Thanks to some concerns from neighbors up the hill (and possibly some booking difficulties) concert organizers from the America's Cup and Live Nation have agreed to scale back their summer concert lineup at the temporary waterfront music venue from 40 concerts to 30, while also promising to have someone on-call to handle any noise complaints.
The summer music lineup kicks off with Imagine Dragons on May 31st and the big headliner Sting a few days later on June 2nd. So far only seven family-friendly shows including Train, Heart and Fall-Out Boy, have been booked at the venue which will only exist from the end of May until it is dismantled after the yacht races end in the middle of October. In order for those shows to go on as planned, however, the venue still needs to receive approval from the Entertainment Commission today.
Working with touchy neighborhood groups like the Telegraph Hill Dwellers — one of the groups that denied us our giant floating jumbotron — A-Cup organizers and Live Nation representatives agreed to limit the number of summer concerts to 30, with only ten of those falling on weeknights. (Meaning: if they book out all 30 shows, there will be an average of one per weekend from May until mid-October, and a mid-week show every other week.) Shows will end by 10:30 p.m. on weeknights and 11 p.m. on weekends, but if a band needs a little extra time for an encore, organizers can request up to six 30-minute extensions throughout the season.
For the neighbors' part, it sounds like they still want to see more restrictions on mom-rock concerts on the waterfront. "Numerous people told me during Treasure Island, it felt like band was playing inside their living room," Telegraph Hill Dwellers president Jon Gollinger said of the Treasure Island Music Festival, which is held over two miles away across the water from Telegraph Hill. (A full mile more than the distance from the Outside Lands main stage in Golden Gate Park to the tony mansions of Sea Cliff.) The sensitive listeners in the neighborhood group also want organizers to ensure the noise complaint hotline connects to a real human being, rather than an answering machine, so that they may be immediately addressed.
For their part, Live Nation hopes to do as much sound-dampening as possible at the city's only open air, waterfront music venue. The stage and speakers will face the water, presumably to lash back at Treasure Island residents for allowing such a nuisance to take over their little suburb once a year. Behind the stage on the Embarcadero side, the venue will raise a special curtain "manufactured by a company that specializes in sound mitigation" to keep things quiet on the city side.
The venue's permit goes before the Entertainment Commission today. Despite all the sound mitigation efforts, neighbors still believe post-show traffic will be a problem.
Previously: Sting Will Christen S.F.'s First Outdoor Waterfront Concert Venue
[SFEx]