Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.org Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Scott Knudson.

In this final episode by Producer Andrew Dziengel, he brings us behind the scenes with those who make possible Mississippi Music at the Bemidji Waterfront.

[Music] In 2015, a group of volunteers that were associated with the Bemidji Downtown Alliance met over a period of months to create a summer concert series and organize a summer weekly Wednesday night concert series at the lake.

So we got together with Northwest Minnesota Foundation and a few others of us who were interested and started to meet and just kind of get it together as to what we're going to do and we decided on having concerts on a Wednesday night because not much goes on on a Wednesday night in Bemidji down at the waterfront, which is a fabulous venue.

When we created the concert series we wanted to make sure that it was a family-friendly concert series and so it's very relaxed.

We have a beer garden that we set up, people bring their own chairs, they have a couple food vendors, people pull up their boats.

We get anywhere between a dozen to 40 boats pulled up earlier on in the evening and, you know, just play music, have fun.

It's not a very long evening, so to speak, of music.

It starts at 6:00 and we wrap up at 8.

So people can come down listen to music for 2 hours and be home and in bed by 9 if they need to.

It's a family-friendly event.

We've noticed through the years that kids are really enjoying it and so are their parents.

My name is Charlie Pulkrabek.

I had a job at the time that a good part of it was paying attention to Minnesota music and covering Minnesota music.

There was almost exactly the same type of structure series going down in Park Rapids on Thursdays.

What they were bringing in down there, a lot of the acts were acts that I might have considered worthwhile to travel to the Twin Cities to see.

So I kind of made it my job to get over there every Thursday evening.

Just over time I noticed that there were people there from every walk of life in the area.

It seemed like a great community event as well as a presentation of good live music.

And I was also on the board of the Bemidji Downtown Alliance representing my same job at the time and it started to bubble that maybe we could get something like that going in Bemidji.

And so we met and brought a few people on board.

Nancy Viskocil at the Northwest Minnesota Foundation, who left our board this year, she was instrumental in bringing that together.

We probably would have gotten there but in terms of being in the room and planning and defining our mission and all those things she was very versed at going through that process and really was able to guide us through that in record time compared to what the rest of us could have done on our own.

So right now I believe on the board I think we have six board members.

Kristi Miller right now is our president.

I'm Kristi Miller and we are talking about Mississippi Music.

Nate Matthews, city manager, was one of the originators and he talked about what they did in St Cloud and how fun it was.

Nate Matthews came in as city manager and was immediately involved.

And he's down there helping us load the equipment out at the end of the night, he's putting elbow grease behind it.

I think it's kind of therapy for him for a guy that probably spends a lot of his days in meetings and stuff.

He was, you know, pretty instrumental in, you know, getting the city involved and getting through city council and stuff like that.

He tried to be a little hands off so he wasn't too partial but I mean having the city manager on our board and a very active volunteer in helping getting stuff set up night after night.

My name is Nate Matthews and what we're talking about today is Mississippi Music, how we started the organization and a little bit about what we do as an organization.

Tonight's concert with Known Only Locally is specially sponsored by Security Bank USA.

We got Charlie Pulkrabek who does the booking.

He's a musical genius and knows a lot more about bands in the state and across the nation than most of us do.

Charlie has been with us from the beginning and Charlie is a music aficionado.

He knows a lot about the music scene in Minnesota.

And he's got such great taste in music.

We really rely on him to pull in these bands that have shown to be extremely successful in drawing people in and entertaining people.

We just couldn't do it without him.

He gets around and knows what's there and knows what's out there.

We have Peggy from KAXE.

Peggy Stevens is really good at estimating numbers of people.

She's been estimating that we have over a thousand people there on any given Wednesday.

She's been on from the beginning and she's helping out to set up and things like that.

We got Megan from Bemidji Brew that helps facilitate having the beverages there every week.

We got Nate Matthews in there, we got myself, we also have Dave who's retired and he works at KAXE, also, who's also on the board and he helps the night of setting things up and getting fencing and stuff all that up and together.

Another part of it is the interaction between our board.

We're just such a cohesive board.

