Music Festival Autopsy

Aug. 16, 2006

Over the past 15 years, we at the Express have had front-row seats on the success and failure of many music festivals here in Northern Michigan. We’ve written about many festivals in advance, we’ve attended them, and we’ve seen them bob up and down on the waves of fate.
Some, like the BlissFest, have made steady gains through the years. Others, such as a series of rock & reggae festivals at Castle Farms in the early ’90s or a riverfront festival two years ago in TC, had poor attendance and sank like stones.
It’s been a mystery to me as to why some festivals succeed while more likely prospects fail. And it’s a mystery as to why so many young people in Northern Michigan don’t support local music festivals. During the late ’60s, the slightest rumor of a rock festival in Michigan would turn up 5,000-10,000 kids at the drop of a dime. Not so today.
Does anyone remember the Goose Lake Pop Festival of 1971? More than 200,000 of us showed up for the weekend. That festival was held in a very obscure setting near Jackson, Michigan, with Jethro Tull, Chicago, Joe Cocker, Alice Cooper and 10 Years After performing, to name a few.
Jump ahead 35 years to last week’s Lollapalooza Festival held at Grant Park in downtown Chicago. Although Lollapalooza had some of the most exciting bands in the world playing in America’s “second city” at the epicenter of five well-populated states, only about 60,000 people showed up each day. By comparison, that old Goose Lake festival kicked ass.
Why is that?
Considering that Traverse City has two music festivals coming up over the next two weeks -- the Clover Christian Music & Dance Festival and Logan’s Landfest -- it seems timely to discuss my reckless theories on what makes our local music festivals a hit or a miss...
Let’s start with the things that tend to sink the Good Ship Lollipop.

LOSERS:
• Too much gray hair: When you go to a music festival today, you see many persons from the baby-boom generation who have been veterans of the scene for up to 40 years. Call it unfair and ageism, but I can’t imagine many young people want to hang out with folks old enough to be their parents or even grandparents at a music festival. Rock history would have been very different if the kids who attended Woodstock in 1969 had found Mom, Dad, Grandma & Gramps waiting for them at Yasgur’s Farm. “Like, watch out for the brown acid, Mom!”
• Too many distractions: Years ago, a rock festival was a big deal to teenagers. We didn’t have Internet games, 48-inch TVs and an endless stream of teen DVDs and iPod downloads as options. Today, kids are way more into the indoor culture of being plugged in and parked in front of a video screen. Many are clueless as to what’s going on in the real world, except for those of you incredibly intelligent and informed young studs & babes who read the Express each week, and this column in particular.
• Not fresh: They say that a prophet has no followers in his own land. On that score it’s also true that packing a festival with local bands tends to be a balloon-popper because we‘ve seen them too often already.
The exception to that rule are local musicians who constantly reinvent themselves and dare to take chances.
For instance, at last week‘s Dunegrass, headliners Steppin‘ In It put the audience in a doze with a sleepy set, yet hometeam player Don Julin and the Neptune Quartet rocked up their string quartet with psychedelic sounds for an electrifying twist on a local band. The same was true of K. Jones & the Benzie Playboyz‘ stripped-down, heart-pounding show at the BlissFest.
• No fun: Today’s rock festivals aren’t what they used to be. If you’d like to visit a police state with guards everywhere and everything controlled to the nth degree, including the mosh pit (and certainly none of the “recreational aids” that had people falling from the P.A. towers at Goose Lake), then check out the manufactured edge & rebellion of the OzzFest. There’s no escaping the fact that today’s rock fests are predictable, politically correct, and boring exercises in corporate sponsorship. Plus expensive, so why go?

WINNERS:
• The BlissFest does it right. Fifteen years ago, there were just a handful of folkies in a remote field near Cross Village. But, as noted by Woody Allen in a recent Express interview, “80 percent of success is just showing up,” and that’s just what the BlissFest did for more than 25 years. The festival grew its audience with an uncompromising commitment to always having a star of legendary appeal headlining each festival.
Today, you see more young people at the BlissFest than old folks. They are the grown-up children of the Blisstonians who brought them along for years. And the BlissFest has wisely given them their own space out in a wooded area and a teen dance tent so they don’t even have to cross paths with Mom & Dad.
Similarly, the new direction taken this year by the Dunegrass & Blues Festival in Empire is a winner for the long haul. The weekend included big-name performers Hot Tuna, Greg Brown and Iris Dement. There were perhaps twice as many in the audience as last year, and hopefully, that trend will continue to grow. That said, they also need to sharpen that youth angle.
The days of Goose Lake and Woodstock will never return; we’re in a niche world now where you have to narrowcast to your followers, be they folkies, rockers, jazz fans or metalheads. On that score, the upcoming CloverFest has a built-in niche with Christian and electronica fans, while this week’s Logan’s Landfest is gunning for the younger crowd. Both festivals are free, with donations accepted for worthy causes. Friends, lend them your ears.