Seattle’s Bumbershoot Festival Is Back and More Local Than Ever
Written by djfrosty on August 18, 2023
Seattle’s famed Bumbershoot music festival has been on hold for three years after the annual event traded producers and the pandemic interrupted live music for years. This Labor Day weekend (Sept. 2-3), however, the beloved festival is back, celebrating its 50th anniversary and focusing in on community.
In January of 2022, Bumbershoot owner Seattle Center selected the New Rising Sun coalition as its production partner to reimagine the local event. With Neumos co-owner Steven Severin, Museums of Museums founder Greg Lundgren and McCaw Hall general manager Joe Paganelli leading the group, the two-day festival is back in the hands of locals and Severin says the community has embraced their vision of putting emphasis on Pacific Northwest artists for the lineup with Band of Horses, Sunny Day Real Estate and headliners Sleater-Kinney and finding ways to make a major festival more accessible to everyone in the community.
“People were like, ‘Holy sh*t. This is what we’ve been asking for,’” Severin says of the lineup announcement. “This is a 50-year-old festival that has gone through many different changes and metamorphosis, and this is how I believe that Seattle wants to see it.”
Most recently, Bumbershoot was produced by AEG Presents, which agreed to produce the festival with Seattle non-profit festival production company One Reel beginning in 2014 to help cover the $1 million in debt One Reel had wracked up. By 2019, AEG announced it would not renew its contract to work on the festival.
Knowing full well that most festivals take years to turn any profit, Severin – who serves as Bumbershoot’s co-president & director of music programming – says New Rising Sun has worked to remove barriers for those who want to attend the milestone event by partnering with e-commerce giant Amazon, which agreed to underwrite presale tickets for this year’s festival to keep the event affordable. Amazon sponsored a special early bird $50 single day and $85 two-day general admission ticket, the lowest ticket prices have been in a decade, according to Severin. The company also worked with arts organization Third Stone to give out 5,000 tickets to area nom-profits and community organizations.
“I’m never going to fault AEG for how they ran things because that is how festivals changed. The whole model changed. You went for bigger and bigger and bigger artists,” says Severin, but now “the money stays here, it doesn’t go to New York or LA. It’s homegrown, as local as it gets.”
Lundgren, who also founded Vital 5 Productions, believes the festival can attract even more locals through its robust art programming. While there will be traditional festival art exhibits such as large-scale paintings and sculptures called Out of Sight, Lundgren says they are “drawing a larger circle around” what people consider art. The festival will include wrestlers, pole dancers, filmmakers, roller skaters, double Dutch jump rope performers, nail artists, makeup artists, fashion designers, extreme pogo stick and sign spinners (yes, like the folks who spin Subway signs on street corners).
“The more that you start to examine people that work within those [expanded art] spaces, the more that you realize that not only is this their daily practice, very similar to a painter or to a modern dancer or to a filmmaker,” says Lundgren. “But their own attitude and their own ethos around what they do is very much centered around self-expression, around how they’re communicating with their larger world.”
There will be a tattoo runway, where anyone can walk the catwalk to show off their body art. People can sing their favorite karaoke song with an improvised burlesque dancer interpretive dancing at burlesque karaoke and the festival will host a Witch Dome with everything from tarot to past life readings and palmists.
“My hope is that by year two or year three you won’t be able to tell who the performer is and who the audience is. To me, that’s a huge success,” says Lundgren. “If we can create a festival that everybody feels like they have not only the capacity, but the invitation to participate in.”
Additionally, Third Stone – the non-profit arm of Bumbershoot – launched the Workforce Development Program to offer young adults aged 17-25 the opportunity to learn critical business skills within the festival and live music setting. In partnership with The UC Theatre’s Concert Career Pathways (CCP) program, this six-month tuition-free, hands-on education experience and paid internship began in April 2023 and will culminate in the opportunity to work on the grounds at the festival and graduation.
This year’s 16 participants come from all around Washington with most coming from low-income communities and identifying as people of color and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community.
“The heart of the program is to reduce barriers of entry into the [music industry] workforce,” says Third Stone executive director James Miles. “The goal is to prepare these young people to take on any job in live production.”
The program includes in-depth courses with industry veterans from around the industry, as well as hands-on jobs putting on this year’s Bumbershoot. Following graduation for the 16 students, Third Stone will help support the participants in landing their desired job.