Twenty-three years ago in a field out in central Illinois, over a thousand people gathered to watch 20 bands play for two days at the first-ever Summer Camp Music Festival. Fast-forward a couple of decades, and Summer Camp has become a flagship festival of the Midwest spring/summer calendar. From those humble beginnings, hosts moe., Umphrey’s McGee, and Jay Goldberg Entertainment & Events have grown Summer Camp to welcome over 20,000 attendees a year to watch more than 150 artists play across eight stages spread throughout Chillicothe’s Three Sisters Park.
With the festival’s sterling reputation built over nearly a quarter of a century, many were shocked by last year’s announcement that after Summer Camp 2023, the festival as fans have come to know it would take a hiatus and return as a “redefined camping & music experience.” The last Summer Camp for the foreseeable future was a Memorial Day Weekend blowout to remember, with headliners Willie Nelson & Family, Goose, Excision, and collaborative performances from moe. and Umphrey’s McGee. But after that jubilation came a state of uncertainty. What would become of our beloved Summer Camp Music Festival?
Enter Solshine: A Music & Arts Reverie. Organizers revealed the new name in late 2023, promising to keep the spirit of Summer Camp alive while bringing the mission of the festival’s Soulshine Tent—headquarters of the Make A Difference program and a place for workshops, seminars, and an art gallery—to the forefront of the experience. When the festival rolled out its inaugural lineup a couple weeks later, the overwhelming feeling among Summer Camp alums (a.k.a. SCampers) was that organizers had, indeed, kept the spirit going. Here was a Memorial Day Weekend camping event at Three Sisters with headliners moe. and Umphrey’s McGee and a fully loaded lineup blending jam, EDM, bluegrass, and beyond. Solshine had Summer Camp vets STS9, Goose, Big Gigantic, and The Disco Biscuits alongside newcomers The String Cheese Incident, John Summit, and deadmau5. Though the name at the top of the bill said something different, this still looked a lot like Summer Camp.
Live For Live Music caught up with Summer Camp/Solshine founder Ian Goldberg to ask him the question that’s been on everyone’s mind: how is Solshine different from Summer Camp?
“Boy, that’s a loaded question…There are several ways in which it’s different,” Goldberg expounded. “The principle [way] is basically the idea of trying to add what I’ve been referring to as intention into not only our part of the festival—which is the creation, the promotion, the production, that has since the beginning had intention within it—now we’re trying to bring that intentionality into the experience of the festivalgoer.”
The root of Goldberg’s answer goes back way before Summer Camp, before Coachella, Bonnaroo, and most of the major festivals still standing today. In 1992, as a college sophomore, Goldberg attended the farewell tour by Jane’s Addiction, which the band dubbed Lollapalooza. Between sets by Red Hot Chili Peppers, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, and many other acts now considered cultural guideposts, Goldberg was struck by what he saw beyond the stage: tents and booths set up to spread awareness on U.S. consumption of foreign oil, social justice issues, and what was happening in the rainforest.
“That was largely an inspiration for me as I was in college figuring out what I wanted to do,” Goldberg recalled. “Because I was inspired by the fact that I could do something I love—which was music and producing music—but it also could potentially make a difference in the world and encourage people to act in [a] socially responsible way to make the world a better place. And all of that has been represented in our Soulshine programs that have been at Summer Camp for all of the different years. I’ve always been looking for a way to make that a bigger part of the festival.”
Another primary factor that led to the Summer Camp/Solshine rebrand was the reality of producing a festival post-pandemic. New supply chain and labor issues exacerbated the existing difficulties of staging a festival of Summer Camp’s size in the middle of a small town in central Illinois. For the sake of his team’s sanity, Goldberg recognized it was time to reel things in a bit.
“That left me with a little bit of a perplexing situation: How do you cut out some fairly significant parts of the festival and [not] have people showing up going, ‘What the hell. I’ve been coming for a decade, and this is the way it’s always been. And now it’s changing,’” Goldberg imitated.
The solution that addressed both issues of furthering a commitment to intentionality and alerting folks that the festival would look a little different was to change the name entirely. As Goldberg explained, rather than doing what he called “negative messaging” and spending all year leading up to the festival warning people of impending changes, he opted to emphasize these developments in a positive light.
