Last weekend’s cozy music festival in northern Michigan featured regional bands and solo artists playing on two stages amid a laid-back vibe. A recap and photo gallery.
Relaxed, Family-Friendly Vibe: Dunesville Music Festival near Interlochen. (Photo/Nicole Hollinsky)
EDITOR’S NOTE: Nicole Hollinsky and Nathan Grocholski, summer interns for the Michigan Music Alliance, attended their first Dunesville Music Festival near Interlochen last weekend. Here are their daily diaries and impressions of the northern Michigan festival, and scroll down for a photo gallery by Hollinsky.
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“NOBODY IS OUT OF PLACE” (By Nicole Hollinsky)
If you love the outdoors, tie-dye, weed, hippie energy, crafting and genres like folk, funk, rock and bluegrass, Dunesville has a place for you.
Deep into the woods down a few dirt roads in Interlochen, this festival will have you unplugged, relaxed and feeling the boho vibes. Smiling festivalgoers in rainbow clothes and flowers in their hair are quick to help each other, especially the friendly volunteer staff, who ride around on golf carts taking attendees to and fro throughout the festival, stopping to talk to people on their way.
Nobody gets weird looks there, no matter how out-there you dress, how you dance, if you smoke or not, or if you drink or not, nobody is out of place.
Night Music: Libby DeCamp on the main stage. (Photo/Nicole Hollinsky)
Though weed seems to be a common theme, the festival remains family-friendly with a family camping area and a kids’ tent with activities, along with three food trucks featuring fantastic food such as street tacos and grilled cheese (though it might get a bit pricey to eat there for every meal).
With workshops, vendors and two stages (the main stage and Shaker Stage), the festival creates its own little world on the large plot of land surrounded by woods.
Day One started in chill fashion, reflecting a laid-back sunny summer day. The party really started after 9 p.m. with awesome music, uplifting energy, dancing, mingling, fun. Ypsilanti’s Sabbatical Bob proved to be Friday night’s highlight exuding funky, energetic music and incredible vocals, and keeping the audience enthralled for the entire set.
On Saturday morning, we woke up to a torrential downpour, an awful experience if you were in a tent like myself and my boyfriend. Although I was bothered by the rain since we had to put off setting up our booth for a few hours, a few of the hippie festivalgoers and vendors could be seen walking through the rain without a care, at times with arms outstretched and a smile.
The main stage was shut down for a few hours because of the rain, and all the acts were moved to the Shaker Stage, which is under a large canopy. Once the rain let up around 1 p.m., the sun came out in full force, and the festival reverted to a booming place once again.
By 9 p.m., the smaller, more intimate Shaker Stage tent was surrounded by a haze of smoke, with people dancing to some great rock guitar from Ann Arbor’s Act Casual with Ypsilanti’s Stormy Chromer on the main stage. The party didn’t end until around 2 or 3 a.m.
Sunday was warm, with a laid-back, lazy feel to the festival’s final day. On the main stage at 11 a.m., The Whiskey Charmers from Detroit unfurled an easygoing, country sound for a relaxed start to the day.
“SMALL BUT WELCOMING” (By Nathan Grocholski)
Coming into this festival for the first time, I was not sure what to expect.
Prior to joining the Michigan Music Alliance, I had never heard of this festival before, so this was a brand new experience for me. I was pretty familiar with the location of it being so close to Interlochen, where I had worked for three summers at the arts camp, but other than that, this would be a completely different experience than anything I had ever participated in before.
Art of the Visual Variety: Painters at Dunesville on Saturday. (Photo/Nicole Hollinsky)
The overall atmosphere of the festival was small, but welcoming.
Everyone we encountered was friendly and loved to chat. Most of the festivalgoers that I ran into had been to several past Dunesvilles and were eager to share their experiences with us. Even some of the touring musicians stuck around to support the other acts and come say hello to the attendees of the events.
While there were probably at least a couple hundred or more people on hand, it all felt very close-knit and more open, never overcrowded. While the musicians performed, some attendees sat and observed, children scampered about and played, and he mood was very relaxed as opposed to rock stadium crowds and other large events, where the energy is high-paced.
Numerous activities accompanied the live music, with a yoga and meditation tent, the Harmony 101 sessions, and the vendor tents in which small businesses and non-profit organizations sold merchandise or shared information about themselves, ranging from solar power to cannabis.
The crowd was, for the most part, pretty diverse in these regards. Even the musical acts had a variety of different genres, some leaning toward folk, bluegrass and country, and others toward hard rock, funk, jazz and more.
There were times, especially on Saturday, in which there would be two acts playing at the same time on the two stage, and one band overpowered the other. Overall, a minor issue that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the festival overall.
In a way, I feel Dunesville captures the spirit of what Woodstock must have been like, only on a smaller scale. And that has me looking forward to what Dunesville has to offer come 2022.
PHOTO GALLERY: Dunesville 2021 by Nicole Hollinsky
