Heads Up
On his way to the Ossipee Valley Fairground last week, Corey Moses stopped at the side of the road where a woman was selling fruit by her house. Corey told her that he was on his way to the Up North Music and Art Festival; she responded enthusiastically that the whole town was excited to be hosting the festival and that, actually, her grandson was going to be working there. She sold Corey a quart of beautiful blueberries, and he suggested that she bring some fruit to the festival. Although she struggles with Parkinson's disease, this woman left the comfort of her Hiram home to camp out all weekend at the festival. Corey ran into her often, including once when he gave her a ride on his golf cart. She had tried to hop the fences to shorten her route, and when Corey picked her up, she asked to go "to the front." "I thought she meant go to the front gate," Corey said, "but she said, 'No, I want to go to the front of the concert!'" So he gave her a ride to the concert field to see RatDog.
Corey Moses was Production Assistant and Artist Liaison for Up North, and a member of a stellar team of producers who, in the space of half a year, managed to deliver an event that is already being heralded among both artists and concertgoers as the triumphant resurrection of the intimate New England music festival. Throughout the weekend, each staff member seemed to be in a hundred different places at once, but Up North was a festival where it wasn't at all extraordinary if one of the producers stopped what they were doing to say hello and ask if you were having a good time. That was simply the vibe.
Corey is a lighting designer at the Paradise Rock Club and the World Trade Center in Boston. Because of his experience in event production, he was recruited to help out shortly before the festival took place. According to Corey, the "acquired knowledge and expertise of all the friends involved on all levels" was what made the festival run so smoothly. Although he worked nonstop and barely slept all weekend, he emphasized that Up North's success was due to the work of a collective. "I might kind of feel like the man driving around on this golf cart," he told me, "but really I am humbled just to be a part of this."
"There's an unbelievable amount of effort that went into it, so the payoff is having people be happy," Rick Ginsburg of Up North Productions explained when the weekend was over. The friendliness of the producers and their staff exemplified the kind of intimacy that was present at the festival. This is one of the main reasons people are calling it the northeast's best new festival.
The production team is a group of close friends who decided to pool their professional and creative resources to throw a huge party. Describing how the festival was conceived, Rick explained, "We've all been going camping for years. I had a little jamband thing that I did for about ten years; we would play a handful of shows here and there, and we would take the band up to these campsites and these big fields. We did maybe fifty to a hundred people. The last time we did that was about three years ago, and we always used to say, wouldn't it be great to try to put something together that was bigger than this?"
Northbound
Up North Productions is owned by Rick and Jose Hidalgo. They combined forces with Chris Russell, a production manager for Live Nation in Boston, and hired Courtney Metsch, who does PR for Live Nation, to manage the media, and in the last year, as Rick put it, "One thing led to another." An old high school friend of Chris's offered to invest, saying that if they ever wanted to do something "a little outside the box," he would support the idea. The team knew they had the practical experience and connections to book the bands and produce the festival, as well as the expertise to pull it off. Around the same time they found someone with a couple hundred acres of land not far from Hiram, Maine. Surprisingly, the Ossipee Valley Fairground -- which suited the festival perfectly -- was originally the Plan B venue. They defaulted to it when they found that the terrain was too rough at the Plan A location. "The transformation of the fairground was surreal for me," said Chris Russell, "because I had been going up there for months, to survey the land and just get the logistics down. At first, honestly, I was a little wary of putting on a festival here because of the logistics of the layout, but when I had it all on paper and I had it drawn out in front of me, as I'm standing in the middle of that field, on Wednesday … we're laying down the stage, and all the vendors are coming in and everything just started to come together. Everything found a place and we couldn't have asked for a better venue." Rick sounded as though he could scarcely believe it himself as he described how the festival came together: "It became a reality around January, so in about six months time we were able to whip it up and put it together. We only announced the festival on Memorial Day and in three months we were able to get three thousand people out, so… It happened really, really quickly."
Considering that Up North came into existence in barely half a year and was officially announced only a couple months before its debut makes it all the more impressive that almost 3,500 tickets were sold. However, it was rumored that the festival grew close to its 5,000-person capacity on the final night.
Chris is Up North's Site Coordinator and Production Manager. He described the legwork in preparing for the festival: "I logistically laid out the site, built the stage, got all the staging, got the generator company, got the sound and light, advanced the whole festival with every single band. This was my first major festival; it's what I do on a daily basis but not on a scale that large, so it was really a learning experience for me. I had a lot of fun with it. There were so many different angles that I took to do this and every idea worked, so it was very exciting for me." Chris continued, "I've had an overwhelming amount of positive feedback, and it really warms my heart to know that -- because my role in Boston as a production manager obviously isn't that large on the scale that we're producing festivals. I assist in production down at the Comcast Center and I'm one of the production managers at the Paradise, so the scale is somewhere in the middle there. But for me to handle something of that caliber by myself, and to walk away seeing everyone smiling, was really awesome for me. My whole production team, from the sound company to the stagehands to the generators to my second stage people, everyone was just so thrilled at the job we all did, and the team that I compiled really worked together. They all just kicked so much ass. Everyone wasn't getting paid that much money, and no one complained about it; no one complained about loading in when it was torrentially downpouring, when the wind was going 25 mph and we couldn't see anything. Everyone had a really positive attitude and it really helped set the tone for the vibe for the whole weekend."
