In this episode, Zale Schoenborn shares about emphasizing sustainability at Pickathon, the Northwest music festival he founded.
Text transcript:
David Roberts
Listeners, today at Volts we've got something a little different, a little off our beaten path. It’s an episode about one of my favorite music festivals. It might not seem obvious to you why you should care about a small music festival in the far northwest of the country, but I think if you are patient and listen for a little bit, you'll get a sense of why I’m spending time on it (beyond self-indulgence).
By the time 2011 rolled around, I was more or less done with music festivals. I love live music and have been to many great concerts, but most festival experiences were so hectic, stressful, crowded, dirty, and exploitative that it just no longer seemed worth the effort. (That has only gotten more true in intervening years.) So I was a little skeptical when a friend told me about the Pickathon festival, held every year about 20 miles outside of Portland, Oregon.
For one thing … “Pickathon”? Sounds like one of those twangy festivals with crunchy hippies playing mandolins and banjos. That is not my bag. But he assured me that the lineup is diverse, from all genres, focused on acts that are about to break bigger.
He talked me into going. And listener, it blew my mind.
For one thing, the land itself is gorgeous — it is held at Pendarvis Farm, a sprawling area of pastureland and wooded hills that is used only once a year for gatherings, only for Pickathon.
Every attendee camps (the festival lasts three days), but not in some crowded parking lot. Rather, there is a whole network of trails running through the woods, with established camping spots that have been used and reused since 1999 when the festival started.
Then there’s the crowd. It wasn't jam-packed. You could always get food or drink with very little line. You could always see the band, no matter which band you wanted to see. There were tons and tons of families and children and almost no backward-baseball-cap bros. It felt oddly wholesome.
But perhaps the strongest impression I took away that first weekend was how weirdly, anomalously clean the festival was. One staple of festival life is giant, overflowing trash cans, with food wrappings and disposable cups strewn everywhere. At Pickathon there was none of that. There was virtually no visible trash. Water was free, available at spigots across the grounds.
It all struck me as so intensely human, so humane, that I fell in love and attended almost every year thereafter. (Here’s a 2013 story I did for Grist and a 2017 story I did for Vox, in which I interviewed 20 artists in three days.)
Pickathon is back this year after a two-year hiatus, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk with festival founder Zale Schoenborn about how the festival has evolved since 1999, what's next on the sustainability front, and what's new at the festival this year. Even if you don't happen to live in the Pacific Northwest and can't attend, I think you'll enjoy hearing from someone who has put so much thought into into bringing humans together to commune and celebrate in a socially and environmentally sustainable way.
Alright. Zale Schoenborn of Pickathon, thank you for coming to Volts.
Zale Schoenborn
Thanks for having me.
David Roberts
I'm sure this must be an insanely busy week for you, so thanks for taking the time.
Zale Schoenborn
No problem. It is definitely exciting.
David Roberts
Yeah. So there's a ton to talk about with your music festival, but first, I guess I'd like to just go back and hear a story that I'm sure you have told hundreds of times by now. But Pickathon is remarkably long-running, in the context of the music festival world. It started in 1999, which is just wild. So stretch your mind back, if you can, that far, and tell our listeners the story of just why did you start a music festival? And initially, when you started it, what was kind of the vision? And to what extent is that vision changed or sort of held steady in the, doing math, 24 years? 3? 23 years since?
Zale Schoenborn
24? I don't know. It's all ... you got to count one extra year in there, I think. Great question. Well, going all the way back, something that lasts 24 years, if anyone has the honor of kind of a hobby that grows out of control, that can turn into something, that's the only way you get to what Pickathon is. It's years of making horrible mistakes, and fixing them, and surviving them. So, like, all of the above. But if you rewind all the way back to 1999, it really was pretty humble beginnings. We just thought of, why don't we have kind of a better music party with our friends? And we always had this idea of "genre-based music festivals are really annoying." Like, how come we have to be so isolated in a Bluegrass festival or a Rock festival?
David Roberts
Yes, thank you for saying that. I don't know why that's not a more widespread opinion. "We're having an ice cream festival. Come and eat all ice cream for three days." I mean, I like ice cream.
Zale Schoenborn
Exactly. You really get sick of music you love, if that's all you hear. So it was interesting because the response from the pre-program crowds was very negative to that. They did not endorse it. There's like a hardcore following in these kind of genre circuits, and if you were there, they're going to come see the genre that they kind of support. But if you mixed it up, you are off in Never Never Land. And it wasn't until the really big festivals like Bonnaroo and other folks started mixing it up some, that that became a thing. So now it's pretty common, but we stretch it a little farther. And that's kind of like the early days. We were just kind of having a party. Let's potluck party. And we said, "jeez, what can we do with all this energy? Well, let's support our community radio station." So we were just like raising money for KBOO, a local radio station here. And that kind of happened for like six, seven years in that mode.
David Roberts
This was in Portland, though.
