Remembering Dunegrass ‘08

By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
“Pick up yer butts, this field is not an ashtray! There are lots of barefoot kids around. Children, do you know where your parents are?” How many times have I shouted these words into a microphone over the last 16 years, along with the other mantras of the music festival emcee? “Let’s give a warm Dunegrass welcome to: ARLO GUTHRIE!”
The Sleeping Bear Dunegrass & Blues Festival that just was, almost wasn’t. The last days of July were full of lawsuit buzz all over town. “Are they gonna have it? Can one person hold a whole town hostage?” Surely there are some people in Empire who want to see the mini-Woodstock in Deering’s field next to St. Phillip Neri Church go away. Music festivals are LOUD! Thousands of people clog up the streets, sometimes park where they shouldn’t, forget they are guests (especially when they outnumber the townspeople), and some overindulge in the physical condiments that always slip through the gates of these public bacchanalias. Four thousand people can make a lot of garbage. Maybe this one is the last one.

But a village can also make a lot of money and have a lot of fun. Many citizens of Empire seem to be indifferent, or at least indulgent, about Dunegrass. To those of us who are enthusiastic, Mike and Carol Vanderberg and their family (lately with Stephen Volas, Jeremiah Sequoia, and Grassroots Productions) have hosted a huge party for Empire (and a few thousand of our closest friends) each August for 16 years, so why not party along? Why not take a weekend break from being a quiet, (most-of-the-year) sleepy village, and host a big BASH? From the general consensus of the townspeople to the town council, from Mr. Pendleton to Judge Power, from the merchants to the musicians, the decision was “Whatever. Let’s do it!”
The scale of this year’s festival was enormous. In part it was necessary to celebrate the legacy of founder Mike Vanderberg, whose tragic death on August 11, 2007, while he was still tidying up the field from the previous year’s festival, shocked the village. So besides the Main Stage, Side Stage and Shade Stage, there was a huge red-and-white Mike Vanderberg Dance Tent with two stages, the North Stage and the South Stage.
From Thursday noon until Sunday night one of those stages was lit up with colored lights and cranking with amazing music all of the time. Two big sound boards in the middle faced in each direction, so Joe and the knob-turners just did a 180 as one band finished and the next one was ready to begin. Some of the festival’s greatest moments happened in that tent. Patrick Niemisto and the New Third Coast helped Mike start the festival, and they have played at every one, so it was fitting that they should kick things off this year. Amelia Vanderberg and her pals from the Blue Heron studio in the middle of Empire played on the North stage, and then K. Jones & the Benzie Playboyz. There was a big local presence in that tent, and Mike would have been proud.
Some heavy-hitters also performed under the striped big top. An Afro-Cuban horn and percussion band of young musicians named Aphrodesia, just back from a tour of West Africa, was amazing. The Chicago-based band Cornmeal really raised the temperature in there with its high-energy, incendiary licks. (I swear you can see blue flames on the strings of Chris Ganji’s guitar like you see St. Elmo’s fire on the masts of tall ships just before a big thunderstorm.) And Steel Pulse, one of the premier Reggae bands in the world, packed the tent for its set that always starts with the Star Spangled Banner. And it was still only Friday afternoon!
On Saturday morning, Cabin Fever followed the Main Stage antics of Buckethead from the night before by performing with paper log cabins on their heads: Cabin Head! Tom Fordyce, Tom Keen, Jim Curtis, Paul Kirchner, and Kurt Westie also have been part of the birth and yearly progress of the festival, so the local connections again kick-started the day. The amazing Vince Herman was back with Great American Taxi. (I saw Vince free-style deft lyrics out of thin air while jamming with the indescribable Chris Thile and some other Punch Brothers and Great American Taxi pickers late Sunday night.) Larry McCray from Detroit was way hot in there both times.
One ‘pure music’ epiphany of the festival happened on the South Stage Saturday afternoon. A generator blew just as the Punch Brothers were getting started. No electricity, no amplification. Chris Thile, formerly of Nickel Creek, anchored the band at the corner of the stage with his mandolin as the crowd pushed in as close as they could get. You could have heard a pin drop in that tent as Chris and the Punch Brothers played a brilliant hour of the best acoustic music you will ever hear. No wires, no microphones, just strings!
