IndyCar Meets Music City

The first weekend of August brought IndyCar back to Nashville for another thilling race through the downtown streets. It really is amazing to watch all the IndyCars race over the Korean Vets Bridge and take the various tight turns along the way. I’m sure locals aren’t thrilled with the amount of road closures, but the increase in tourist visits in the dead of Summer might soften the blow.

Music City

Meanwhile, our Clandestine team was busy producing the opening night gala for our client Gainbridge as well as IndyCar. The client chose The Bell Tower again this year because of it’s proximity to everything downtown. It really is a terrific location and the venue itself has great bones.

IndyCar
Clandestine Events

The night before the big event, our team headed over to The Bell Tower to oversee the installation of numerous electric guitars and drapery. The install started at midnight and went until 2:30am — just a tiny glimpse into the glamorous life of event planning.

IndyCar Bell Tower

The following day, we headed back to the venue at 11am where we spent the day overseeing all the vendor deliveries and setting everything into place. We made a few game time decisions to move things around a bit so that the flow really worked.

In previous posts, I have referenced the need to be skilled in rapid problem solving. Our biggest challenge for the day was when we plugged in our custom neon piece and discovered it had become damaged in transit. We brought the piece to a local signmaker, but their neon tech was out of town so we weren’t able to display the neon. It was definitely a bummer.

Our event last year was jam packed, so we wanted to make sure we had enough room for guests to get around and see the stage – we scaled back on floor pieces, less florals – more plants, and spent a bit more time on items we could suspend; guitars, disco balls, and smillac upstairs on the beams.

Rustler Hat Company
Rustler Hat Company

Our big wow moment for this year was the custom hats that were available thanks to the ladies at Rustler Hat Co. – the absolutely killed it and were such a huge hit. It was a really fun way to connect our event to the city and to get our guests fired up for the weekend. By the end of the night, almost everyone had a hat on.

Country Line Dancers

We also had country line dancers that surprised guests right before our main act took the stage… Darius Rucker and his band were fabulous. They sounded great, and were a perfect match to the party crowd. And then, just like last year, we had local DJ Grant Fischer take over for the ‘after party’.

Darius Rucker

The IndyCar Meets Music City party was a rockin’ success; as was the rest of the weekend.