Maine news, sports, weather from Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, Maine

June 27, 2010

Jamtown, U.S.A.

Some 50 bands and 15,000 or so of their best friends will make the trek up Route 26 to Oxford for the three-day musicfest called Nateva.

By Bob Keyes bkeyes@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

The big-time world of rock 'n' roll comes to small-town Maine this week.

The Nateva Music & Camping Festival, a 50-band jam, will commence unofficially Thursday afternoon at the 100-acre Oxford Fairgrounds in western Maine, and roll through sundown on the Fourth of July. The focus of the proceedings are weekend concerts -- all day and night Friday, Saturday and Sunday -- featuring mostly jam and indie-rock bands.

The top draw is the band Furthur, scheduled for two long sets on the evening of July 4, with surviving Grateful Dead members Phil Lesh and Bob Weir performing a deep catalog of Dead songs. As many as 15,000 people will attend each day, with attendance expected to peak during Furthur's festival-closing four-hour marathon.

Weekend passes and single-day tickets are available, although on-site camping is sold out. Remote camping at Oxford Plains Speedway, about three miles away, is available. The remote camping includes a free shuttle to the concert site.

The festival is expected to create traffic problems along Route 26 north and south of the festival site throughout the weekend, although Oxford Police Chief Jonathan Tibbetts said his officers are accustomed to dealing with big crowds. The speedway occasionally draws crowds of between 10,000 and 15,000 people, Tibbetts noted, adding that his combined force of local, county and state police has been preparing for the festival for months and is working closely with the concert promoter's private security staff.

Despite persistent permitting issues, Nateva is shaping up as one of the largest summer jams in the Northeast, and the largest concert in Maine since Phish drew close to 70,000 fans to Limestone in 2003.

Nateva is a big deal nationally, said Justin Ward, editor of livemusicblog.com. "On the festival circuit, bands like Furthur, moe., STS9, She & Him, Grizzly Bear and the Flaming Lips are all a pretty big deal. For an inaugural fest to book a lineup like this could be called a big deal, yes," he wrote in an e-mail. "I'd say the buzz is that this has a potential to be a big festival and/or largely successful for years to come assuming they properly plan the logistics."

Rob Derhak of the band moe. won't have to travel far. Derhak, moe.'s bass player and singer, lives in the suburbs north of Portland. He credits Oxford for having the smarts to land a festival like this.

"I'm psyched," said Derhak, whose band spends much of the summer hopping from one festival to the next, and headlines at Nateva on Friday night. "I get up to Mt. Abram all the time in the winter to go skiing. I drive through Oxford every single time, so when I heard it was happening, I was pretty pumped. It's really cool, and it's good for Maine. I think the town will realize that it's a good event. After all is said and done, Oxford will be pretty psyched, too."

A LITTLE BIT NASCAR

The rock festival scene these days is part NASCAR, part Renaissance fair, Derhak said. The fans are rabid like NASCAR fans, and they travel well -- piling into campers, RVs and any other reliable rig and staking out turf for a weekend of music and kinship. Especially at festivals featuring jam bands, the fans are spirited and eccentric like the Renaissance folks. It's an unlikely combination of passion and personality that plays out over the course of days, all centered around a shared musical experience and common-ground lifestyle, he said.

Jake Cinninger, guitarist for Umphrey's McGee, said the best festivals tend to be those far from population centers, because they encourage people to create community.

(Continued on page 2)

Tweet