RALEIGH -- It was hot - hard-to-catch-your-breath hot - way after the sun went down, but that didn't stop thousands of concertgoers from flocking to the new Downtown Raleigh Amphitheater during the weekend.
The city's outdoor music venue, opened last month as part of the latest effort to get people downtown, is proving quite the hit.
"People really like this venue," said Roger Krupa, director of the Raleigh Convention Center, which oversees the amphitheater. "It's just urban cool ... with easy parking, the shimmer wall and the downtown skyline."
The show Friday, which attracted 5,000 people to the 5,500-seat arena, featured Canadian folk-rockers Tegan and Sara and the Tennessee rock band Paramore, whose music appears on the "Twilight" soundtrack.
On Sunday, 4,100 people attended a concert with Shinedown, Puddle of Mudd and Chevelle. That show started at 4:30 p.m., when the thermometer read 101, according to the National Weather Service. But folks rocked out until 10:30 p.m., amphitheater officials said.
The amphitheater, with three more shows on tap this week, has found a nice niche in the Triangle's outdoor arena marketplace, which already included 20,000-capacity Walnut Creek, 7,000-seat Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary and the 3,000-capacity N.C. Museum of Art amphitheater.
Timing is also helping the smaller-scale downtown amphitheater, because this year has been so difficult for the big-arena shows. Both the Lilith Fair and Jonas Brothers canceled planned Raleigh stops.
Heather Grant of Raleigh has gone to the new arena twice already, including Friday night with two girlfriends. She likes the location, convenient parking and clean bathrooms (always high on a woman's list.)
Food and drink nearby
"I like that it's convenient to dinner or to go out for drinks as opposed to Koka Booth or Walnut Creek, where once you're out there you're stuck," she said.
Grant has a few issues with the new venue, such as the 20-minute wait before getting in, the lack of shade and the 30-minute search to find beer and food. But she said she liked the beer selection and the food once she got them.
Andy Martin, co-owner of Deep South The Bar across the street from the amphitheater, said asking him whether he likes the facility is a silly question. Of course he does.
"When my business partner was asked what he thought about the amphitheater, he would always say, 'We have a bar across the street,'" Martin said.
In other words, it's like having a honey store across from a bee convention.
Friday's concert attracted mostly teenage girls (see the aforementioned "Twilight" connection), so there was not much bar overflow then, Martin said. But Sunday was the bar's busiest night since it opened two and a half years ago, he said.
New sponsorship pact?
One thing still unresolved is the amphitheater's official name. Raleigh leaders had wanted to call it the Bud Light Amphitheater, which would have brought the city $1.5 million over five years from Anheuser Busch. But state law prevents public venues from being named after alcoholic beverages and brands, and the N.C. Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission rejected a requested exemption from the law.
Krupa said he hopes a new sponsorship agreement will be announced soon.
In the meantime, name watchers thought they had a clue to what it could be Friday when concert T-shirts at the Paramore show listed Raleigh's date and venue as "Road Runner Mobile Amphitheater."
It was a simple mistake, Krupa said. Someone accidentally used the name of a Charlotte amphitheater.
Staff writer David Menconi contributed to this report.
