Dunegrass lives! Popular music festival rises from the ashes for 17th year

Glen Arbor Sun

The Sleeping Bear Dunegrass Music Festival is back, albeit in a new location on the Empire Eagles’ M-72 property six miles east of Empire. Come join the revelry from Friday, July 31-Sunday, Aug. 2, and enjoy excellent blues, roots, rock, reggae, bluegrass, progressive, funk and contemporary acoustic music playing on two stages from around Leelanau County and the state.

Dunegrass kicks off with a set by Susan Fawcett on the Vandergrass Stage, Friday at 6 p.m. and continues past midnight. Friday and Saturday feature open mic sessions from 11 a.m. until noon and then roll all day long and into the night. Check out the website www.dunegrass3.org for a full lineup. Organizer and Winwin Productions owner Ryan Lake says he’s most excited about Porter Batiste Stoltz, which will play Saturday at midnight. But locals are also psyched to see so many familiar faces, including The New Third Coast, The Corvairs, Cabin Fever and Ms. Princess Sarah Jane Everlasting.

Tickets at the gate cost $85 for all three days (or $70 on the website if you get them in time). The Empire Eagles’ location offers more than 20 acres of property for parking, primitive camping, food and craft vendors, safety services, a kids’ tent, an events tent and three days of beautiful music.

dunegrass6At first glance, this year’s festival will appear a shadow of what Dunegrass became under the guidance of Grassroots Productions, a nationally known company that went bankrupt after mismanaging and overbooking bands for last year’s festival. Lake estimates that the 2009 festival will spend less than 20 percent of what Grassroots did last year. Lake’s expectations of 2,000 attendees are much more modest, and realistic, than the miscalculations that saddled Grassroots with an insurmountable debt of $175,000 (see interview with Lake here).

But downsizing the festival — making it local again — is exactly the point.

“We are very excited about this year’s lineup,” says fellow organizer Ted Grossmeyer. “We have concentrated on producing a ‘Made in Michigan’ festival this year, and with only a few exceptions we are featuring bands and performers from Michigan. We are reaching back to the festival’s foundations, and following the vision of the founding Vanderberg family, that together have made the festival such a success over the years.”

Recent setbacks

Until just two months ago, Dunegrass was seemingly dead in the ashes following a series of setbacks in recent years. Days after the festival in 2007, founder Mike Vanderberg collapsed and died in the field — owned by the Deering family and adjacent to the St. Philip Neri Catholic Church in Empire — where the festival was held. (During the 1990s, Dunegrass was in the field now occupied by the New Neighborhood across M-72 from the National Park Visitors Center.)

Steven Volas of Grassroots Productions had already taken over the job of booking bands and managing the festival’s finances from the Vanderberg family, and last year he brought a lineup of Woodstock proportions to Empire. Household names including Donna the Buffalo, Buckethead, Peter Rowan, Bela Fleck and the ageless folk artists Richie Havens and Arlo Guthrie were to grace our tiny town.

dunegrass14-copyBut if that lineup appeared too good to be true, it was. Sun editor and Dunegrass emcee Norm Wheeler recounted after last year’s festival, “A lotta people didn’t get paid, that’s the buzz … By Saturday noon of Festival weekend it was clear backstage that something was amiss. The Grassroots brain trust huddled in the big motor home and emerged frequently with long faces or in tears. Someone in the know told me that there wasn’t enough money coming in to ‘cover the nut’ (pay the bills), and maybe some big names on the schedule would cancel. Sunday morning started with the news that Richie Havens would not be coming (‘His flight had been canceled’).”

In an interview with GlenArborSun.com before last year’s festival, Arlo Guthrie said, perhaps prophetically, “It’s nice to see [that Dunegrass is] still going. It’s natural for it to grow into a bigger thing, but you don’t want it getting too big. Every organization has to decide at some point what it wants to do. Most feel the pressure from an audience asking, ‘How are you gonna top this? Who you gonna get that you didn’t have last year?’ Soon you get caught in a spiral … as if what happened before wasn’t good enough.”

By the time the dust settled on Dunegrass ’08, many bands, venders and organizers had not been paid — neither had a law firm that Grassroots contracted to fight a “not in my backyard” suit filed by a couple renters who lived next to the Dunegrass site. Grassroots Productions was $175,000 in the hole, the festival’s name was seemingly tarnished within the music industry, and Volas left town with his tail between his legs.

Mike Vanderberg’s daughter Amelia considered reviving the Dunegrass festival without Grassroots Productions, but by late fall it was clear that the Deering family would not agree to host Dunegrass again. And Volas missed a deadline in February to appear before the Empire Village Council to discuss future Dunegrass plans.

Fast forward to May. A group of local residents including Grossmeyer, Laura Sielaff of the Empire Eagles, and Mike’s surviving wife Carol Vanderberg, were meeting regularly to discuss reviving the local festival. Sielaff and the Empire Eagles could provide the land, but they needed someone with connections to the local music industry. Entire Ryan Lake, who joined them and agreed to start Winwin Productions for the purpose of pulling the Dunegrass Festival out of the ashes.

Though he wouldn’t mention specific names, Lake admits that some Michigan musicians he contacted were wary of playing at Dunegrass after last year’s debacle. “They felt burned,” he says. Nonetheless, through Lake’s connections (he’s a musician, himself, and will play Sunday at 2 p.m.), he was able to build trust among local musicians — especially those from the Earthworks Collective, which includes Steppin’ In It, Daisy May & Seth Bernard and Luke Winslow King — that this year’s festival was returning to its roots and focusing on local talent.

Through Lake’s damage control efforts, Davis (whose band Steppin’ In It played at this summer’s Manitou Music Festival Dune Climb concert) re-upped to play on the first night of this year’s Dunegrass Festival.

Did Lake ever think there were simply too many obstacles to overcome to bring back this vibrant music festival in just two months?

“Nope,” he answered. “The wind just seemed to be blowing our way.”

Check out the official Dunegrass website, www.Dunegrass3.org, for more information, and visit our archives at www.GlenArborSun.com for past Dunegrass coverage.