The Shade Stage over by the festival entrance also featured great music in a smaller tent with a more intimate feel: Seth Bernard and Daisy May, and Breathe Owl Breathe, all from the almost-local Earthworks Music Collective, were there, along with Bump, Like Water Drumworks, Boroughs, and Ultraviolet Hippopotamus, among others. (One of the great disappointments of the festival was the mixup at the Shade Stage that resulted in the Reggae trio, The Meditations, not playing there. Peter Rowan assured me that these three men wrote the book on reggae harmony singing, and they are like gods in Kingston, Jamaica.)
The Main Stage and Side Stage played to the biggest crowds on the festival midway. Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, Particle, and Melvin Seals & JGB highlighted Thursday. The Steppin’ In It boys and the Earthworks gang hosted hoedowns and jamborees each morning, including Rachel Davis and Luke Winslow King. (I loved playing a big trumpet fanfare duet with Andy Wilson to wake everybody up!) It’s hard to find enough superlatives for what unfolded through the four-day festival on those two stages. Peter Rowan and Tony Rice returned again. Peter has become the festival’s favorite uncle, and his voice and presence make him a national treasure. He started his career playing with Bill Monroe, the father of the Bluegrass “High Lonesome” sound. Todd Snider was a hit again, as was Vince Herman’s band Leftover Salmon.
I missed Buckethead Friday night. (Wasn’t he just after the brief shower when a rainbow appeared over the festival grounds and everyone saw Mike Vanderberg’s smile in it?) Did the eccentric dude with the chicken bucket on his head and the painted face live up to the hype? Teenager Will Hendricks was blown away by the light-speed slasher guitar licks. The main-stage sound guru Disco said, “He was a great guitar player for sure, but in the end it was just a guy on a big stage playing over his iPod!” The security guys said the entire back stage area had to be evacuated before he would approach the stage, and his post-performance meal consisted of 12 tomatoes, eight green peppers (I think), and six bananas in three lines on a plate.
It was sad to have to announce that Richie Havens had cancelled, and then I botched the name of Greensky Bluegrass to start the day on Sunday. (That was probably inevitable, as there were over 50 intros for me to do over four days,) The guys in this band have been at Dunegrass for five years or more, they were willing to take Richie’s spot on Sunday noon, and they sounded great! Rowan and Rice delivered their usual astonishing performance. Then Sunday evening was just amazing! First it turned out that the band MoonAlice included guitar maestro G.E. Smith from Saturday Night Live fame, and legendary bassist Jack Cassidy from Hot Tuna. They rocked on the Side Stage — how did we only get to hear them for one hour? Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn with the Sparrow Quartet brought jaw-dropping virtuosity, a new genre of music altogether with Chinese singing, classical quartet literature and banjo bluegrass all blended together.
Seeing and meeting Arlo Guthrie was the highlight of the weekend for me. He is humble and unassuming, a regular family guy who refuses to be turned into an abstraction by the culture machine. His son and his grandson played with him, and his storytelling (Joseph and his brothers? WOW!), and conversational singing of his own classics as well as his father Woody Guthrie’s songs made it a moving, emotional performance.
What next? This Dunegrass festival bore little resemblance to the first one we locals put together on an impromptu stage with our own sound gear and a bunch of local bands mostly from within 16 miles of here 16 years ago over where the New Neighborhood has sprouted up on that other field. As things have changed so much, we must expect change to continue. Maybe Grassroots Productions got too ambitious this time, and maybe, like Icarus in the myth, we have flown up too close to the sun, melted our wax, ignited our feathers, and will now experience a fiery, meteoric fall. Can the Vanderberg family convince the town that we can all host and manage this huge party one more time? Can Grassroots Productions pay for it? Whatever the answers to these questions turn out to be, the 2008 Dunegrass & Blues Festival was, for many reasons, just incredible and unforgettable.
Glen Arbor Sun co-editor Norm Wheeler and members of the Beach Bards poets have MC’d all but one of the 16 Dunegrass Festivals.
In our archives, check out our ode to Dunegrass founder Mike Vanderberg …. and our interview with Arlo Guthrie.