Inkcarceration Music and Tattoo Festival
How do you top the success of the 2018 Inkcarceration Music and Tattoo Festival inaugural campaign? How about 30+ bands on two outdoor stages with 70+tattoo artists, reformatory tours, food trucks and more. The reformatory’s annual Halloween haunted house attraction, Escape From Blood Prison, makes its inaugural spooky experience for festival goers in 2019.
Last year promoters kicked off the Inaugural 2018 Inkcarceration Festival with a diverse lineup that included Rise Against, A Day to Remember, Life of Agony, BUSH, Living Color, Black Label Society, Clutch, Hatebreed, Sevendust, Suicidal Tendencies, Corrosion of Conformity, Fuel, Of Mice and Men and more. The heat was fierce on and off stage as fans maneuvered throughout the festival grounds, enjoying the sights like kids in a candy store.
Joining this year’s headliners; Shinedown, Godsmack and Five Finger Death Punch will be Taking Back Sunday, Skillet, Fozzy, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Awake at Last, Funeral Portrait, The Everyday Losers, Live, Motionless in White, Red Sun Rising, Buckcherry, Andrew W.K., Stabbing Westward, Light the Torch, Eyes Set to Kill, Raven Black, Impending Lies, Monster Dolls, Seether, I Prevail, Starset, P.O.D., From Ashes to New, Smile Empty Soul, Kerbera, Beyond Unbroken and Rivals.
Music Madness Magazine had an opportunity discuss the creation of Inkcarceration Music and Tattoo Festival with Susan Fisher, Director of Marketing for the festival. Her excitement for what they have created was infectious and explains why the festival has been so wildly successful.
Music Madness: I know you are busy putting together the finishing touches for this year’s Inkcarceration Music & Tattoo Festival…
Susan: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. We’re ready now for year two.
Music Madness: It has to be exciting! Before we get into year two, can you tell me how the concept for Inkcarceration and all its madness came about?
Susan: Sure. A team of us came together last winter. There had been things done at the Reformatory before, but we weren’t involved in any of that. So we were approached by the Ohio State Reformatory. We had some inroads there, and we brought together a team of professionals that had been in the band world for 30 years; concert tour manager, band manager, food truck operations manager, marketing managers. We brought this kind of SWAT team together last February, believe it or not, and said, “Okay. Music, tattoo, prison. This has got success written all over it.”
We got pretty amazing headliners considered they didn’t know who we were last year. And we kicked it off with Rise Against, A Day to Remember, Bush, Black Label Society and we were off to the races. Four months later we opened the doors and it was incredible. Incredible.
Music Madness: What are the expectations from year one to year two and beyond?
Susan: Sure. Well, we have incredible expectations for this year. We’ve nearly tripled our ticket sales versus last year. And as you can imagine we went from zero Facebook followers, and now we have 60,000, or something like that. Social media is a beautiful and powerful tool. So we’ve got fan clubs, and we’ve got campsite fan clubs. People are like, “Hey, man, who needs places to crash? Come share my tent.” The comradery of it has developed. It’s been really, really awesome. We are incredibly excited.
So our team has expanded, as you can imagine, to accommodate the bigger crowed. We’re working with the city. We’re working with the highway patrol. We’re working with law enforcement to keep everyone safe. I just had a meeting today with fire and EMS to make sure we are covered. Our goal is to give people a festival experience that they will want to come back year after year because they had such a great time. We want to treat them the way we’ve all been treated, or we want to have been treated going to a festival. So we’re down to the little details about where the portajohns go, where the hydration stations are, and how much space there is between acts. We think about all of those details, because we want the festival experience to be what people write about, and what they tell their kids about, and what they bring their kids to when they’re old enough, and they just have a great time.
I mean, with Shinedown, Godsmack and Five Finger Death Punch, we’re just out of our heads excited about what they’re going to bring. And the depth is awesome, too, with Skillet, Seether, Taking Back Sunday, +Live+ and the list goes on. We’ve got some ReverbNation bands and some local bands, and we’re giving the little guy a chance, because we all started as the little guys. It’s important to give them a place, too. So we just think the vibe is going to be great, and we’re looking forward to a great weekend.
Music Madness: Absolutely. Its hard not to get excited about that lineup! In addition to the music, there’s so much more. Can you tell us a little bit about what is new this year?
Susan: Sure. Well, with your Inkcarceration ticket, you get a free access to the historic landmark, Ohio State Reformatory, otherwise known as Shawshank Prison made famous, obviously, by the movie 25 years ago. It’s the 25th anniversary so that’s really cool. It’s the most impressive building I’ve been in in the world. It’s the largest freestanding cell-block, so to see something this massive, it’s hard to describe. You get to meander all through it and go through many of the scenes that took place in The Shawshank Redemption film, so the warden’s office and Brooks’ room. There’s great, great scenes from the film you get to see.