Family Affair
Up North shared a tremendous celebration of diversity; the culture included something for everyone. "It's a great mishmash, a melting pot of different cultures. Everyone's a free agent here," said Louisa, an artist and kindred spirit we met over the weekend. The mélange of genres present in the lineup was just as varied as the vendors, the staff, and the festival-goers themselves. It was amazing that the entire event maintained such a strong sense of cohesion. But the intimate feeling at Up North was not merely a result of its small size; it was set up so that everyone could get a taste of everything. Many fans were already friends, or friends of friends. It was a gregarious conglomeration of Beantown Rockers and New England music fans at the Ossipee Valley Fairground, as well as the extended music family from the East Coast and beyond. This was a party made by friends, with friends, for friends, and that was felt in the atmosphere upon entering the festival grounds. When people recounted how they found their way to Up North, their stories usually involved something about how their friends were playing music, or selling food, or camping out there. Many used the words "home" or "family" to convey the social atmosphere and the character of the event. Dancin' Greg summed up the scene quite astutely: "My theory is that everyone is a friend; I just haven't met them yet. Or I forgot." I asked Greg if he had a message for the people. "Let it go," he said. Surely this is one of the reasons why people come to festivals: to let go, if only for a little while. Photographer Carolyn Cray proffered fitting advice: "If one should need an out, let go, let music." Louisa added, "At an experience like Up North, it's like you're transported to an alternate universe where people are trying to manifest utopia. The privilege that we strive for is that concept of home that we all come together to create for these few days."
The charming fairground was nothing short of an idyllic setting and by all means a lovely place to call a utopian home for the weekend. The surrounding scenery was gorgeous -- the valley was "beauteous and exquisite," as advertised on the website. There was a family camping section, a quiet area away from the main camping area. There was also a hiking path leading down to the gushing Ossipee River. Camping areas were naturally accented by clusters of thick pines that provided shade from the hot sun and shelter from the brief bouts of rain. The main concert field was nearly adjacent to the smaller stage. With only two stages, the brilliantly planned schedule made it possible to see every single act perform -- another perk of the smaller festival. The crowd languidly wandered between stages during set breaks, with plenty of time to get ready for the next band.
On Friday, the music started at 5PM and continued until 2AM. The Everyone Orchestra kicked things off with a brilliant ensemble led by Matt Butler and featuring Jon Fishman (Phish) playing with Jamie Masefield (Jazz Mandolin Project), Mike Rivard (Club d'Elf), Taylor Mcferrin, Ryan Montbleau, Dan Archer, Mr. Rourke, Geoff Scott, and Jason Cohen. Mike Rivard recounted, "It was really cool to play with the Everyone Orchestra for the first time and be part of that spontaneous experience and play with Matt Butler, Jon Fishman and a bunch of cats I had never played with before, and do it in front of an audience. Besides that, for me, the high point of the festival was getting to sit five feet from Aston 'Family Man' Barrett's bass amp during his set with the Wailers. Family Man is one of the heaviest cats in the realm of bass, and to watch him and feel him from such a close distance was a majorly awesome experience. His lines are the epitome of what bass playing should be: just the right notes and nothing else; totally locked into the groove, with lots of space for the other instruments to speak, and driven by the needs of the song, each line a melodic counterpoint to the main melody. His playing has been a big inspiration on my own, and as much as you can absorb from hearing someone only on a recording, being able to watch them while they play allows you to pick up on all of the subtleties that can't translate through recording alone. Besides being an undisputed titan of the bass guitar, he also exudes a vibe of humility, warmth and love that are just as important as the notes he plays. Thanks for the lesson, Fams!"
Turn it Up
Friday evening also featured excellent sets by Soulive, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, and Ithaca-based improv rockers Jimkata. The consensus was that the late-night Lettuce set was one of the best of the weekend. We had heard Lettuce's tight grooves and deliciously funky sound the previous night on the Rock On! Boston Harbor cruise with a hefty contingent of the Boston massive, but were treated to an even more raging performance at Up North. The energy between Lettuce and the crowd built up and up until it burst through the rafters and spilled out into sky, which was fully glinting with the billions of stars that we city dwellers rarely get to admire. "Everyone there was loving being there so much that it emanated back to the bands," Eric Krasno (Soulive, Lettuce) said later. "The crowd of three thousand felt like fifty thousand." Sam Kininger (Lettuce, Soulive, Sam Kininger Band) said he had an amazing time, and stated decidedly that the festival had been "the embodiment of RAGE: Righteous Acquirements of Gratuitous Extracurriculars."