It's fun to work with them and it's fun to meet with them and we know we got a good thing going.

We all take pride in that and ensure that it continues forward.

It's nice we can get up and running pretty quickly.

It's pretty easy to do with the people that we have and we have some other people that volunteer to help out.

I mean it takes about a dozen people I guess in all to have the event each night.

We designed this to be as easy to do as possible and so we worked with the local business community to build a movable trailer stage.

You know what that was again Nancy's idea to take an old shipping crate, take it out to LaValley and LaValley cut one of the walls out of it and then made a hydraulic stage that folds out.

And the thing that's neat about that trailer is everything we need to put on that concert we can store inside that trailer, whether that's the beer garden materials or banners that we hang off the trailer itself.

That trailer gets pulled in usually after lunch or so on Wednesday.

Some of our team members all then meet at the site at 3 and set up the beer garden, get the garbage cans out, communicate with our food vendors, help Mike out, do a little trash pickup, kind of get things ready for the show.

Mike Huerbin will get to the Waterfront 2:30, 3:00ish.

He's been doing sound for quite a few years around this area.

He's been consistent every week doing the sound and doing a great job at it.

He's invaluable to us.

He's essentially doing it pro bono, there is cost involved for him, so we're probably just covering that and maybe a little more or a little less depending on what equipment he needs.

I'm Mike Huerbin, I'm the sound guy for the Mississippi Music Festival.

I do the sound for the Park Rapids Second Street Stage.

For my setup I basically show up around 2:00 down at the waterfront and we get there with our trailer full of equipment and unload everything.

For Mike there's a decent amount more setup with the sound equipment.

And we're typically ready by about 4:30 or so for when the musicians show up.

Then we get them sound checked and if everything goes well by 5:30 we're pretty much ready to go.

We just play a little bit of set break music and wait for 6:00 to come around.

And then we all come back down at 6:00 and enjoy the night and pay the band and then tear things down and put everything back in the stage and then the stage gets hauled away.

It's been great.

It's really a nice stage.

It's got an awning that folds out and everything folds back up and we, you know, put it away for the week and bring it back out for the next week.

If we can get 10 concerts out of a summer we're good.

This year, 2022, it's been eight concerts and the year before was seven and then we missed a year because of covid in 2020.

Our organization, in creating the concert series, wanted to do something that would promote and support our beautiful downtown.

Because of that, when we picked the location for the concert series, we wanted to be downtown and there's no better place than right on the waterfront.

Back in the '80s there was a thing called The Upper Mississippi River Revival and Larry Long, from the Cities, was instrumental in getting things going for cleaning up the river, the Mississippi River, and we had concerts down in that same area and it just was perfect.

Just because of that beautiful, you know, piece of property right down there.

It's water level.

You know, it's just a beautiful site.

It's right by Paul Bunyan.

Long views across the lake, and as the sun sets, you know, and lights up the far shoreline.

Well, we just thought, yeah let's do it there.

We chose Wednesday for a couple reasons.

We know that resort people will come in at the beginning of the week and they can get settled and then midweek maybe somebody wants to come to town and we're seeing some of that.

Obviously most of the folks who are there are locals.

I know people are coming in on boats from Ruttgers, for instance, and some of the other resorts around Lake Bemidji and then some of the residents from on Bemidji, too, will come in.

You know I had a conversation with a couple from Walker area that when they found out about our concert series they looked up some of the artists and some of them they're from Minneapolis and they've heard them before and so they sought us out.

People are coming from all over for this as well, not just the local community, but we're getting a draw from the Leech Lake and the Walker area, from the resorts and some of those seasonal residents.

We also felt that Wednesday would not conflict with Park Rapids.

Park Rapids has an outdoor concert series downtown as well on Thursday.

Tuesday just there was a lot of other things going on and then Friday, Saturday, we didn't want to really compete with other, you know, local venues ie, you know, bars or Sanford Center or something like that so Wednesday seemed to be a good fit.

It's a nice evening to do it and locally it's a great evening.

Kind of the thing I think with these midweek kinds of things, especially if it's, you know, 6:00 is probably pretty close to what people get off work.

