Behind The Scenes With Hangout Founder, Shaul Zislin
By Julio Diaz, Pensacola News Journal, May 14, 2012
To many, the idea of running a major music festival sounds like a glamorous proposition.
But for Shaul Zislin, owner and founder of the Hangout Music Fest, that “glamour” has included making breakfast for road crews, dealing with tornado warnings and an oil spill, and cleaning artists’ trailers.
“When we tell people what we do, they think we sit in an owner’s box, like you see in the NFL,” Zislin said with a laugh.
Then he recounted the third day of last year’s festival when, at 4 a.m., he and his wife, Lily, were on their hands and knees cleaning trailers because the cleaning crew was nowhere to be found.
“We’ve got a whole set of new artists coming in at 8 a.m. and it’s me, her and a couple of our closest friends saying, ‘All right, we gotta do this. There’s 12 trailers to clean,’ ” he recalled.
Zislin is self-effacing about his part in producing the festival, which makes its third appearance on the public beach in Gulf Shores, Ala., this weekend.
But it’s not hard to see that he’s good at what he does.
Good enough to win a major industry award, Pollstar magazine’s Festival of the Year, just two years into presenting Hangout. Good enough to sell out the 35,000 capacity festival months in advance. Good enough to attract some of the biggest names in the music business — including, this year, headline acts Dave Matthews Band, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jack White.
Surf Style to Hangout
Zislin has been a part of Gulf Shores since a business trip 20 years ago convinced him that the community would be a good place for his burgeoning chain of Surf Style souvenir and swimwear stores.
Today, he owns “15 or 16” Surf Style stores from Mississippi to Panama City, several real estate developments and the Hangout restaurant at Highway 59 and Beach Boulevard, overlooking the public beach which has become the grounds for the music festival.
Soon after opening the restaurant, Zislin turned his attention to what would become the Hangout Music Fest.
In fall 2009, during the popular National Shrimp Festival in Gulf Shores, he met with A.J. Niland of Huka Entertainment, which books the bands, and the festival was born.
“When you look at a very seasonal place like this, you’re talking about 12 weekends a year,” Zislin said. “So the idea was to create a bookend to (the Shrimp Festival), something that would signify the beginning of the summer and stretch that economic activity one more week.”
That impact has been dramatic, according to Grant Brown, Gulf Shores’ director of recreation and cultural affairs.
“Last year, we estimated the direct result of the festival was $30 million,” Brown said. “That’s just Gulf Shores. If you look at Orange Beach, Foley and the surrounding communities, it very easily could be four times that number in what it brings to the area.”
Missy Zak, vice president of marketing with Meyer Vacation Rentals, said her company is seeing the festival’s impact, too.
“We have about 1,600 properties — beach houses and condominiums — so having something of this magnitude to bring people into the area is amazing,” Zak said.
A bigger footprint
Heading into the festival’s third year, Zislin and his team continue to adjust and adapt.
This year, in an effort to make the festival grounds easier to navigate, Zislin is expanding the footprint a block to the north, spilling over Beach Boulevard, without expanding the maximum capacity.
“The boardwalk was always the pinch point,” he said, analyzing the congestion that occurred when the festival quickly sold out 35,000 tickets in 2011 behind a bill that featured Paul Simon, Foo Fighters and Widespread Panic.
“It’s hard to walk that beach between the two stages a few times a day, when you’re dancing in between. So we had to find a way to expand that east-west corridor. By incorporating Beach Boulevard into that, and creating two major corridors, I think we’ve changed that tremendously.”
The continued drive to up the ante is clearly a key to Zislin’s success and something that is admired in the community.
“He is a perfectionist and a visionary,” Brown said. “We build this festival together from the inside out, but it really took him as the visionary to take a risk.”
“I guess the word ‘passion’ keeps coming back,” Zak said. “He doesn’t take on any endeavors that he’s not passionate about, and when you’re around him, it’s contagious.”
Not that Zislin will get much of a chance to see the fruits of his labor this weekend.
“I get pulled in a lot of directions,” he said. “My main concern is that nothing bad happens. A workday during the festival is very unpredictable, and you deal with a lot of factors. For us, for me, for Lily, it’s an 84-hour marathon.”
Click HERE for video.
Bookmark the permalink.
Print Version
Leave a Reply