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Park News - (7/24/10) According to a post at CoasterFusion, the lights in Freestyle have been turned on to help security do their job it seems, as some kids reportedly jumped the fence for a little exploration last week. Of course, I’ve also heard some interesting little rumors this week as well… but it’s too early to speak of them yet. More soon.
    On the bad news side, Freestyle Music Park as it’s been hit by another lawsuit for $1.07 million. Check out the details here.
    Finally, Amusement Insider goes back in time to show off the park from it’s heyday in 2008, the year it opened as Hard Rock Park. Having visited the park that year myself, I never would have dreamed it would have devolved into the mess it is now in just two short years. Hard Rock Park was an awesome... though overpriced, experience.
    (7/22/10) Is something going on at Freestyle Music Park? According to a reader who drives past it five times a week, the park has been dark and dead since it shut down last fall. However, the past three mornings this week they have noticed lights are now on in the “Across the Pond” section of the park. Anyone else see any sign of activity?
    (7/1/10) The corpse of Freestyle Music Park just took a $14 million hit this week as a Federal Judge awarded that amount to Tetra Financial Group after the owners of the park failed to respond to Tetra’s lawsuit. According to Discover Myrtle Beach, Tetra then requested a default judgment in their favor. On top of the $14 million, there is also an 18% interest rate as well.
    (6/11/10) Freestyle Music Park has moved one step closer to a full liquidation it seems. Check out the latest report.
    (6/2/10) While there is still no good word about any progress at Freestyle Music Park, the local news reports that Tetra Financial and BMW have filed their own paperwork asking the courts to find Freestyle at fault and make an immediate ruling in their individual lawsuits agains the park.
    (4/16/10) It seems Freestyle Music Park will be ordered by a court to pay their $570,000 debt. I’m not quite sure how this will play out as the park owners have all but vanished from the public eye since they fired off all the remaining staff earlier this year.
    (4/5/10) In case there was any doubt, Freestyle Music Park did indeed miss making their court imposed April 1st payment deadline of just over half a million dollars. Right now there are no plans to open the park at all for the 2010 season… and unless a deal with a new owner or investor happens soon, there simply wont be time to make it happen at all.
    (3/30/10) It’s sad, but it seems that right now there is very little chance that Freestyle Music Park will open for the 2010 season. They claim they are still working on a deal to sell it to new investors, but with the April 1st deadline looming large, I wouldn’t count on it at all.
    (3/26/10) The April 1st deadline for Freestyle Music Park is coming up quick… and unfortunately there isn’t even a decent whisper coming from anyone with connections to the park. This does not bode well at all as it almost seems as if the Russian owners may be taking a Scorched Earth tactic with FMP. After all, it was the Russians who defeated the invasion of the mighty armies of Napoleon, by retreating and leaving nothing of value behind. Lets just hope that in the few days left, someone comes in to save the park from being liquidated.
    The local news has posted a new update, but really doesn’t say much at all other than to confirm what we’ve already known for weeks.
    (3/10/10) For those wanting to take one more “Trip” through the memory of the Nights In White Satin dark ride, formerly at Hard Rock Park, then you might want to check out this article published in InPark Magazine. It’s on page 12 of the PDF version.
    (2/20/10) Screamscape has done a little extra digging on the Freestyle Music Park front and has come into contact with a very interesting source who has asked to remain anonymous.
    “We were retained by Tara Perry and Exploration Holdings. The group represented to us that they had a signed contract to purchase the park that would expire on January 15, 2010. After starting the process with them to fund the acquisition including giving them an LOI they proved unable to complete the process and vanished.” (LOI = Letter Of Intent)
   By the sound of this statement it does indeed sound like Tara Perry’s group was the original group of investors that Freestyle Music Park has been telling everyone about since October. Going back to our January 5th and 6th updates, the park had even said that they expected to finalize a deal with new investors by January 15th.  After missing that deadline, it looks like things opened up to involve negotiations with other investors to decide the fate of the park.
