Remember the days when major music festivals weren’t saturated with button pushing EDM artists and rock bands playing authentic musical instruments played all weekend long? Sam Shear does, and with his upcoming Phases of the Moon Festival this young promoter is setting out to provide festival-goers with an experience focused on what he describes as “100% organic feel good music.” Taking place September 11-14 in Danville, Illinois, this first year festival has come out of the gates swinging, with a jam band lover’s wet dream of a lineup featuring top-tier acts such as Widespread Panic, String Cheese Incident, Bob Weir & Ratdog, Gov’t Mule, Tedeschi-Trucks Band, Leon Russell, and a list that’s overflowing with incredible acts.
As if the lineup wasn’t strong enough, Phases of the Moon will also feature world-renowned visual and performing artists to make the overall experience that much more stimulating, as well as a number of on-site amenities such as a farmer’s market, non-profit village and more.
These days it can be difficult to stand out among the seemingly endless amount of music festivals happening, but the musical lineup and overall philosophy of Phases of the Moon Festival harken back to a time when festivals focused on creating a vibrant community rather than a marketing hashtag. To get a better idea of the story behind Phases of the Moon, as well as more insight as to what attendees can expect from the experience, Neil Ferguson caught up with festival founder Sam Shear.
Can you talk about your background in music and how this whole festival came about?
I went to Sierra Nevada College, which is right on the border of California and Nevada in Lake Tahoe. It was a beautiful place to go to school. I went there mainly for snowboarding, but I had a huge love for music and art. I was out there for about 5 years and during that time, being so close to the Bay Area, I had countless opportunities to go and see amazing shows. Whether it was Bob Weir or Phil Lesh, or seeing Furthur for New Years, there were just some eye-opening moments that happened in the music world while I was out there. Then at the same time our school had some really creative ideas, like one class that was dedicated to going to Burning Man every year. Kids would get college credit to go to Burning Man, set up an art piece, and interact with the environment. I had the opportunity to study all of these amazing visual artists such as Peter Hudson, Alex and Allyson Grey, Nature Dreamweaver. So that’s where my love for music and art came to play. Once I graduated I was trying to figure out a way to fuse both those concepts into one, which is where Phases of the Moon came from.
How did you end up deciding a music festival is a perfect medium for that?
My sister’s good friend is part of this non-profit organization called Living Lands and Waters. They are a non-profit based in the Mid West and they go up and down the Mississippi River and other lakes and rivers cleaning it out using barges. They pull out anything from tires to bowling pins to dead bodies, everything. I thought what they were doing was a fantastic idea and it motivated me into creating a benefit event for Living Lands and Waters where we could infuse this idea of what they were doing along with the music and art. Starting as just a benefit concert, we got into it and went from location to location, and next thing you know we wound up in Danville, Illinois on this 3,000 acre piece of property and it went from a one concert benefit to a four-day music festival.
How did you choose the site, and what makes it a special place for a festival?
Creating an event of any size, you really want the community to be behind you and interested in what you’re doing. We reached out to a bunch of different communities from Wisconsin to Indiana to Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. One day I received a message from a woman named Jeanie Cook in Danville and just from her email she was very inviting, and she said we should come check out this beautiful park. We drove out to the park and my mouth dropped. To see this place with a giant lake at the top, turn of the century buildings on the property, and just the size was unbelievable. We knew right away this was our home.
I’ve noticed a refreshing lack of DJs and electronic acts on the roster. Was this intentional?
Oh yeah, that was very intentional. One of the things I set in the very beginning was that we wanted 100% organic feel good music, and we defined that as people playing instruments. We felt that there is more of a personal connection between a band and an audience when an artist went up there and played his or her soul out on an instrument. That’s what people wanted we felt. I didn’t want the person to go up there, click a button, and walk off stage. We wanted real power and real connections happening between the audience and the musicians, so we decided we were going to stay away from a lot of that EDM stuff.
In your opinion, what makes a perfect music festival experience?
I think a perfect festival experience is an event that can provide four things, and these are the four things we are going for with Phases: good music, inspiring artwork, a strong sense of community, and that conscious collective you see at a festival where everyone’s kind of moving and grooving towards the same beat.
Touching on that, can you elaborate on some of the other unique activities people can do at Phases besides see music?
We are bringing in a lot of insane visual artists that you would see at Burning Man. This is not just a music festival; the art is just as important as the music in my mind, so we really wanted to bring in some stuff people will remember and talk about. We also have around ten world-renowned performing artists and groups, everything from Quixotic, who will do a main stage performance, to Tammy Firefly to Big Fun Circus and all of these other great roving performers that will interact with the festival-goers during the four days.
We also have a disc golf course we are working with Innova on, who is one of our sponsors, and we’re creating a course in our tree farm. We’re still talking about whether or not there will be a nighttime disc golf thing as well.
One of the big things that separates Phases from other festivals is this area called the Sanctuary, and that is all about mind, body and soul. It’s a concept I picked up on when I was out West seeing some of the big festivals out there like Wanderlust and stuff like that. We wanted to create an environment where there will be yoga classes happening throughout the entire day, you can get massages, there’s meditation happening, sound healing, tea ceremonies, and just all of these great activities people can get involved in after seeing one of their headlining acts.
We also will have a non-profit village that we are working with Head Count on and this will involve 12-14 non-profits we are currently working with. Everything from Conscious Alliance, Head Count, to local ones like Keep Vermillion County Beautiful, the Audubon Society, and then Living Lands and Waters, where the whole idea came from. One of our artists, Nature Dreamweaver, will be onsite and will create an actual art piece out of the junk pulled out of the Mississippi River.
Talk about the artist in residence with David Gans and how that will work?
When I first started this project one of the first people I initially I thought could have some great insight and be a help was David Gans. When we reached out to David he was very interested in what we were doing, so we kind of brought him in almost as a supervisor to look over what we were creating to make sure it had that Grateful Dead feel. David will be with us for all four days mingling with the artists and hopefully you’ll see him on many different stages.
A lot of people are probably wondering about the Lunar Landing Conspiracy set. Can you talk about how this will work?
A big thing I’ve been telling people is that it’s all about spontaneous collaborations, having those moments where two of your favorite artists get onstage and it puts a smile on you face. What we’re trying to create is something special and new. A lot of people have already seen String Cheese Incident in many ways, so we wanted to create something that people could talk about and something fun for the artists as well. When we came up with this concept we felt that String Cheese would be the absolute perfect match for it, but to a certain extent the Lunar Landing Conspiracy will be a multi-sensory performance that includes String Cheese and a bunch of artists that will be onsite with us. Hopefully we can get a couple space suits and a lunar rover involved [laughs].
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