The Trucks Come Before the Show. Now They Have Sixty-Eight Acres in Mt. Juliet.
Almost nothing that makes an arena show possible ever appears on stage. Before a headliner walks into the lights, somebody has trucked in the rigging, laid protective decking over somebody's football field, bolted together the staging, set the barricade along the front rail, and parked a small fleet of buses somewhere out back. That work is an industry of its own, mostly invisible, and a substantial piece of it has just bought land in Mt. Juliet.
Roughly 68 acres at 946 Sullivan Bend Road changed hands this month, acquired jointly by Concert Stuff Group and Major Tom Touring / Colonel Tom Touring. Brokers at Colliers represented the buyers. The seller, Ron Buck, was represented by Big Tent Commercial. The parties have not disclosed terms, have not said what they intend to build, and no site plan has been made public. What they have said is why they wanted the ground: in their telling, Middle Tennessee has become the center of gravity for the touring business, and this secures them a long-term position in it.
Who actually bought it
Concert Stuff Group is headquartered in Mocksville, North Carolina, and it is less a single company than a shelf of them — fifteen at last count. The lineage runs back to 1986, when Jim Brammer and Jeff Cranfill started the operation that grew into Special Event Services, the group's audio, lighting, video and rigging arm. What followed reads like an inventory of everything a tour needs that isn't a musician: a trucking company founded in 1996 that now runs a fleet of roughly 150 vehicles; a large-format staging outfit; a firm that does nothing but protect stadium turf and arena floors; a tour-bus leasing business; a custom fabrication shop; a company that supplies crowd barriers and cable ramps. Several more were added in 2025, including one built specifically around rehearsal space, storage and parking. The group itself was only formally incorporated in 2024 — a holding structure laid over four decades of accumulated businesses.
The second buyer comes from the audio side, and from considerably farther away. Major Tom is a British live-sound company co-founded by Lars Brogaard, a Danish engineer who has spent four decades behind front-of-house consoles for some of the largest touring acts in the world; he is long associated with Rod Stewart, and the company has supplied sound for arena runs including Ed Sheeran's. Brogaard's explanation of the deal was unfussy: he has known Brammer for years, trusts him, and believes Middle Tennessee is where the industry now lives.
Why here, and why now
Wilson County has been on the receiving end of this kind of arithmetic for a while. In the last several months alone the county has absorbed a Portland snack manufacturer expanding into Lebanon with hundreds of jobs, a commission that chose to write its own rules for data centers rather than wait to be surprised by one, and a diverging-diamond interchange approved at Central Pike and I-40 that exists because traffic here outgrew the road. Large parcels with highway access, within an hour of a city that books thousands of shows a year, are not an unlimited commodity. Sixty-eight contiguous acres is a serious piece of ground in that context.
What it becomes is genuinely unknown, and it is worth being careful about that. A company portfolio that already includes rehearsal halls, truck fleets, fabrication shops and storage yards does not buy 68 acres for a sign out front. But nothing has been announced, no permit has been filed publicly, and the honest thing to say is that the land is bought and the plan is not.
Still, there is something worth noticing in the shape of it. For a decade Mt. Juliet has been described, a little lazily, as a bedroom community for Nashville — a place people sleep so they can work somewhere else. The concert industry did not come out here looking for an audience. It came looking for room.
