Syracuse native Martin Sexton is set to play a live concert at New York’s oldest operating drive-in, Fingerlakes Drive-In in Auburn. Announced earlier this week by Creative Concerts and Fingerlakes Drive-In, the concert will take place September 19 at 6PM.
With social distancing guidelines in place, each car pass sold will be for standard passenger vehicles only. There has been a limit of four concertgoers per vehicle allowed.
Martin Sexton got his start serenading the streets and subways of Boston during the early 90’s. Not only have fans heard his explosive voice in famous venues across the world but also many of his songs have been featured in spotlight TV shows such as Scrubs and Parenthood to name a few.
The American Singer-Songwriter has produced nine studio albums including his most current release “Mixtape of the Open Road.” After a successful tour, a decision was made to keep going with more performances beginning with the Fingerlakes Drive-In.
His authentic style of artistry has Billboard magazine calling him “The real thing, people.” Furthermore Rollingstone noted Sexton has “Outstanding taste in songwriting as well as a soul-marinated voice.”
Tickets to the live event are on sale now here. NYS Music is running a contest for one car pass to Martin Sexton on the 19th, and Allman Betts Band on Friday the 18th. For more info, enter on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!
Each Sunday evening from 7-9pm on 102.7 FM, you’ll find EQXposure on WEQX, featuring two hours of local music from up and coming artists. Tune into WEQX.com this Sunday night to hear music from Sydney Worthley, The Sweats, and many more!
WEQX has long been the preeminent independent station in the Capital Region of New York, broadcasting from Southern VT to a ever-expanding listening audience. NYS Music brings you a preview of artists to discover each week, just a taste of the talent waiting to be discovered by fans like you.
From the Finger Lakes who just released their full-length debut album Caught in a Wave recorded at Pyramid Sound Recording Studios in Ithaca. You can pick up the album for contributions on BandCamp. Singer Travis Durfee says they hope to sell a few digital copies to make up what they’ve lost this year in live shows and that they are already working on material for a new album. Check out their quaratine videos on Facebook.
In February, Worthley went to Nada Recording Studio in Montgomery, NY to record five new songs in five days and you can hear them all on the new album Rose Colored Glasses. Worthley is a notable advocate for mental health awareness, having performed in Saugerties at the annual Hope Rocks Festival.
From August 26-27, 2005, Camp Bisco 4 was held in Van Etten, NY at the Skyetop Festival Grounds, marking the first time the festival was not held in Pennsylvania. The festival grew this year, and would return even stronger in 2007 at Hunter Mountain before firmly establishing their presence in Mariaville, NY from 2008-2013.
Camp Bisco IV lineup
This weekend in particular held additional significance for the Philadelphia-based hosts of Camp Bisco, the Disco Biscuits. Original drummer Sam Altman would be leaving the band after this weekend to pursue a medical degree. With the fate of the band, and festival in question, Camp Bisco IV: The Trance-Formation was held to send Sammy out on a high note. The band would later welcome current drummer Allen Aucoin behind the kit at shows starting that fall.
Map of the festival grounds
Ahead of Camp Bisco IV, Meat Camp Productions (now MCP Presents) took over management of Camp Bisco and, being fans, the band felt the festival would be in good hands. MCP sought to make Camp Bisco a larger event by moving to Van Etten, and drew a reported 4,400 attendees, the largest Camp Bisco at that time.
Camp Bisco IV offered two sets of the Disco Biscuits each night, as well as 2005 up-and-coming bands Umphrey’s McGee, The New Deal, Conspirator, John Brown’s Body, The Benevento Russo Duo, Brothers Past, Big in Japan, and DJ’s Christian Bruna, Omen and D.R.O. (Final Phaze NYC), DJ Mauricio a.k.a. Fractalien (Portland), and Orchard Lounge (Chicago). Many acts can be seen on the Camp Bisco IV official DVD, which is incredibly still in stock.
Friday night would feature regular Camp Bisco acts including Brothers Past, Orchard Lounge and The New Deal. The Disco Biscuits would kick things off with “Astronaut” -> “Shem-Rah Boo” -> “Astronaut,” the start of over 100 minutes of non-stop playing in their first set of the weekend.
Day 2 of Camp Bisco IV featured even more music, as well as overcast skies that would lead to rain later that night. Lynch, featuring Jim Loughlin of moe., John Brown’s Body from nearby Ithaca, the Benevento Russo Duo, two sets of Chicago firebrand Umphrey’s McGee, and following two sets of Disco Biscuits, the trance-heavy sounds of Simon Posford projects Hallucinogen and Younger Brother.
