Metro Pulse profile: The importance of being Ashley

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Nice Metro Pulse profile here of promoter Ashley Capps, the father of Bonnaroo and Moogfest:

If a minor maze of assistants signals success, how has Ashley Capps, a booking agent and music promoter for 20-something years, achieved it? Namely through that spice of life, variety. His career stands out for its undulating nature and its overwhelming variety of names and places. On the stage of Ella Guru’s, a 250-seat club in a warehouse district just starting to be known as the Old City, he booked an unknown Nashville songwriter named Garth Brooks and gave him $20 gas money to drive home. Only a few years later, Brooks referenced that Knoxville debut from the stage of the Thompson Boling Arena and in the lyrics to his 1995 song “The Old Stuff.” As managing agent of the historic Tennessee Theatre, Capps makes critically acclaimed songwriters like Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith feel so at home there that they come back year after year. And he’s helped organize the massive, three-day mudfest called Bonnaroo on 700 acres in the middle of the state. He’s introduced Blue Cats audiences to young talents named Norah Jones and John Mayer and, as their careers shot skyward, booked them at ever-larger venues and at increased ticket prices. He’s risked losing money to book one of his own favorite artists, and he’s probably made those losses back from hundreds of drunk rednecks standing on the scuffed-up World’s Fair Park lawn to hear has-been, middle-aged classic rockers wank on their guitars in a last-ditch effort to feel important.