In addition to that, we’ve got a special feature that goes on every fall at the Reformatory. They put on Escape From Blood Prison, which is their haunted house series. They do a lot of haunted tours, and everyone’s going to get a preview of that. I think it’s like a $10 extra ticket, but you can go in for the self-guided free tour and you can go in for the bonus tour. I actually have not been through it. I’m a little nervous, because the cast wander around, and they will sneak up on you throughout the festival. I mean, you could be getting a beer, and one of them from the cast that has half of a face or like is totally mutilated, might tap you on the shoulder and just totally freak you out.
Music Madness: That’s awesome (laughing)
Susan: It’s a great surprise … I like to say surprise and delight, but it’s kind of like a surprise and fright, which just adds just like this awesome aspect to the festival.
Everybody commented, even on Facebook afterwards. People will usually complain about something, right? It was hot as hell, the trash, whatever. People were not complaining. They were like, “It was amazing. Everybody was so cool. Even the cops were cool.” The vibe was so good and everybody was there to genuinely have a good time. There was this feeling of a shared experience that I’ve never witnessed before, honestly. Like, “We are all here for the first Incarceration inside this prison yard. This is so cool.”
Because you’re in this huge backdrop of this monstrous, monstrous building, and then you have these 150-foot evergreen trees that are the backdrop for the stage. I mean, that’s hard to find. You don’t find that anywhere. And then you’re surrounded in this chain-link fence, because you’re in a prison yard and you’re reminded by that, because you’re surrounded by chain-link fence. It’s really cool.
Music Madness: Is it ever to early to start working on year three?
Susan: You know what? We are already planning year three. We are already fielding calls on the availability of bands. I mean, it’s a sweet progression of this thing. It happened so quickly, which we are incredibly grateful for, and we spend a lot of time making sure our bands were happy. We got them private tours of the grounds and some of them got inked. They had a great time. Their band managers and agents had a good time. So then our phone started ringing, which was not the case the previous year, so it’s pretty cool to now have people saying, “Hey, when’s Inkcarceration going to be in 2020, so we can fit you in or hope to fit you in?” I was like, “Oh, that’s cool.”
Music Madness: That’s really exciting. So other than the characters from Blood Prison, what else should guests be looking out for?
Susan: We’ve added … And this may not seem big, but if anyone was there last year, it will be big. We’ve got a better layout for all our food trucks. We’ve got 15 coming in, Island Noodles, a whole bunch of really cool foods. Graeter’s Ice Cream, which is like the best ice cream in Ohio. We’ve built kind of a respite tent on this nice, grassy plot, so we’ve got shade. I know that doesn’t sound very exciting, but it was coveted last year and we’ve created more, because it was hot. And it will be hot again, I have no doubt. We’re thinking about the festival experience. Have a great time, be right in the mix, get in the pit, go get a beer on the hill. Then when you want to take a little break, go in for your tour, come out and relax in some shade for a little bit. We’re really trying to make that total experience a real positive one, thinking about a festival-goer who’s there for eight hours.
Music Madness: Very cool. How does the tattoo portion of the festival tie in? Are people still able to come in and get tattooed or is everything pre-set?
Susan: Yeah. The artists we’ve brought in have quite a following. I mean, they are artists in the true sense of the word. The work they do is incredible and the followings that many of them have are quite strong, which is why we brought them, because we’re having a big tattoo experience. The Bullet Tattoo Experience…so there’s going to be 10 different categories of judging every day. So we brought in great artists, and they compete on everything from color, to black and white, to small, to whatever. So every night there’s going to be a competition up on the stage where the winners are announced. I would say most of them are going to be booked up, or if not, you still can call them. But for walk-ups, every tattoo artist is going to have a little sign in front that will say, “Appointments available,” or not. Hopefully, people can squeeze in and get inked while they’re at Inkcarceration.
Music Madness: I can hear the excitement in your voice and feel like everyone should be there! It is no longer an under the radar festival.
Susan: We just got featured in Entertainment Weekly, which was kind of a big deal to make it on the national stage and top festival for the summer. We’re like, “Oh, my God.” Then the State of Ohio, we actually just got the Tourism Award of Excellence. We got into the Hall of Fame. We got certificates from the Ohio State Senate and the Ohio House of Representatives for bringing this great event to their state, so it’s kind of cool, like it’s real.
Music Madness: That’s awesome.
Susan: We created it from nothing, so it’s kind of cool to see everybody respond. We’re all about the fans. The tickets are going fast. We are expecting a sell-out, but there are still some, so we hope everybody can try to make their way there and join us.
Learn more about this year’s Inkcarceration Music and Tattoo festival HERE.
Interview by Steve Carlos