    At this point I think it’s safe to assume that Perry / Exploration Holdings are completely out of the picture. Based on their previous actions in New Orleans, I’d also wager that Southern Star is unlikely to actually put any money where their mouth is. So unless there is a mystery 4th investor group out there, this leaves Felix Mussenden’s group with the run of the table and the bargaining power to try and lowball the Russian owners into a discount deal for the park. The Russian owners (MT Development) are now effetely caught between a rock and a hard place… facing bankruptcy and the risk of losing everything on one side, or accepting an offer that is likely to be far less than what they want just to escape with something. Right now I imagine they’re holding out hope that another serious group may be ready to join the party and make a more reasonable offer. If not… what’s it going to be? DEAL or NO DEAL?
    (2/17/10) The deadline extension for Freestyle Music Park to pay off some debts has now come to an end, with no new ownership or investor deal in sight, so it was back to the courts to see what could be done. The good news is that FMP was given another extension and now has until April 1st to pay off their debts. The park has also confirmed that they will not be able to open in late March as planned. Once a deal with a new owner or investor is finalized it will take at least 8 weeks to open the park.
    (2/10/10) It is interesting to note that the official Freestyle Music Park website (www,freestylemusicpark.com) is now suddenly offline.  Despite the fact that the staff has been laid off, it seems very strange that the website would also suddenly go offline.
    (2/8/10) Freestyle Music Park sent out an announcement late Friday that due to limited funds remaining while attempting to finalize negotiations to take on a new investment partner they would be closing their business office until further notice and laying off the remaining 30 full time staff. I’ve included some excerpts from the final announcement sent out from park staff.
    “While park management continues to pursue negotiations with potential investors, we have limited funds and need to use those assets toward the goal of bringing new investors to the park,” said Freestyle Music Park General Manager Steve Baker. “We fully anticipate one of these deals will be satisfactory to the current owners. It’s a tedious process and is just taking much longer to come to final agreements than expected. Deals on the table are contingent upon the Park opening this season. With the time difference in Russia, we will be working around the clock to make these deals happen in the coming days – not weeks - days.”
    Due to the seasonality of the theme park industry, the park has been operating with a limited staff throughout the offseason. According to Baker, the remaining staff will be laid off until an investment agreement is finalized. Until that time, the board of directors and executive management will continue to meet with potential investment groups and communicate with the current owners to finalize the agreement. Once an agreement is reached, the management team will bring employees back to work, create a plan for vendor repayment and announce the plans for the 2010 season.
    Baker says the success of the 2009 season was very encouraging. He cites the worldwide economy and recession as the reason the current Russian investors are seeking additional funding to operate the park. The out of state parties remain in Myrtle Beach and committed to seeing the deal through, he adds. “We still take our financial obligations seriously and will do everything we can do to resolve them. There’s a great future for this park. It just needs a chance and hasn’t had that yet.”
    (2/4/10) I’ve only got one quick update to the whole Freestyle Music Park story. Word has been sent my way confirming that Steve Dooner and the Las Vegas WET people are in no way involved in any of the negotiations taking place with Freestyle Music Park right now. More when we find out!
    (2/2/10) According to an article posted at Discover Myrtle Beach one of the former Hard Rock Park, Felix Mussenden who was also the CFO, is now seeking to take back the park with the aid of new investors. According to the story, Felix’s partner may be Steve Dooner who was backing the Las Vegas Wet project for years before it all went silent for the recession. Dooner had some monster plans for Vegas, so I’m curious to see what his involvement could be with Freestyle Music Park.
    Two other parties are also said to be involved in their own bids to get the park, one being Southern Star Amusements (who have been fumbling around trying to revive Six Flags New Orleans for the past several years without success). Meanwhile there is still a third mystery investor by the name of Exploration Holdings. I don’t know much about Exploration Holdings but a quick search did reveal a connection between the founder (Tara Perry) and Jim Fowler and Barbara Farris. Looks like some bad blood went down between them all back in January 2008 according to this article.
    (1/26/10) With Spring quickly approaching, I’ve been sent a few e-mails from people wondering when Freestyle Music Park would post their 2010 operating schedule on their website, as they have yet to do it so far. So far I’ve been unable to find any solid date mentioned on their Twitter, Facebook or official websites, so anyone with an official connection like to let us know when the park is planning on opening for the season?
    (1/25/10) Screamscape has heard that one of the issues slowing down the current progress of Freestyle Music Park is that there are up to four different parties currently in talks with them about either investing or even purchasing the park itself. While one player was rumored to be Barbara Farris, we’ve also heard the “Merlin” name dropped as well. Of course Merlin has been all over the news lately with the purchase of Cypress Gardens to turn it into Leogland Florida. I’ve got to wonder what they would do with Freestyle Music Park if given the chance. Anyone else know more about the players involved?
