The Outdoor Music Festival Is Back and Ready to Rock

While Megan Thee Stallion kicked off the seasonal vibes with her performance at Target Center in May, outdoor concerts and multiday fests continue to heat up July and August. Some fans make plans to attend these jamborees every year, selecting their favorite campsites and staking out spots by the stage. This year, there are a few new and returning concerts to add to the calendar.

At the top of the list is the new Minnesota Yacht Club Festival, produced by C3 Presents, the team behind Austin City Limits Music Festival in Texas, Lollapalooza in Chicago, Bonnaroo in Tennessee, and Shaky Knees Music Festival in Atlanta. The Minnesota Yacht Club Festival will be July 19-20 on Harriet Island Regional Park in St. Paul with headliners spanning the generations, from female powerhouses Gwen Stefani, Joan Jett, and Alanis Morrisette to longtime rockers and festival circuit favorites the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Minnesota-based acts are on the bill too, including Durry, Hippo Campus, Soul Asylum, and Gully Boys.

Harriet Island was home to the Lollapalooza festival more than three decades ago, staging Jane’s Addiction and Nine Inch Nails in 1991 and Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1992. Many a Minnesotan will say they were there. And then there was the short-lived River’s Edge Music Festival in 2012 with headliners Tool and the Flaming Lips. That festival was promised as a five-year event but died on the vine after the inaugural weekend. Enter 2024, with the Chili Peppers returning as one of the headliners and with hopes renewed for an annual event. There’s the old setting: a lovely park next to the Mississippi River with two stages. New this year: riverboat dinner cruises included in VIP packages.

Photo by Sam Feldt

“St. Paul is a major market, with all the sports teams and a really good population,” explains festival producer Tim Sweetwood, who works with C3 Presents, a subsidiary of Live Nation. “Minneapolis-to-St. Paul seems like a place where people are always reinvesting, but we saw that there wasn’t what we would consider a major music festival arena—some place that has a very large headliner attached to it, whether that’s an arena or a stadium act. Maybe [there were] music festivals there in the past, but would we be able to get in there and not also disrupt what’s currently going on in the music scene?”

Across the river in Minneapolis, the annual Basilica Block Party returns after a two-year hiatus on Aug. 2-3 with the theme “bigger, better, back together.” No longer a big block party with crowds moving from stage to stage in the shadow of the Basilica of St. Mary, the festival that benefits the church has relocated to Boom Island. But the headline acts are familiar BBP bands such as the Goo Goo Dolls and Counting Crows as well as local favorites Run Westy Run and emerging best new band she’s green.

Alternative, pop, and rock bands aren’t the only focus for summer music festivals. Genres range from hip-hop to folk. The Twin Cities Jazz Festival, anchored in Mears Park in St. Paul’s Lowertown neighborhood, celebrated its 26th anniversary this year in late June. The popular Winnipeg Folk Festival in Winnipeg, Manitoba, officially started 50 years ago this year and runs July 11-14, while Country Jam USA in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, turns 35 with concerts July 18-20. Prior Lake’s popular Lakefront Music Festival, July 12-13, has Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo the first day and country star Dierks Bentley the second. And the 35th annual Bayfront Blues Festival on Aug. 9-11 in Duluth features Buckwheat Zydeco Jr. as a headliner. Many offer camping on-site and entertainment options beyond concerts.

Courtesy of Lakefront Music Festival

Stu Neuman says music festivals figure prominently in Minnesotans’ propensity to savor every drop of summer. He promotes the outdoor shows at Surly Brewing Festival Field (“festival” is right there in the title!). “We maximize Minnesota’s six good weeks of weather with a yearly lineup booked by First Avenue that manages to be both eclectic and crowd-pleasing. Hosting acts like Tame Impala, Phoebe Bridgers, and Zach Bryan in Surly’s backyard right before they start filling arenas and stadiums has been a definite highlight, even though we had to explain to some of Zach’s fans that Surly doesn’t make Busch Light Draft.”

Live music fan Karen Dotson of Maple Grove has her summer calendar filled with concerts and music festivals. She has tickets to both the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival and Basilica Block, as well as to the Pixies and Modest Mouse at Surly on June 20. “Live music outside in the summer—there’s probably not much better than that,” she says. “Being able to get out and be around people again and celebrate the variety of bands is so fun. The opportunity to see multiple artists in different venues is also really appealing to me.”