“So as we like to say, it’s gonna be everything you loved about Summer Camp but just with some changes,” Goldberg said.
While searching for a new name for the festival, Ian stumbled upon the word “reverie,” which means “a state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts; a daydream.” And for Goldberg and the tens of thousands of people who have attended, played, or worked Summer Camp, it is a lot like a daydream—a fleeting blissful fantasy.
“This is the kind of daydream that isn’t just pointless,” Goldberg observed. “It’s the kind of daydream that helps you set intentions for what you wanna do with your life, what you wanna be achieving, and what’s important to you. That to me is what I want our event to represent for people.”
Between the emphasis on intentionality, which has been the focal point of the Soulshine Tent for 20+ years, and the reverie discussion, Goldberg had his new name, Solshine: A Music & Arts Reverie. Ian had his mission, he had his name, and he had his lineup. But how would the fans react?
“One of my favorite moments of this cycle of the festival so far was when we announced our lineup,” Goldberg recalled. “Everyone kept saying, ‘Okay, so it’s Summer Camp with a different name.’ And I was like, ‘Yes, exactly!’ That’s the reaction. I want people to see the music and go, ‘Hey, all of the music that we’ve come to love about Summer Camp is all gonna be the same.’”
While the music and the message will stay largely the same, there will be some physical changes at Solshine. Chief among them, there will be fewer stages this year, with the Sunshine Stage not returning in 2024. In the absence of that stage, the festival’s other main stage—the Moonshine amphitheater stage—will now host music until 4 a.m. The beloved Campfire Stage will also see an upgrade, moving to a new location to accommodate a bigger stage and a bigger campfire.
“I feel that the campfire setting, in general, builds community,” Goldberg said. “The campfire is where everyone goes to sit around and tell stories and hang out. And so we’re elevating that element of it.”
Though it may seem paradoxical, Solshine will also no longer host the Soulshine Tent. Instead, the mission of the gathering place that gave Solshine its purpose will be spread throughout the festival. In its place, the Soulpatch garden—a permanent garden that has grown to become a hub for the festival’s sustainability community—will become the epicenter for things like the Make A Difference program. Other familiar elements like the art gallery will be moving elsewhere in the festival, with Goldberg teasing other changes that he isn’t ready to reveal yet.
“We are undyingly grateful to our community that has built that support that has allowed [Summer Camp to exist independently for 23 years],” Goldberg said. “And we look forward to them embracing this new concept and helping us to continue to grow it. Because as a festival, we’re no longer a kid. We’re no longer a teenager. We’re adults now.”
Though Ian Goldberg and his team have worked to meticulously map out the changes for Summer Camp to become Solshine, he readily admits that the choice is up to the festival community whether or not to accept these transitions. For nearly a quarter of a century, Goldberg has trusted that community to come back year after year to grow alongside the festival. Now, there are longtime SCampers who have begun bringing their children to the festival, further expanding the community. And to Goldberg, the sense of childlike wonder—whether from an actual child or an adult who gets to feel like a kid for a weekend—is paramount to what this festival is all about.
“Part of being an adult for me personally is maintaining a connection to my child-like behaviors,” Goldberg explained. “There are probably a lot of people who would look at me and say, ‘He’s a little boy. He acts like a little kid.’ And I love that. I think it’s great, and I think more people need to remember that that’s a part of how we stay young. Part of how we stay alive and how we continue to enjoy our lives is to embrace that part of us that is joyful, that has fun at festivals, and say, ‘Hey, this should be a part of my everyday life.’ Of course, we’re all gonna have stress. I have miserable days. But at the end of the day, we only get a limited amount of time on this Earth, and we all need to figure out how to continue to enjoy it and to find joy in the little things of life.”
Finally, there was one last burning question for Ian Goldberg: If a Summer Camp attendee is known as a “SCamper,” what do you call someone who goes to Solshine?
“That’s for the community to decide. And we can’t wait to figure it out.”
Tickets to the inaugural Solshine: A Music & Arts Reverie are on sale now. Check out the phase two lineup below.
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The post A Summer Camp By Any Other Name: Ian Goldberg Talks Festival’s Transition To Solshine [Interview] appeared first on L4LM.