Big in JapanThe Benevento Russo DuoLynchUmphrey’s McGee
Camp Bisco IV boasted not only a family-friendly environment, with a family camping area and child play-park (Mulberry’s Dreamland) as well as the first time Color War was a featured activity during the day. The event pitted four teams of festival attendees (Orange, Green, Yellow, Purple) in friendly competition, reminiscent of summer camp ‘color wars’ of the past. Activities included volleyball, dodgeball, capture the flag, a freestyle competition and much more. The Orange team was victorious in the first event, now a staple of Camp Bisco, held at Montage Mountain in Scranton, PA since 2015.
Color War schedule of events, as created by Yancy Davis
The emotional build up of the weekend would take place late in the Disco Biscuits’ second set on Saturday, following “Floes.” Jon “The Barber” Gutwillig noted to the audience that there were some in attendance that night who were at the first Disco Biscuits show, saying, “So we feel like we have a lot of the old, a lot of the new, and everybody came together up here in the mountains for a very, very special night. The Professor, his last gig on the drums. Let’s hear it for Sammy.”
With that, the crowd roared with appreciation as the band played “A Song for Sammy,” referencing songs he wrote, inviting him back to perform whenever he wanted, tying an emotional bow on the weekend.
Appropriately, the band returned to the stage to perform “Spectacle,” with lyrics that spoke to the closing of one chapter of Disco Biscuits and Camp Bisco lore:
Asleep in the day, awake in the night, only so many roads to take your life.
The problem you see, you can’t mess with time, and take a different road you’d try.
“Spectacle”
Special thanks to Camp Bisco Color War HQ for photos of the first year’s events.
In 2020, it is nearly impossible to imagine 600,000 people gathering anywhere, but especially in the rural town of Watkins Glen for Summer Jam ’73. For live music enthusiasts, summer is the best time of the year. The warmest months typically mean road trips with friends to exotic cities like Hartford, Connecticut; Bangor, Maine; and Camden, New Jersey. It means forgetting your tent stakes and having to make new friends by begging for extras at music festivals. Summer is when the sun stays up the latest, the air smells the dankest, and live music infuses with nature in the most powerful ways.
As many festival professionals, seasoned Shakedowners, and road warriors are isolated in their hometowns waiting for social ‘undistancing’ to begin, we take a trip back in time to July 1973 — to Summer Jam at Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway. Thanks to Dave Smith’s Historic Essay, and many other stories written by attendees of the mega-event, we’ve put together a list of 1973 Flashbacks from that iconic yet blurry weekend.
UPSTATE NEW YORK’S LARGEST CITY
With 600,000 people crammed onto 95 acres, Watkins Glen became one of the most densely populated areas on Earth! It is estimated that 1 in every 400 Americans trekked to the event, many being young adults from the Northeast.
JAM BEFORE THE MUSIC
New York State Police estimated 20 miles of roadblocks (with over 50 miles of traffic) by 4am Saturday morning — 8 hours before the first band was set to take the stage. Traffic was so backed up many guests abandoned their cars and walked tens of miles to get in. On Wednesday night, 48 hours before the actual event, police estimated roughly 50,000 new guests in a town of 3,500. By Thursday, that figure doubled and by Friday night, Watkins Glen was a quarter-million strong. New York State Troopers recalled Woodstock and the nightmarish traffic problems. This was worse.
ICONIC MUD OF NEW YORK MEGAFESTS
Tents, tarps, flip-flops, beer cans, strollers, coolers, empty peanut butter jars, and fancy sun hats were among the items caked into the mud long after the event was over. Much like New York’s iconic music festival four years earlier, Woodstock, Summer Jam ’73 had its fair share of torrential rain and ass-shaking hippies to create an Upstate NY mud bath for the ages.
IS THIS STILL SOUNDCHECK?
The Band and the Allman Brothers Band both put on longer (and more rocking) soundchecks than usual to warm up the early attendees, but The Grateful Dead put on a two-set pre-show for the ages. Bassist Phil Lesh did his best to remind the crowd, “This is still just a test,” as they introduced Set II, but happily, no one was buying it. “This whole thing is a fraud, we’re really clever androids,” Lesh announced before breaking into a legendary “Bird Song.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7L1zD4Xh-Q
TRANQUIL(IZERS) AND SERENE
How do you take the beauty of the Finger Lakes Region and make it even more spectacular? Drugs. Jamaican grass, speed, LSD, magic mushrooms, mescaline, cocaine, and a suspicious clown peddling Ex-Lax were a few of the items found at the mind-altering buffet that weekend. Dealers made so much money selling everything from animal tranquilizers to bags of oregano, that some of them rented U-Haul storage trailers just to leave behind come Sunday morning.
