The people of Birmingham, Alabama, will be in for some mildly interesting entertainment this weekend at the annual City Stages Music Fest. But true hippies from all over the country will converge on the Woodstock of the South, the Bonnaroo Music and Art Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.

While the bureaucrats who book acts for City Stages manage to draw has-been acts like the Beach Boys, Bonnaroo sells out by drawing the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Elvis Costello.

Blues greats like Buddy Guy also choose to play Bonnaroo rather than Birmingham. And this year, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the folks in Tennessee have booked a number of great New Orleans acts like the Neville Brothers, Dr. John and the Rebirth Brass Band.

The best City Stages has to offer is the Derek Trucks Band and the Allman Brothers, along with other southern rockers like the North Mississippi Allstars.

City Stages was a great showcase event for the publicity starved city of Birmingham when it first started in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tickets were cheap and press passes were easy to come by, since organizers knew it would take some massive publicity to get the festival off the ground.

But in the mid-1990s, the early success of the event went to the head of organizers and they raised ticket prices and created all kinds of unnecessary rules for the press, so many news organizations stopped coming and promoting the event. The result doomed the festival to become a local event rather than a regional draw, and created financial losses for several years.

According to one long-time media fan of City Stages, this has been a mistake.

"They could use all the publicity they can get," he said.