Martha's Vineyard gets ready for three-day music festival during Beach Road Weekend

If you’re looking for a last hurrah of the summer season, make plans to get down to Martha’s Vineyard the last weekend of August for three days of great music at Beach Road Weekend.

The festival runs from August 25 to August 27, boasting a stacked lineup. Headliners Bon Iver, Mumford and Sons and Leon Bridges will be joined by all-stars, including Patti Smith and Regina Spektor.

“All three headliners were bands that I chose,” Adam Epstein, founder of Beach Road Weekend, said. “When I first started the initial conversations about this festival, Mumford and Sons was the band I really wanted. Their sound [is] just perfect for this island…Leon Bridges was on our initial list of invitees in 2019. I'm a big Leon Bridges fan.”

Gates open at 11:00 a.m. Shows start at noon and end at 8:00 p.m. From there, local bands take over the two stages until the gates close at 9:30 p.m.

“Everybody starts somewhere,’ Epstein said. “Every pro musician here is important to us, but some of them need a break that others haven't gotten yet … and these are bands that I admire on the island and I think the spotlight can help.”

How did Beach Road Weekend on Martha's Vineyard start?

Epstein, a New York native with a house on the Vineyard, became invested in resurrecting the island’s once-vibrant music scene which had been destroyed over the years.

“The island has an incredibly rich music history that has been suppressed and hurt by the growth in the real estate market,” he said. “There has been a tremendous loss of live music venues on this island. [When I] first started coming here in the '80s, you could walk up and down Circuit Avenue and Oak Bluffs and there were multiple choices of places you could go and watch great music.”

The road to Beach Road Weekend began with the Martha’s Vineyard Concert Series as a way of putting the island back on the touring destination map for artists and agents who had lost sight of it.

“We started from Martha's Vineyard concert series in 2016 and started bringing shows and bands and artists to the island with the goal of building a music festival,” he said. “We knew we were going to have to re-educate the industry about the island because it [became] barren for touring …. We [had] to work really hard to build awareness of the island and its rich musical heritage, as well as its rich musical interest in the current world.”

Over the course of three years, Epstein and his staff worked on reinventing a music scene until he finally decided it was time to launch a festival, in 2019.

A year after the festival’s launch, the COVID-19 pandemic struck and the festival was put on hold until 2021 when a socially-distanced event was held, but it didn't return to its former glory until last year.

Now, the festival has become a source of great pride for Epstein as he’s worked to curate a safe and sound experience for everyone, even choosing to limit the capacity of the field — which can fit 18,000 — to 12,000 so crowds can move about.

“The best part of this festival is when I'm walking through that field, I see parents on blankets with their kids and they're just hanging out and not helicoptering their kids,” he said. “They feel safe. There's enough room, they're comfortable …. That's the environment of what Beach Road is. It's a family out there and the music is part of the culture, of the comfort and embrace you get when you come to Beach Road."

What goes into putting on a festival of this capacity?

Hosting a festival on an island is a huge undertaking. The stages, sound systems and other equipment have to be imported from other states and ferried to the island. Staff has to be housed on the island for equipment load out, which had Epstein overseeing 300 beds at hotels around the island for last year’s set-up.

“We bring in skilled labor who do this for a living …. I mean, hundreds of people come, and we need to house them all during the duration of the load,” he said.

How much are Beach Road Weekend festival tickets?

With the festival costing over $7.5 million, Epstein said ticket prices have to be on the “higher side” in order to be able to cover costs.

“We know it's expensive, and there's not a day that goes by [where] I don't wish we had a bigger field with the ability to have more people so I could lower ticket prices,” he said. “From the outside nobody understands that."

Tickets for the festival range from $400 to $3,000 plus fees for a three-day pass or from $150 to $875 plus fees for a single-day pass.

"All they see is the fact that I've got a $400 pass, which is high by the standards of most festivals, but most festivals aren't on an island and they don't have to spend $650,000 to house their staff or spend $2,000 or $3,000 in cargo just to get their equipment onto a ferry," he said. "So, all those things have to be baked into the price associated with the ticket.”

Getting to and from the festival

In terms of getting to Martha's Vineyard, if you’re going all three days, try and stay on the island. But if you’re only planning to splurge on a day pass, just make sure you make it for the ferry back.

Daily parking passes ($30 to $75 plus fees) and a three-day shuttle pass ($75 plus fees) are available for purchase. Shuttle pickups start at 10 a.m. and the last pickup is at 9 p.m. with service ending at 10 p.m. Shuttles will be picking up and dropping off festivalgoers at three locations, Oak Bluffs, Edgartown and the Martha’s Vineyard camping ground. Be sure to check the website for specifics of routes and parking.

Beach Road Weekend will take place from Friday, August 25 to Sunday, August 27 at Veterans Memorial Park on Martha’s Vineyard. Tickets can be purchased online.

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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Beach Road Weekend takes over Martha's Vineyard for fifth year