If they go home and let the dogs out and get down there they're probably just getting there.

And from 6:00 to 8:00, so people can come down, listen to music for 2 hours and be home and in bed by 9:00 if they need to.

Early on a lot of us were talking about how we would book the artists and should we team this up and we knew that it was probably easier for one person to do this so they could control the content and try to put together a comprehensive series cuz this is, you know, six to eight concerts that we have throughout the summer starting in June and ending in August.

Charlie's been booking and been our point for the artists and their agents for the last six years, seven years, we've been putting this on.

I became the person that does the booking, or the curating, however you want to look at it.

Curating is kind of a precious term for rural Minnesota but that's probably more accurately what it is in terms of how I wanted to approach that.

I wanted to book original bands that are mostly recording original music.

Most of them are making a living or a good part of their living at doing that and are really making an attempt at making it in music.

I just personally find that a lot more interesting.

It's a really relaxed vibe and the music that we're choosing and booking is a diverse eclectic selection of original artists from Minnesota.

We purposefully have bands from out of town because when we started in 2016, you know, you could see any number of local bands in the local bars at any time so our thought was let's bring in bands that you don't get to see all that much, you know, kind of mid-range bands and give them a venue and that's worked out really well.

I think the variety and quality of the musicians that we get in the bands they're just, they're really good.

With the concerts these types of things are popping up in a lot of cities and I've heard from other people where they are booking cover bands, they're bringing in a lot of people.

Just like I talking with Brian Skinness who does the booking down in Park Rapids, the approach that we've taken builds a brand that doesn't really happen with cover bands that are playing, you know, various top 40 music.

And I'm not taking anything away from musicians that do that, I have a respect for all musicians.

But in terms of what we wanted to do and what we wanted to maybe provide more gigs for or maybe help the economy of.

Part of the intention to have regional artists in nature so whether that's the Iron Range or whether they're coming from the Fargo/Moorhead area or the North Metro, the Cities area, we wanted to try to support those artists.

You know whether we change that in the future I'm not sure.

I know there are a lot of good bands here in Bemidji and the bars aren't what they used to be, although they may pick up again, but for now we're pulling in bands from, you know, Missouri, Minneapolis, Wisconsin, a few of those kind of regional bands.

The one exception to that is Known Only Locally.

Known Only Locally is one band that we have continuously had every year and they're the only local band that we basically have had on stage.

It's a band that's been around for 30-40 years and a lot of old-timers really loved Known Only Locally and remembered them.

[Music] And that's because, I suppose you could say, because I'm on there and I'm part of Known Only Locally.

But we want to represent Jim, who was my husband, who died in 2013 and his music.

Jim Miller was excellent musician in the community and very well missed so it was an idea to bring them every year and this year I think was a little more special just because of All School Reunion and probably one of our biggest crowds of the season.

It's great, you know, it's so much fun.

I love it.

I love playing with the folks I have on stage.

You know Eric Carlson is fabulous, he's doing Jim's music, and Gary Broste our old bass player who now plays with Corey Medina, he's wonderful.

And his son Phil and my sister Miriam plays in there and Katie Tesar and Mark Bower we've pulled him in on drums and he does a great job too.

It's really, really fun to be on stage.

I got to say I'm really enjoying playing that music.

They'll probably, as long as they're willing to play, will probably continue to play on the stage.

Additionally, one of our sponsors, Security Bank has been very adamant that they want to represent Known Only Locally so it's worked out well.

Mississippi Music, the group that puts this concert series on, whenever we get the opportunity we want to thank the people that come and thank the community for their support, our sponsors for the support.

We get a lot of our funding from sponsors.

We have, every night, we have a band sponsor that helps fund the cost of the band getting there, the transportation, the services of me the sound guy, and all of our equipment.

And then we also have beer sales that goes into, you know, the coffer, but we have that constant cash flow of sponsors and quite honestly it's not very hard to get sponsors.

It's been a relatively quick process.

Some people are requesting, you know, what bands they would like to have once we have the lineup and know what it is.

They might know a band and they want to have them be the sponsor on that specific night.

Word of mouth is really kind of grown the concert.