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
With over half a million young adults gathered from all parts of the country, there was almost zero violence (one stabbing reported). A 74-year old Watkins Glen native, George Rehety, reported from his lawn chair, “You know, these are nice kids. I haven’t seen one fight.” An eight-year-old from nearby Corning, NY had this stellar recap: “Music was good, but I couldn’t understand the words. What was that funny smell? The food that I tasted was really yummy.”
LOCAL LAW KEPT IT COOL
600,000 drunk and stoned young people in blazing heat — what could go wrong? The sheriff of Schuyler Country was Maurice Dean of Watkins Glen. As one of the youngest sheriffs in the Empire State, his age helped him understand the prevalent generation that was “invading” his town. When comparing the Summer Jam crowd to the Can-Am crowd just one week earlier, a mounted cop said, “I’d rather deal with these kids than the race crowd any day. I’ve never been called ‘Sir’ so many times in my life.”
BUZZED AND CONFUSED
The drug of choice for the weekend was Jack Daniels and Canadian Club whiskey. Pull tab beer cans like “Genny” went for 99 cents a six-pack, but only if you were prepared. The local beer suppliers were fresh out. “And I’d filled the place with beer, up to the ceiling,” Jack Mafianey, the Beverage Baron himself, said. “This is ten times bigger than the Grand Prix.” With the biggest party on Earth happening in a tiny town, beer disappeared. According to Dave Smith’s record, concert beer initially went for $.75 a can and when all the ice melted, warm beer cost a quarter.
GO CHASING WATERFALLS
Nude swimmers were surfacing all over the beautiful Finger Lakes Region. At the end of Main Street, Chequaqua Falls saw its fair share of bare butts, and Aunt Sarah’s Falls in Montour Falls became a communal bathtub by the Sunday morning. Locals laughed at the sight of concertgoers emerged in the local ponds off County Route 16 — a favorite for Watkins Glen snapping turtles that loved to chomp anything that dangled past them. One local couple looked outside their window to see a trio of young women spraying each other down with a hose. Not the usual Saturday night ritual in Watkins Glen.
WILL WAIT FOR FOOD
Forget about fast food in rural Finger Lakes towns back in 1973. Jim Teemley’s Meat Market and Deli was the next best thing for the dry-mouthed hippies that descended on the community. Teemley’s wife recalled, “It was as orderly as a school cafeteria, the kids were very polite and mannerly, and there were no incidents of potato chip bags or candy being stolen.” On Route 414, the Simpson’s store ran out of food at a record pace, and although the Raceway was prepared for 150,000, they didn’t properly supply for four times that amount. Luckily, with free entry, the extra $10 fans brought for the now free concert entry was more than enough to acquire sustenance.
While the world may never see another Summer Jam ’73, music festivals will return. The sweet sound of live music will fill the air. You and your friends will make unforgettable memories. And concertgoers will wake up on another hazy Monday morning with mud in their Birkenstocks. 2020 may prevent us from partying with 600,000 like-minded people, but it won’t stop us from discovering the wonders of nature and finding community through the chaos.
“Time To Drive-In” will offer fans the opportunity to safely enjoy a true live music event while following social distancing guidelines. A car pass provides a parking space for a standard passenger vehicle and entry for a maximum of four people per vehicle. Concertgoers will be able to enjoy two full sets, each night, with full concert production, in a socially distant manner.
Fingerlakes Drive-In is a classic drive-in that opened on July 15, 1947, and is the oldest operating Drive-In theatre in New York State. Tickets are now on sale at through Creative Concerts.
On the heels of a successful Live at the Drive in Lockport this past June, Aqueous and Buffalo Iron Works have announced two evenings of live performances at Silver Lake Twin Drive In in Perry, NY. The shows on August 7 & 8 will feature a socially distanced set up for cars, providing respite for live music fans in Western New York.
