BusinessTN

This summer, over a thousand electronic and jam band devotees will migrate to Tennessee for a camping music festival, featuring three stages, multimedia visual events, live art installations and more. The scene is not one of the many tents at the Bonnaroo Music Festival, but rather, the makings of the second annual Dexfest: Cosmic Convergence. The strategically timed, three-day festival will take place the weekend after Bonnaroo, June 17-20, about 200 miles east in Dandridge, Tenn. How did the small, historic town end up a destination for hippies, sample-savvy DJs and the synth rhythms and breakbeats of an emerging electronic scene?

Credit is due to the festival's 21-year old founder, Dexter Palmer, a Jefferson County native and current Belmont University student-turned entrepreneur. To some, Palmer is also known as Dex, a touring DJ and producer of genre-bending dubstep and glitch-hop music.

"This year, we're starting to gain a lot of national coverage for our event," Palmer says. As it turns out, Dexfest proved to be more of an accidental success than the result of a deliberate marketing effort. The festival started last year as a birthday party in Palmer's honor that surprised everyone by drawing nearly 700 people from across the country to Sherman Oaks Campground, owned by his father, Steve Palmer. This year, sights have been set even higher to attract between 1,500 and 3,000 people, potentially doubling Dandridge's population of less than 3,000.

To create the necessary hype, Nashville-based Thick as Thieves Productions signed on as the official promoter. "It's a family-oriented, grassroots festival that we're hoping to set over-the-top with some national headliners," says Blake Atchison, owner and founder of Thick as Thieves since 2007. Other affiliates helping Dexfest reach new levels on the sponsorship and production side are Nashville-based Yazoo Brewery, Po-n' Crunk Productions, March 1 Music and Music Matters among others.

Last year's festival saw just one national headliner. This year, that number has grown almost ten-fold, including main-stage acts like the String Cheese Incident offshoot, EOTO, and Conspirator, the side-project of the Disco Biscuits, who will perform at Bonnaroo the weekend before. "A lot of followers of the Disco Biscuits, which has a major cult-like following, will be our central tickets," Palmer says. Plans are to siphon off other transient, summer concert-goers by picking up where Bonnaroo leaves off. "We saw the opportunity of having 100,000 people three hours away and nothing occurring that weekend in the Southeast. We hope that they will shift over to Dandridge," Atchison says.

However, a lack of what Atchison calls "the Bonnaroo mentality" means Dexfest does not seek the same mega-status. "With the economy, people are picking and choosing what they attend," Atchison says. According to Steve Palmer, bigger is not always better. "Some people will come here instead because this is smaller, less money and their type of music," Palmer says. With a clear musical aesthetic, Dexfest can rely partly on intrinsic demand. "It's been amazing watching the electronic scene grow in the past few years," Atchison says.

In the race against other niche festivals, Dexfest's marketability as a vacation destination could give it a head start given nearby Douglas Lake and Great Smokey Mountains National Park -- the most visited in the nation. "Bringing even 500 people from outside of the region is huge, and that's exactly what tourism is about -- bringing people from the outside in," says Adele Sensing, director of tourism of the Jefferson County Chamber of Commerce. While it won't bring Dandridge the name recognition that Bonnaroo brought to Manchester, should Dexfest continue, it will bring a manageable influx of visitors each year, which penny-wise music fans and city and county officials can both appreciate.