Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival
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His first concert was Michael Jackson. His first festival was Phish. And when live music producer Paul Peck grew up and got his own chance to put on big events, that genre-jumping mix of experiences stayed with him.
Peck is a core member of the team behind the inaugural Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival, which is set for March 4-6 on a spread of more than 800 acres near the Florida town and lake of the same name.
From Mumford & Sons to Kendrick Lamar, from Skrillex to Hall & Oates, from Led Zeppelinís Robert Plant to “Trap Queen” rhymer Fetty Wap, the Okeechobee festival promises the kind of cosmic, borderless diversity in programming that Peck mastered in his previous work with the annual Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tennessee.
As enthused as Peck sounded in an interview with PureHoney about the festival setting — an inland tropical oasis that he called “a nature paradise” — he was downright boyish on the subject of the lineup and, within it, the prospect of rare and unforgettable on-stage pairings.
“I love those moments so much I go out of my way to produce them,” said Peck, who produced the “SuperJam” concerts that were a focal point of Bonnaroo — one-night supergroups made up of disparate talent not likely to ever be reassembled.
The Avett Brothers
At Bonnaroo in 2013, a rock and soul SuperJam featured members of My Morning Jacket and Sly & the Family Stone, with surprise appearances by Billy Idol, Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes and R. Kelly. The next year, Peck put an all-star live band around the DJ and producer Skrillex.
Okeechobee will have its own summit, called “PoWow!” which is billed on the festival’s Web site as “a once-in-a-lifetime collaborative concert” where “anything can happen and anyone can walk on stage.”
Givers
Peck said the mix-and-match impulse is partly a product of his teen-aged obsession with catching great live shows. That bug — wanting to be in the room when something awesome happens — bit him in his hometown of Hartford, Conn., and followed him to college at Tulane University in New Orleans.
“Even before the term ‘fomo’ was invented,” he said, referencing “fear of missing out” in the now-standard acronym form, “I wanted to see these great shows. I wanted to experience them so much I started producing them myself in clubs in New Orleans.”
Roadkill Ghost Choir
Peck was with Bonnaroo at its inception in 2002 as a jam-band conclave on a patch of Tennessee farmland, and he stayed on, through the 2014 edition, as it grew into a veritable city-state, with a lineup of dozens and three-day attendance approaching 100,000 people.
Those same years saw the rise of major music festivals across the United States — Bonnaroo in the South, Coachella out west, Ultra in Miami — and efforts to build new music encampments in other parts of the country.
Sunbears!
The U.S. festival map has so many points of interest today, from Governor’s Ball in New York to Hangout in Alabama to Sasquatch! in the Pacific Northwest, observers fear it’s saturated. Last fall the dwindling fortunes of SFX, a once-massive concert promoter with a big festival portfolio, became news.
As it happens, Okeechobee is the same weekend as another Florida bash, the seventh annual Aura Music & Arts Festival, almost 300 miles to the north in Live Oak.
SWIMM
Peck said he does not view the two as competitors, and he may have a case since Aura does incline more toward the jam-band, gathering-of-the-tribes vibe of early Bonnaroos, where Okeechobee is more chockablock.
The idea for Peck and his partners is to promote chance encounters in an idyllic, immersive setting of grassland, forest and waterfront, where hip-hop partisans who love Kendrick Lamar can have epiphanies watching iconic rocker Robert Plant, or fans of Mumford & Sons’ artisanal acoustic music are unexpectedly blown away by the electronica of Skrillex.
This festival, like others before it, will offer diversions large and small, with main-stage sets giving way to overnight raves on the outskirts or, for those who need it, quiet refuges from the audiovisual torrent. “I can’t wait to open the gates and the property and show people what this world is going to be all about,” said Peck, adding that he hopes this will be the first of many.
The first Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival is March 4-6 at Sunshine Grove. Visit http://okeechobeefest.com for tickets and information. RSVP on Facebook
UPDATE: Just Announced February 1 “PoWoW! A LIVE SUPERSTAR MASHUP”
PoWow! WITH MIGUEL & WIN BUTLER (ARCADE FIRE)
AN UNPRECEDENTED COLLABORATIVE CONCERT
STAR-STUDDED LINE-UP ALSO INCLUDES JOHN OATES, KAMASI WASHINGTON,
THE METERS’ GEORGE PORTER, JR. & ZIGABOO MODELISTE,
AND THE PRESERVATION HALL JAZZ BAND HORN SECTION
MAJOR SPECIAL GUESTS AND SURPRISES
~ Sean Piccoli