Zale Schoenborn
It did start ... we were out in Portland. We've been in three different sites. So the first site we were out at is Horning's Hideout. So in this KBOO phase, we were out in a place a little bit out in the west side of Portland, and beautiful little kind of reserved acreage in the coastal mountains. We didn't survive there because there was just a lot of neighbor turmoil, and we were the little festival. We were having awesome acts. I think we had one of the last Holy Modal Rounders, true performances by them. Kelly Joe Phelps.
It was awesome, but it was just not ... it takes a while. Pickathon is one of those things that we could tell everyone it was going to be awesome. And we, basically, had to have people come and grow by like 10% a year because that's the only way folks would get it. We just didn't do a lot of what we do now because this site we were at, the Horning's Hideout, had a venue, it had power, it had water. It wasn't like an open farm, it was like a pre-set site. But when we got kicked out of there about six years into that, we kind of found a temporary home for a year down in Pudding River, and then eventually found the Pendarvis Farm. And it's in those years where we really grew up.
David Roberts
And what year was that? What was the first Pendarvis Farm year?
Zale Schoenborn
I think it was 2006.
David Roberts
So tell listeners, because this is one of the, I think everyone who's been to Pickathon would agree is one of the most striking features of the festival, is the grounds, itself, Pendarvis Farm itself. So tell us a little bit about how you found that because my understanding is that that area, that farm, is not used for other festivals or gatherings. It's a once a year for Pickathon kind of thing. So how did that come about?
Zale Schoenborn
Through friends. So we had somebody that had gotten married there, and they said, "well, you should check this place out." And it was a friend that's married. They weren't doing like weddings at that time. They just had kind of a friend's wedding. And I did. I went to, actually went to one of the ceremonies there and checked it out, the little party they had. And I didn't really know the scale of the property because they hadn't really maintained the back, even right behind their farmhouse. So maybe the first two acres, three acres of it, five acres, I could see, but I didn't know went back a half mile
And right when we figured out the scale of this and met Scott and Sherry Pendarvis, who are definitely special people in the universe, we hit it off, and the energy Scott and Sherry throw out into the universe is kind of both inviting kind of creativity, but also they want their property to have this place for wildlife and fauna. And so not doing something all the time was, kind of like, part of where they were coming from because they weren't looking at it from, "let's just turn this thing in and turn it around every week." They were like, "let's do something special, and then we don't want it to do because we're going to wreck the wilderness."
David Roberts
One event a year, and sort of the rest of the year is like restoration and growing. So I've always wondered, how is there not like a line of people at their door saying, "I love this, I love this area, I love this venue, let us do this too. At least have two festivals a year, or three." It's amazing to me that they've resisted that for all these years.
Zale Schoenborn
It's not a business equation for them. They want to live and be sustainable, but it's different than if you were running a business and trying to maximize it. It's just not where they're coming from. And there's a lot of logistics that you have to run through. You have to get permits with the city. So it's a bit of just like the amount of tension you want to try to fight with, like, "how much, what kind of permit do you want to actually run your events?" There's a lot of overhead in that, and I think just us being so large, so impactful, really kind of felt like the right balance for them. And yeah, it's been great.
David Roberts
So what do you do? You find this, I mean, basically, huge wildland. It's like pasture and woodland, and you're looking at it, and you're like, "how do I impose a festival on this?" Like, you have to create every path, every stage, every sort of venue. Like, every little bit of the festival has to be imported onto that site because there's nothing pre-existing there. So when you first looked at it, how did your mind not just short circuit? How do you go from nothing to festival accommodations?
Zale Schoenborn
Well, desperation definitely helps. That is the kind of starter pack for willing to take anything because we didn't have a spot, so we didn't know really what we could do there, how big it could be. And you're 100% right. When you went beyond kind of the main field they had their horses in, it was ten feet rolling, four-inch thick blackberries, choking everything. I mean, it was the craziest amount of blackberries, and they just haven't been tended to for a long time. So it was more than just wild. It was just choked.
And there were a couple of roads. There was like an old, there is a second grove forest that was logged, a couple of times, but they logged in the so that road existed. And Scott and Sherry had a couple of other trails that they had already, kind of, throughout the land. But, yeah, about 80% of those trails, Sherry and Scott kind of rolled up their sleeves, and we made, like, a trail system, and we slowly, surely cleared out the forest over, I would say six ... You've been coming for a long time. So were you there when the "Wood Stage"?
David Roberts
I was trying to figure this out the other day. 2011 was my first year.
Zale Schoenborn
Okay. So we might have been kind of fully baked, close to it on the trail side, but we were still probably adding trails when you came. It's been a slow process. There's only so much you can do every year.
David Roberts
Yeah. And this is one of the things, I think, that's really striking about the festival when people get there and see it, is that there's now this network of trails through the woods. And not only a network of trails but these campsites have been used now once a year, every year for whatever, decades now. So it's like a little city. It's like a little city in the woods, of little roads and campsites. There's nothing quite like it anywhere else.