    (1/15/10) If Freestyle Music Park didn’t have enough other problems, now they are being sued by BMW over the use of Mini Cooper looking cars on the Round About coaster.  Meanwhile a judge has also ordered that the park pay all their debts in the next 30 days.
    (1/11/10) Freestyle Music Park has filed a request for a little more time to pay off their debts. While they are still in negotiations with possible new investors, they wont be able to finalize any deal with them until mid to late January.  Speaking of the investors… we’ve been sent an odd rumor claiming that the unknown blond woman seeing at the park previously may actually have been Barbara Farris, the owner of the Blue Dolphin II development in Florida as well as a book author. She has also long been a force behind the proposed development of Jim Fowler’s Life In The Wild animal park concept.
    Off the top of my head, her involvement with Freestyle Music Park seems a little off track to me, unless it’s just a means to an end perhaps. Honestly, it would almost make more sense for her and Fowler to try and pick up Cypress Gardens on the cheap right now to bring his animal park concept to life, but that’s another story. More on this as we dig it up.
    (1/6/10) A few news bits for Freestyle Music Park this week as people are waiting to hear more about these new investors coming in. According to the older news reports, they had expected to seal the deal by Jan 15th, but so far there hasn’t been much else. Unofficially, I’ve also heard rumors that seem to indicate that the same investors who were seen poking around the park around the end of the season (possibly headed up by an unknown woman) are still involved.
    Meanwhile Freestyle got hit up with two more debt payment requests, according to this news update. Poking around the park’s website, it also seems a little odd to me that they aren’t trying to push season pass sales right now, nor did they over the Christmas season that I could see. While it would seem the park’s own Twitter account has been dead since their last Tweet on July 27th, for whatever reason it looks like they have another Twitter account posting and still active… it’s just that the official link from the park page goes to the old Twitter account. (Hey… update it already!) However they do seem to be keeping an active Facebook page at least.
    (1/5/10) While I don’t have the link to the article, I’ve been told that the local news reported that Freestyle Music Park was expected to finalize a deal with new investors sometime in mid January. Hopefully at this time we’ll find out if we can expect anything new to be added or not.
    (12/7/09) Despite a ton of rumors about some possible new “wet” attraction being planned for the 2010 season, locals tell us that so far there has been no sign of any new construction taking place at the park yet.  So if something new was on the way... it’s unlikely to be ready for the start of the season.
    (11/18/09) I don’t know any details, but a new rumor is starting to go around claiming that a deal may be in the works to sell Freestyle Music Park to a new owner for as much as $40 million. Anyone know more?
    (10/22/09) In what has become a trend, the 17th lawsuit against Freestyle Music Park has been filed, this time from Zamperla who is seeking over $100,000 from the deal earlier this year to add four new kiddie rides to the park (a Samba Tower, Convoy, Kite Flyer and Magic Bike).
    (10/19/09) It seems the rumors that Freestyle Music Park was working to get new investors involved were true. This news article confirms that a new group of investors from Florida and Ohio have been brought in to add a little extra cash flow to the park. It also mentions that the Russian company “has since decided that the park is too far away to support.” No word on if we can expect any new attractions next season or not, though the cash will pay off those bills that are owed and guarantee that that the park will open as expected in Spring 2010 for a 3rd season.
    (10/2/09) Discover Myrtle Beach believes that an announcement is on the way from Freestyle Music Park where a new investment partner could be involved.
    (9/16/09) Pics taken during the final weekend celebration at the park have been posted to Discover Myrtle Beach as well as a look back at the park’s first season as Freestyle Music Park.
    (9/15/09) Got a new rumor about a possible new addition to Freestyle Music Park in 2010. According to one source they may be taking a serious look at adding a bumper car style attraction to the park, which is interesting because that was about the only ride promoted for Hard Rock Park that was never built.
    (8/25/09) Freestyle Music Park talks to the media about how their 2009 season went. In general… it wasn’t what they had hoped, but far from being terrible. The park is in no danger of closing and will return better than ever for the 2010 season. The park will close for the season at the end of September 13th and has set March 1st, 2010 as next season’s opening.

2010 - Unknown - Nothing is known at this point in time...