MILWAUKEE — Rollicking, rowdy and sometimes raunchy, Janesville’s Party Marty will be wrapping up another successful Summerfest in Milwaukee this coming weekend.
The performer, who can be found at Zoxx Social Club every Wednesday evening overseeing and playing in the open jam and open mic hosted there with his band Party Marty and the Dirtbags, has been playing the music festival for eight years.
Marty Morgan spends his weekends during Summerfest, this year on June 20-22, 27-29 and July 4-6, running a series of tents and tables nestled in the Henry Maier Festival Park between the Briggs and Stratton Big Backyard stage and the lakeside.
At the Ground Floor Stage, Morgan’s homemade musical kingdom, small artists have the chance to pull in music lovers as they walk between stages or try to find a spot to eat their dinner between shows.
“Unlike the big, awesome stages with sponsors, we’re DIY,” he said.
“We use all our own equipment. We come in and set up before the gates open. We book all our own bands and it’s kind of up to us three musicians: me, Jon Rouse and Brendan Demet. And we do everything here, the three of us.”
It’s a bit of a Cinderella story. Maybe not rags to riches, but certainly rags to Dirtbags.
“It started when Jon was playing outside of the gates for tips years ago, a decade ago. And they said, ‘Come on in and work with our stage,’ and then eventually they let him branch off and have his own stage,” Morgan said.
With Rouse afforded an opportunity every Milwaukee busker dreams of, the Ground Floor was born. There, merchandise is sold, festival friends are made and anyone who has time to sit down and rest can listen to music by independent artists.
“A lot of our acts are solo acoustic acts or duos, but we have a lot of rock bands, too. We have some punk bands, we have electronic bands, we have jam bands. We’re all over the place,” he said.
“You get a different crowd every time. The crowd is already here, and if you have good music, you’ll pull them in. If you don’t have good music, you won’t. So this is the ultimate test. It’s not just your friends that you’re playing for, it’s the public.”
When not helping artists, selling merch and keeping people from running into the tent’s white bars by hanging a bunch of bananas from it (after running into himself the first day), Morgan also plays frequent shows during the festival with his band, which is made of a rotating cast of Dirtbags.
One of the regular Dirtbags, Andy Glass, plays bass with the group at Zoxx Social Club’s Wednesday jams and is the regular Summerfest bass player.
The group has five different bassists and six different drummers. In addition to that, other artists are pulled in as honorary Dirtbags. On Saturday at the Ground Floor, that included accordion player Al Bunde, guitarist Jake Stanzer and prodigy young musician Tenley Sheldon.
On Saturday, Morgan played guitar, sang and cracked jokes to bring in passersby. He frequently leaped off the stage to run through the crowd, jokingly moving the tip bucket around and passing out jangling children’s toys he finds at Goodwill so members of the audience can join the percussion section.
While drums were his first instrument, Morgan will perform his original songs and covers on guitar at Summerfest and occasionally hop on to play drums for other acts, like he does at Zoxx for some artists.
“Drums were my first instrument,” he said. “I started in high school, kept loving it, I went on to college and played drums, and eventually went on to teaching, and I have a lot of songs that I’ve written that I’ve performed, too.”
A tenet of Morgan’s music career has been the community formed between Dirtbags — both the members of his group and the people he loves.
He performed original comedy songs Saturday centered on the tenets of being a Dirtbag — most importantly, loyalty and the courage to look beyond someone’s imperfections to form a meaningful, powerful connection.
“You’ll never know everybody that I love/some are far, some are lost and some are up above/chances are, you might not think too kindly of/the rotten scoundrels and the dirtbags that I love,” Morgan sang in the last song of the set.
“I’ve got my own pack of rats/my own 40 Thieves/couple guys and girls that would do anything for me.”
Morgan is a full-time musician who will be playing in the Lake Koshkonong area later this summer. Details on future shows and booking are available on his Facebook page, Party Marty, or his website, partymartymusic.com, where his songs are also available for free download.
He will also be playing at and running the Ground Floor during the last weekend of Summerfest this Thursday-Saturday.
“If I wasn’t making music, I wouldn’t be whole. I’ve never not made music, so it’s hard to imagine myself in that role of not dedicating my life to music,” he said.
“I couldn’t imagine myself not doing it.”
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