A group of local survivors and organizers have been creating different events to mark the anniversary of the October 1, 2017 Strip shooting in a meaningful way every year since 2018. For next month’s fifth anniversary, the group has solidified into a nonprofit organization known as the Country Strong Project, and the event has blossomed into the Remember Music Festival, an even stronger way to bring the community together again for music and healing.
Texas group Midland will headline the daylong festival—a partnership between the nonprofit, Stoney’s Rockin’ Country saloon at Town Square and Clark County—on October 1 at the Clark County Amphitheater. Proceeds will benefit the ongoing effort to create a permanent memorial recognizing One October, and after tickets were initially made available to the community of survivors and families of victims, they are now on sale to the general public via Eventbrite.
“Every year we’ve taken on a different need,” says Connie Long, who co-founded the Country Strong Project with fellow survivor Shawna Bartlett. “The first year we called it the Route 91 reunion, and it was only survivors, families of the 58 [victims], first responders and those impacted, and we had about 2,000 people.
“In the second year, people were still needing to come together, but we found we didn’t like the words ‘anniversary’ or ‘reunion.’ So we started calling it a remembrance, a celebration of life for everyone.”
The pandemic slowed the annual event to a gathering of a few hundred people in a park in 2020, and then organizers connected with Stoney’s last year to bring more musical elements into the plans. A focus on that theme of remembrance also laid the groundwork for this year’s festival.
“We were looking for that one word that embraces everything, and this stuck,” Long says. “We hope it continues as the Remember festival going forward. It really is one word that encompasses who we were, who we are, and who we want to be, to remember to keep living through love and music, and to remember the 58.”
Stoney’s Marketing Director Jeff Higginbotham has been booking talent at the prominent country bar since four months after it opened in 2007. He was at the Route 91 Festival in 2017 and says the upcoming event “obviously hits home for me. Every year we’ve done something [at Stoney’s] from fundraisers for [charity group] Love Wins to raising money for the families affected. This just made sense for five years, so we made some phone calls and got some big bands.”
The Remember fest isn’t in any way intended to be a replacement or new version of Route 91, which brought the genre’s biggest stars to the Strip for four years. But it was important, Long says, to bring back a band that played Route 91 in 2017 in Midland. It reinforces the connection to the community that has dealt with the tragedy, and it also helps build a strong foundation for this new event.
“It was time for us to be on our own,” as a nonprofit organization, she says. “The plan was to be able to get bigger with sponsors and we’ve been getting help from our survivors, too, who are reaching out and asking how they can help. We knew it was time to start the Country Strong Project and make it an ongoing thing people can give to.”
REMEMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL With Midland, Dylan Schneider, Meghan Patrick, Walker Montgomery & more. October 1, 1 p.m., $85. Clark County Amphitheater, eventbrite.com.
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