Live From Rothbury Day 1

For the next three days Live Exhaust is on the road live from Rothbury Music Festival in Rothbury, Michigan! This being the festival’s inaugural year, its main goal is to set a new standard for music festivals to be more eco-conscious and sustainable and to be a festival that educates fans as well as entertains them during the holiday weekend.

So over the course of three days, I will be dishing out updates on how the greening and entertaining is going as I sit in on panel discussions and take in the performances and traverse the festival grounds. We’ll keep all senses peeled for anything that arouses or intrigues. And so far the picking was plentiful and the artists, Jakob Dylan and the Gold Mountain Rebels, Betty Lavette, The Wailers and Snoop Dog brought the goods (and recycled them, too!). Today’s lineup looks even better and including a media roundtable with the festivals organizers to discuss Rothbury’s green-centric mission. And in case you’re wondering, a full review of the shows and other events will run in a future feature on Ink19.

So how was the first day? Well, once we set up shop among the estimated 40k(and counting) other campers we toured the festival grounds on Friday night and gazed long at the floating carousel ring of stuffed monkeys that rotated and flickered in a strobe light and among illuminated eye spectacles. and once we got a feel for the place things started to settle in nicely.

And like Coachella and Bonnaroo, Rothbury has an integration of live art among the fans on the festival grounds. But here at Rothbury, the art is multi-dimensional sensory and has recycled back story. Many of the art pieces are created from recycled trash or donated food items like the World Largest sculpture of non-perishable can items (see tomorrow’s post of a picture and more info). I’ve also seen several examples (The Conduit, theatre performance to name a few) that will take us deeper into the FIRST LIVE EXHAUST EXPERIEMENT with the 5 senses.

Well, that’s all for now but check back tomorrow for more info about whether or not Rothbury, fans and artist have headed in the right direction and are all on the same (recycled, of course) page.