Film star and Charleston resident Bill Murray won’t be wandering the crowd Oct. 11, the second day of North Charleston’s Riverfront Revival music festival in North Charleston. He also won’t be introducing headliner and festival co-founder Darius Rucker or country/Americana stars Riley Green, Lukas Nelson, Flatland Cavalry or The Red Clay Strays.
Nope. Murray will be front and center on lead vocals with his fiery rock/soul revue The Blood Brothers in Riverfront Park. The band will play up a storm on classics like Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” or the obscure Beatles’ B-side “Slow Down.”
Rob Lamble, a promoter with SRE Entertainment who partnered with Rucker to begin the Riverfront Revival three years ago, is especially tickled Murray is on board.
“Bill Murray is going to be a blast,” Lamble said in a recent interview with the Charleston City Paper. “He put together the band this year and they started going out on the road. The band is smoking and Bill is really good up front, so it should be a hoot.”
He said both nights of the festival will be amazing.
“Friday night is going to be a banger. I’m personally looking forward to Lukas Nelson (Willie’s son), The Red Clays Strays and Riley Green. And the next day’s going to be a blast, as well.”
Roots of a revival
SRE Entertainment actually went to Rucker after the pandemic with the festival idea, something the company had been toying with for a while.
“We were batting around some ideas for a country music festival in Charleston,” Lamble said. “And we wanted to align ourselves with a partner who made sense, and Darius obviously was the first person to come to mind. And he was very interested, so we partnered up and started putting together the bones for the festival.”
Lamble added that Rucker didn’t simply lend his name to the festival. He’s been deeply involved in creating the lineup for all three years of the Riverfront Revival.
“He’s always been heavily involved in the curation,” Lamble said. “We have conversations about what we would like to see, what we want the festival to look like and folks that we feel like would be a good fit, and then Darius and his management weigh in quite often on those decisions.”
One of those decisions was to book the Red Clay Strays, a rapidly rising country rock band from Mobile, Ala. The band’s single, “Wondering Why,” went viral on TikTok in late 2023 and charted across multiple Billboard lists, including the Hot 100.
That put the band on Rucker’s radar, and the time was right to bring it to Charleston.
“Last year when we got into the booking, we immediately noticed the rise that the Red Clay Strays was having, and we thought it would be a wonderful choice to add some diversity to our lineup. We started with it and then went to Riley as our headliner for night one.”
“Then we reached out to Whiskey Myers (Texas rockers which had a viral song from the Kevin Costner TV show Yellowstone),” Lamble added, “and created the rest of the lineup after we had our headliners.”
Giving back
To further strengthen the connection between the festival and the area, each year proceeds from the Riverfront Revival have gone to local charities. This year, the recipients are the MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital and Charleston’s Just Be You, a nonprofit organization that works to build confidence in teenagers.
“We always like to give back to this community,” Lamble said, “so we naturally chose the MUSC Children’s Hospital, which Darius is very passionate about, and Just Be You is such a good outreach to teens.”
Ultimately, Lamble said Rucker and SRE have tried to make the Riverfront Revival matter to the entire Lowcountry.
“We want this to be everybody’s festival,” he said.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Oct. 10 to Oct. 11, Riverfront Park, 1061 Everglades Ave., North Charleston. Tickets range from $140-$700: riverfrontrevival.com
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