Gates will open at 3:30 each day and Aqueous will be live, on stage, in front of screen one at 4:30. Tickets will go on sale Thursday, July 16th at 10am. Ticketing details are as follows:
General Admission Car Passes: 2 Car Pass: $80, 3 Car Pass: $120, 4 Car Pass: $160, 5 Car Pass: $200, 6 Car Pass: $240.
VIP Admission Car Passes – Included Ticket to Show and Limited Edition Poster: 2 Car Pass: $160, 3 Car Pass: $240, 4 Car Pass: $320, 5 Car Pass: $400, 6 Car Pass: $480.
From the successful Live at the Drive held in Lockport this past June
Each “Car Pass” ticket is priced for a vehicle with the stated number occupants. All ticket purchases will be internet pre-sale only until the day of the event. If your vehicle has extra seats available, you are allowed to bring additional people to fill the vehicle and they can pay for their individual ticket at the gate on the day of the show. Extra people cannot exceed the car’s capacity and security will be ensuring this at the door. Please be respectful for the benefit of all parties.
All parking is designated by Drive-In Security. VIP parking will be in the first 2 rows of the Drive-In theatre. General Admission vehicle parking will be on a first-come-first-park basis behind the first 2 rows. To help with the obstruction of guests’ view, vans, trucks, and SUVs will be asked to park on one side of the snack bar or in the last three rows of the theater.
To comply with social distancing guidelines, all vehicles must park at least 6 feet away from neighboring vehicles. Once parked, do not move your vehicle. If you choose to leave in your vehicle, you will not be permitted to re-enter the theatre. Management has final authority over where you may park.
Patrons are asked to remain in or near their vehicles except for trips to the bathroom, snack bar (limited to 10 people a time), Charcoal Corral restaurant, dog walks and smoking in designated areas. All guests must wear face masks whenever they are in a public area within 6 feet of other guests until further notice.
Perry, NY is located about 1 hour ESE of Buffalo and 1 hour SW of Rochester. Silver Lake Twin Drive-In is located at 7037 Chapman Ave in Perry, and produces weekend film features on two outdoor screens with a casual restaurant, mini-golf & more on-site.
Aqueous recently released a stream of Live at the Drive in its entirety on their Facebook page. Watch below for a taste of socially distanced live concerts at its best.
Phish frontman Trey Anastasio will perform 10 shows from late May into early June across the Northeast and into the Midwest. Trey Anastasio Band will headline nine of the dates, and will then share the bill with Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit at Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands PAC in Canandaigua. Tickets are on sale Friday, February 21 at Trey.com/tour.
Trey recently performed at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester in January, and will perform at Tanglewood in June with the Boston Pops.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS8ajag-DJ8
Trey Anastasio Band Summer Tour
May 22 – MECU Pavilion – Baltimore, MD
May 23 – Stone Pony Summerstage – Asbury Park, NJ
May 24 – Stone Pony Summerstage – Asbury Park, NJ
May 26 – The Strand – Providence, RI
May 28 – Thompson’s Point – Portland, ME
May 29 – Mountain Jam – Bethel, NY
May 30 – Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands PAC – Canandaigua, NY*
June 2 – Royal Oak Music Theatre – Royal Oak, MI
June 5 – Stage AE – Pittsburgh, PA
June 6 – Jacob’s Pavilion at Nautica – Cleveland, OH
With each new year comes the promise of new music, and this year is also the start of a new decade. To usher in the new era, musician Jake Bellissimo has collaborated with legendary composer Gerald Busby on a new song, “The Budding of The Rose.” The song is from Bellissimo’s new album The Motion That We Make, which is set to release later this month.
Formerly of Rochester, NY, Bellissimo has been living in Berlin, Germany. The song is a cross-Atlantic effort with Bellissimo providing lyrics, and Busby setting them to melody and composing music for viola from his home at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City. The resulting song is sublime. The ardent love song traipses through a sonic garden of delight. It’s contemporary, yet timeless and classic.
Busby has resided at the Chelsea since 1977, when his mentor Virgil Thompson procured him a room. A child prodigy, he was playing with the symphony by the age of 15. He started composing later in life, and debuted professionally when he wrote the score of Runes for choreographer Paul Taylor’s dance company. He’s best known for writing the music for Robert Altman’s acclaimed movie 3 Women.
Bellissimo, in addition to being a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, runs the label Drunk With Love Records. The Motion That We Make is a contemplation on motion, mortality, and coincidences. It is a reflection on the places they’ve been and the people they’ve loved, and those they’ve lost. Watch for the release on January 24 on Drunk With Love Records.
