild Sweet Orange and Rustlanders. With four stages planned, including two set up directly on the Gulf of Mexico beach, organizers were promoting the debut as a full weekend of music paired with beach activities.
The final bill’s shape told the story of the festival’s ambitions. Headliners drawn from the jam-band world — Anastasio, Gov’t Mule, the Funky Meters, North Mississippi All-Stars — mixed with soul and R&B of Legend’s stature, the indie credibility of the Flaming Lips and OK Go, and a deep bench of Americana, from Krauss to LaMontagne to Austin’s bluegrass. Scattering those genres across four stages over three days was the festival model pioneered at events like Bonnaroo and brought to the beach towns for the first time in this region — a format designed to move thousands of attendees between stages from noon until well past dark.
The regional names on the undercard mattered locally. Roman Street, the instrumental guitar act with deep Mobile-area roots, El Cantador and Wild Sweet Orange from Alabama’s own club circuit, and Kristy Lee from the Panhandle gave Gulf Coast bands slots on a bill with Grammy winners — exposure no local venue could offer, and a deliberate nod to the music communities the festival was drawing from.
Tickets and Local Sales
A limited allotment of three-day passes went on sale early for $115 through The Hangout in Gulf Shores, Surf Style stores in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, Serda’s Coffee in Mobile, and Blues Angel Music in Pensacola. National ticket sales were set to open Feb. 15, with the three-day pass price rising to $159 once the broader public sale began. Organizers later added a limited number of single-day passes at $79, along with VIP ticket and travel packages starting at $500, available online or by phone.
The ticketing geography traced the festival’s expected audience — Gulf Shores and Orange Beach at the center, Mobile and Pensacola within easy drive. Selling early passes through record shops and local counters rather than only online was a deliberate effort to root the event in the coast’s own retail landscape, and the layered pricing, from $115 early birds to $500 VIP travel packages, mirrored the tiered models that had carried the big national festivals to financial maturity over the previous decade.
A New Kind of Festival for the Alabama Coast
Shaul Zislin, owner of The Hangout and the Surf Style retail chain, said more of the festival’s roughly 60 scheduled acts would be announced around the time national ticket sales opened. The event marked an ambitious bet on bringing a large-scale, multi-day music festival to the Alabama Gulf Coast, an area better known at the time for spring break crowds and beach tourism than for hosting national touring acts across genres ranging from bluegrass to hip-hop-inflected DJ sets.
Zislin’s own story is inseparable from the venue. The Hangout — rebuilt as a restaurant and entertainment complex on the public beach property where an older Hangout roadhouse had stood for generations — had opened in the years before the festival as part of his broader retail and hospitality holdings, and the festival grew directly out of that venue’s identity. The site offered what few venues on the northern Gulf could: open sand, room for four stages, public-beach access at the center of a town built to absorb visitors, and a brand already known to spring and summer tourists across the region.
The economics of a first-year festival on the coast also depended on assets the area already had. Gulf Shores’ condominium and hotel inventory, its restaurant rows and its highway access from Mobile, Pensacola and beyond gave organizers infrastructure that inland festival sites had to build from scratch — and gave the city a stake in an event that promised May visitors ahead of the traditional summer rush. A mid-May date sat deliberately in the shoulder season, filling hotel beds between spring break and Memorial Day.
The Blind Boys of Alabama’s place on the bill carried its own local resonance. The gospel group, formed in Alabama more than sixty years earlier, was among the state’s most celebrated musical exports, and its presence on a national festival bill in Gulf Shores underscored the deep musical tradition the coast was drawing on — from the Muscle Shoals sound to the New Orleans second line only hours west — even as the festival booked acts from across the map.
The festival would go on to become an annual fixture in Gulf Shores, drawing tens of thousands of fans to the beach each spring in the years that followed its 2010 debut.
What the debut established went beyond a single weekend’s lineup. By proving that a major touring festival could be staged on the Alabama coast — national headliners, four stages, thousands of out-of-town visitors on a public beach — the 2010 Hangout Festival added a new category to the region’s tourism economy, one that had previously belonged to larger cities and resort markets. The first year’s bill, assembled in waves from an initial announcement through the final spring additions, set the template the festival would follow for years: a genre-spanning national bill, a regional undercard, late-night shows around town, and the Gulf of Mexico as the backdrop for all of it.
The Beach as a Stage
The festival’s most distinctive feature was also its simplest: the stages went up on the sand. Two of the four performance areas were planned directly on the Gulf of Mexico beach, with the Gulf itself behind the main stages — a setting few American festivals could offer, and one organizers made the visual centerpiece of every promotion. Attendees’ wristbands would carry them between the beach stages and the inland areas, past the food and craft vendors that rounded out the grounds, with the whole footprint within walking distance of the condominium towers lining the beach road.
Staging on a public beach brought logistical questions no arena festival faces — tides, wind, sand under temporary structures, and the need to return the beach to the city in usable condition — and the planning for the debut drew on production teams experienced with beachside events elsewhere. Organizers promoted the weekend as music paired with beach activities, framing the festival as a resort vacation as much as a concert lineup, with the stages a short walk from lodging most festivals would have to bus attendees to.
The dates themselves placed the debut in one of the coast’s most competitive weekends. May on the northern Gulf competes with spring fishing rodeos, shrimp festivals and the opening of the summer season, and the festival’s first year arrived amid a coast-wide effort to extend the tourism calendar beyond the schools-out months. A sold-out weekend of festivalgoers filling condominiums, restaurants and shops in mid-May was exactly the kind of event the coast’s tourism boards had spent years courting.
For Gulf Shores itself, the debut represented a civic milestone as much as a booking coup. The town had grown across three decades from a quiet beach community into one of the region’s busiest resort destinations, and hosting a nationally promoted festival — covered by music press, staffed by production crews from across the country, attended by fans from far beyond the Gulf Coast — announced its arrival as a venue market in its own right. Whatever the weather or the box office brought in that first May, the town’s ability to stage a major festival at all was the underlying news.