In these days and age, Bon Iver is curating his own festival, and if it is news to you, you should visit their website Eaux Claires Music and Arts Festival, where the lineup is given in alphabetic order, in a very equalizing manner, so that no band feels more important than the next one… but there’s no real big name anyway! The festival inaugural edition happened July 17-18 at a 20-acre farm close to Vernon’s own home in northwestern Wisconsin.
Just before his appearance at Glastonbury where he sang with Kanye West during his set, Justin Vernon gave an interview to Grantland to promote his festival: ‘I think our strong suit is that our lineup is not of a genre or a faction. It’s not targeting an audience, so to speak,’ he explained. ‘I want everyone to be comfortable. I would be willing to bet we’re putting a higher percentage of our budget into the aesthetic feeling of [the festival] — when you walk into our spot on the river in the woods, it’s just going to look different. And it’s going to feel different.’
There’s no real headliner, beside him and the National, so in this sense, it’s not a conventional festival, and when he is asked about it, Justin Vernon slmost loses his cool:
‘Yeah, man, fuck that. I mean, I really don’t ever want to cross the line into hating on stuff or judging other people. [But] fuck Lollapalooza. That isn’t rock and roll.
I’m not going to sit and pretend that we aren’t charging people money to get into our festival. But I don’t know, man. You can see it every year: Coachella, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo — the lineups are the fucking same. It’s about numbers, it’s about bottom lines, it’s about measuring groups and cultures of people and the numbers that they represent on a bottom-line agenda. All the lineups are becoming more and more the same, the same fucking headliners.
Ours is a different outlook. We’re not crushing ticket sales. But guess what? The people that end up taking a chance and seeking us out and coming to have an experience I think are going to be getting the best experience. We’re not cutting any corners on the PAs that we’re getting — we’re getting the best in the world. It’s going to sound really good. We’re not cutting any of the corners that diminish the experience that people are going to have. Picking music for music’s sake seems like the obvious choice, but it doesn’t seem like the obvious choice when you look at a lot of the other festivals out there.’
He has a point about every festival having the same lineup, and it is a great thing that he is promoting bands like Blind Boys of Alabama, Charles Bradley, Indigo Girls, Spoon, Sylvan Esso and a hundred of bands I don’t know at all, but as he says, he is not crushing the ticket prices. $135 for 2-day with no real headliner is not really a revolution… it is not too far away from the $175 for the FYF fest, which is also promoting many indie bands and with a very eclectic lineup. In California, I can attend many mini festivals for a ridiculous amount of money with unique lineups (Burgerama, Lolipalooza, Viva Pomona… ). So let’s not pretend Vernon is reinventing the music festival,… ‘It’s about numbers’ … let’s not pretend that his festival is a charity and especially, let’s not pretend a guy like him has never benefited from big corporations either!