We do have a wonderful relationship with our radio stations and our media sponsors with Lakeland Public Television, with the Bemidji Pioneer and our radio stations.

So we have a very good relationship with them that's helped draw awareness to the concert series as well.

You know one of the things that we hope it does for Bemidji is contribute to the local music scene and this kind of loops back to, it's been a little bit of a point of contention, that we haven't booked a lot of local bands.

Obviously we have a lot of good local talent as well.

During the Best Minnesota Town Initiative and party that our community had we did have Wednesday concert series of just nothing but local folks.

It was kind of a huge talent show so to speak and that was really popular with people.

But really, getting back to what our mission is, is to draw artists here and to kind of bring that new, some new music to people that have may never heard some of that type of music before.

Sometimes I think well, this band is just maybe a little more punk than, you know, the 75-year-old who's sitting in the audience would like, but it's not the case.

It's all done tastefully and people enjoy it.

The artists, when they initially show up and they see just this empty grassy area and on a beautiful lake their first reaction is usually wow, that's a beautiful lake or I didn't know the Mississippi went through here.

For some of them it's the first time they've been this far north in Minnesota.

Then, you know, once they start playing and seeing the crowd you can see they're really interacting with the crowd and enjoying.

Artist feedback has been very positive.

The crowd's very engaging.

We've got people dancing up in front of stage, they love that.

They love that interaction with the crowd.

Hondo and Suzie show up and dance and they bring some of their folks in and that's enjoyable to see that.

Our community has been giving our artists a very warm welcome so they want to come back.

The musicians really love the event, they love the stage, they love the crowd, they have a good time with it.

And when they're done with their set, you know, I go up there and start pulling microphones down and things like that and they're like that was one of the funnest gigs that we've done and they're always asking can we come back next year.

So I think we have quite a list of musicians that in a drop of a hat would be more than willing to come back, knowing, you know, what the event is like.

Every artist I've talked to wants to come back.

Just a story.

Ran into an artist on a Thursday morning after a Wednesday concert at the Minnesota Nice Cafe, bumped into some of the band members having breakfast, and they just were raving about Bemidji and how much they enjoyed the concert and they said you just let us know we'll come back anytime.

This is from Bill Dankert the day after the show with Doug Collins and the Receptionists.

Hey, Charlie, thanks again for having Collins and the Receptionists at Mississippi Music last night.

I wanted to write and say how well done this event is.

The stage and sound production was top-notch, the beer was good and cold, the food trucks offered tasty stuff.

I love it when an event like this is so elegant and puts its resources into high quality elements.

It's a really great event.

That's a guy who's been around and seen a lot, you know, and between the two tours that the Gear Daddies have done.

So when he comes and says that, you know, he's got quite a frame of reference as well.

A huge part of the mission was to do a community building event.

We want the music to be central to what's going on, but people getting together and hanging out with each other.

I think it's a great community event.

The fact that it is free, there's people from all ages there, little kids dancing up front, possibly potentially hopefully inspiring them to pick up an instrument and who knows one day they might be up there playing on a Wednesday night.

We hope that this thing keeps going that long.

Comes down to community.

People are going there to be with their neighbors and friends and connect again and hang out at the waterfront.

I see a lot of people just sitting there.

They may be talking during the show but they're also listening, so it gives them a good time to visit where they're not pressured at work or whatnot.

It's a great community event.

I see a lot of people I haven't seen in quite some time together and hanging out.

They provide an enhanced quality of life and exposure to art and music that wouldn't be possible unless people can be exposed to it and so this provides them an opportunity to kind of look at what's going on in the music scene in Minnesota.

It enhances probably that area down there, it shows off that area as being something that is an asset to the city.

It's huge to support that and in that context support our downtown and the city of Bemidji itself by getting that reputation of having quality of life amenities in our community and entertainment and art is one of them.

I think it's something that will continue to grow.

We have a great positive group of people putting this concert series on and we are fed in that positivity from the people that show up and the artists, too.

So we just we want to thank the community for supporting it.

[Music] Thank you so much for watching.

Join us again next time on Common Ground.

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Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.org Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

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