Dotson moved to Minnesota from Florida a few years ago with her husband, Eric, and says she appreciates the variety of music venues and genres across the Midwest. “We kind of dabble a lot, but it’s not uncommon for us to have tickets to six to eight concerts lined up. That’s what we enjoy spending our money on, and it’s just fun.”

For the multiday festivals, she likes the flexibility and cheaper cost of one-day passes. “I think people like that, too, especially if they can’t commit to a whole weekend in the middle of the summer.”

Photo by Matt Duboff

MAKING A MINNESOTA FESTIVAL

The new Minnesota Yacht Club Festival and the return of the Basilica Block Party come as a relief to some music fans who miss the Rock the Garden summer festival. The pandemic canceled the 2020 and 2021 iterations of this Minneapolis event, cohosted 13 times by Minnesota Public Radio and the Walker Art Center, but it was back in 2022 with sold-out performances by Sleater-Kinney and Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats. It felt like a return to normalcy for the outdoor concert community. A joint announcement by MPR president Duchesne Drew and Walker executive director Mary Ceruti in September 2022 announcing the end of the series was a shock.

C3 Presents’ Sweetwood said his company, which is owned by Live Nation Entertainment, wanted to fill that void and started planning the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival about two years ago with site visits and conversations with St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter’s office. “We talked to the mayor’s office, and they were extremely excited to welcome us and try to work with us and be a partner to put it on and make it happen. [Then we] announced the lineup and put it on sale and had a fantastic reaction to it. … And then, like every festival, you do get people from out of town, which is great for economic impact.”

Photo by Steve Loftness

Sweetwood’s team also booked the bands: a mix of national names and hometown favorites. It’s not a touring festival but is specific to one weekend in Minnesota, so scheduling can get complicated. “There’s means to the madness there,” Sweetwood says. “We wouldn’t go as far as to say the acts are heritage, but we also realize some have been around for two to three decades. I see it as, those are the bands that have been around long enough to garner a really big fan base. Red Hot Chili Peppers is an example where they’ve crossed those age boundaries [so] there’s a lot of 20-year-olds that want to see [them], but there are a lot of 50-year-olds that do too. It’s important to have the Durrys, Hippo Campus, and the Michiganders—all these up-and-coming acts as well.”

The band Durry was born in the basement of siblings Austin and Taryn Durry’s Burnsville home during the pandemic and went viral with a video for “Who’s Laughing Now” in September 2021. On a national tour now, the band returns to Minnesota in July for the two-day festival. “We don’t get to play locally very often,” Austin Durry says, “so whenever we do, it’s always a huge treat to see all of our local fans and get all our friends and family to the show. But a festival situation is much different. We’re excited to have an opportunity to play for new people who have never heard this before, and hopefully make new fans and make new friends and win some people over.”

Photo by Cori Miller

Durry counts many of the local acts as friends, too. “We were just looking at the bill before this, and I realized it’s, like, a lot of these bands are bands that we like, are friends with, and have known for years.” For example, Austin Durry says, the trumpet player with Hippo Campus has played with Durry before, Michigander and Gully Boys are longtime friends, and Austin’s first band was with Harbor & Home. “It’s like a big, weird reunion—half of it—while the other half is big crazy superstars coming in.” Taryn Durry says she is excited to be backstage with rock icons like Joan Jett and hopes to get introduced, even if it’s for just a few moments.

Beyond booking some of Minnesota’s favorite bands, Sweetwood says C3 Presents looked for ways to give Yacht Club a local angle, including in the name: “It’s literally on the Mississippi River,” he says. “We aim for a unique side to every festival we do, and we have these river boats and steam boats that are part of the festival grounds. You can buy a ticket that allows you to get into the VIP world but also allows you to get a cruise on a riverboat. I think a lot of people are missing some of the details and how special that is.” The 60-minute cruises launching from Harriet Island have different departure times but are included in that upper-tier ticket.

Sweetwood says he noticed multiple yacht clubs during site visits, noting, “We looked at a couple different names, but this was the one that sticks. It has got a fun name to it; it’s not just the Minnesota Pop Festival or something like that that’s very generic.”

Austin Durry says it’s about time the Midwest gets a marquee music festival of its own. “I think Minnesota is kind of a creative island. There’s all these really great acts coming out of Minnesota—like, tons of them. But Minnesota is not often a destination for artists. And so I hope that this will be a part of changing that and becoming the music destination spot.”

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