Rothbury 2008: Day 1

It’s hard to find Rothbury on most maps. The tiny village is tucked away in a corner of West Michigan, where few people reside outside of the tourist season. Driving north on U.S. 31, your usual company consists of green hills, trees and families traveling to their summer homes on Lake Michigan. Detroit is a healthy three hours away, while Chicago requires a slightly longer journey (not to mention a jump from Central to Eastern Standard). A strange location for America’s newest festival? Sure, but strangeness is part of Rothbury’s charm.

Attending the inaugural Rothbury Music Festival was like spending four days inside a psychedelic Disney film (albeit with sporadic nudity, drug use and glimpses of Dave Matthews). There were blue lakes, trees, costumed hippies and a forest filled with glow-in-the-dark decorations. You didn’t have to be chemically compromised to realize how idyllic this place was for a weekend of communal living, given the abundant shade and clumps of free hammocks (again, free hammocks!!!) strewn throughout Sherwood Forest.

Of course, brand-new festivals also come with their share of problems. We circled the campgrounds endlessly on Thursday afternoon, getting conflicting directions from the college-aged volunteers who had no idea where we were supposed to park. “Take a left on Clay St. and then wait until you see a road branching off,” advised a well-intentioned employee. “I don’t know what the road is called, but I think it’s over there. It might branch off at an angle.” She paused and frowned in concentration. “It… it looks like this,” she finished, slicing the air in a diagonal motion.

Forty-five minutes later, we parked the car and set up camp behind the Odeum Stage, where Rothbury’s headliners were slated to play. Bonus: our two neighboring campers were affiliated with Ice Cream Man, a too-good-to-be-true company that hands out free ice cream (again, free ice cream!!!) at musical festivals nationwide. These treats would soon form the basis of our Rothbury Food Pyramid, which also included $10 falafel sandwiches and free CLIFF bar samples.

Veteran jam artists like Mickey Hart, Perpetual Groove, and the Disco Biscuits kicked things off that evening, playing long sets to Rothbury’s earliest arrivals. Those who weren’t interested in hearing the Biscuits amble through a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Run Like Hell” retreated elsewhere: to the Guitar Hero competition, the batting cages or the ever-interesting Sherwood Forest, which was decked out in blue and red lights.