Zale Schoenborn
That is the truth. When it's all assembled together, we like to call it Big Rock Candy Mountain, where you don't see rough edges, and it just kind of feels like magic. But underneath it, yeah, there's power, there's water, there's security, there's fire, there's dishwashing, there's a site maintenance. There's so much. Everything you would need in the city, you're right on task, right on point. And that took a while to kind of build too, a long while. We had epic mistakes that were so hard to deal with in the festival year, we hit them, and then next year, we would try to address them. So the system looks kind of well-oiled, but it's really a series of just major gas, that are probably really custom to the site. You probably wouldn't make sense everywhere else.
David Roberts
Right. What were some of the biggest mistakes?
Zale Schoenborn
There are so many. I mean, so many. For a while, we just let folks go into the woods and find campsites. And I don't know, actually, if this existed any other festival, but we have this idea now. And the consequences of that was fine when we were small, but as we started to get a little bit more people not familiar with the grounds. There was a situation where people would just go in 100 feet. They wouldn't even try to find a spot that was open, and they'd camp on the side of a hill. And then they tied their tent or something to a tree, and, boy, were they mad. I mean, we just got so many people just having these horrible experiences, or they took them forever to find a spot, and we just felt so bad.
David Roberts
It was a little stressful too. There's an anarchy element to it, when everybody's just sort of heads for the woods. You're like, "oh, my God."
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah. What can you do? What can you do? We came up with this idea, and it's really developed pretty significantly into what we call the "front desk for camping, the camp-host." And now they are a crack crew of firefighters now, pretty much, that are amazing. And their job is to kind of like show you on a dry-erase map, they're talking to the crew out in the field, and they're kind of telling you where there's availability and where you should go look. And if you have too much stuff, or you have some trouble carrying your gear, we have like a gear drop service where we kind of put it in a bin, one through five, and it will show up, and you can exchange a tag and get it out in the woods, right? It's actually delivered to you. And that whole experience of getting everyone in comfortably meant to be like a little thing, but it's a humongously important thing.
David Roberts
I've lived through it a couple of times, and yeah, it's so, so crucial, and it's so amazing how well it works. The very first time I did it, as we were wandering back into the woods looking for a camp spot, the number one thing I thought was, "my God, there are so many ways this could go wrong."
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah.
David Roberts
There are so many ways you can fuck this up.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah. And people get mad when that's happened. That crew is like well-oiled machines. The first year you do any crew, it's kind of clunky, and it kind of works. And then those people stick around, and didn't hate it and liked it, they kind of create their own community, and all of a sudden, before you know, it's like it's always been there. And it works like a charm. And that's where we're at now with that. Some of the big sustainability stories for us, like having so much plastic, it was just crushing to us. We're like, "this is awful. What are we doing?"
David Roberts
Oh, this is great. Well, this was my next question anyway, so this is a perfect segue. So let's jump into this because from the first time I went, the cleanliness, relative to other music festivals I've been to — I think people who go to music festivals at this point are just used to giant, trash cans overflowing with crap everywhere, and like, paper plates, and Styrofoam cups, and just junk everywhere — And this is remarkably absent at Pickathon. But I assume that you didn't start out that way. So I'm sort of wondering, in terms of sustainability, how central was that from the beginning? Or is that something you brought in more over the years?
Zale Schoenborn
We always cared, and so we were always thinking about it, but it was as we started to really grow, you start to lose control of telling your friends, "just bring potluck dishes." At some point, to service that many people, you have to start bringing in pallets of water bottles. And everyone likes to charge for water in our world, which was just abhorrent to us, which is I'm like, "how can you charge basic necessities?" Like charging for the bathroom or something?
We just kind of grew into it from wanting to do the right thing, but it was just really kind of broke for us in 2009. We're just like, "this is crazy, there's got to be a better way." And there were some festivals in Canada that were trying to do some stuff, like reusable. But we kind of had some very hardcore friends in the recycling world, and we just came up with just a really grand prognosis, "well, what if we do no plastic? Let's do none." And then we're like, "yeah, let's do that."
David Roberts
Is that why water is free or was water always free?
Zale Schoenborn
Water is always free, but you had a lot of it we couldn't service. We found some tanks around that time too. We had water tanks, but we still had to have water bottles a lot, everywhere. Or people brought cans. But it was mainly just the spirit, like just having the sense of, "we're going to have like a quarter million cups that we're going to throw away."
I think actually in that preceding years, we had this dream of compost, right? So we're compostable cups. We were in there, but Portland being such a sustainable, kind-of-minded, hardcore town, people were calling us out. They're like, "yeah, you guys are not going to compost cups. Nobody wants cups. Yeah, they say they're compostable, but you're going to have to go find a special spot to do that." And we're like, "really?"
All of that led to that design. Thinking of, "well, let's just get rid of it." And we had some very good friends that were working for Klean Kanteen at the time, and they were kind of into this idea, and we kind of made up this idea of, "well, what if we have a stainless steel cup, and everybody has to hold on to their cup? And what if we make a silicone ring that you could put around the cup, and a carabiner, and you could clip that cup to your belt so it's not such a pain in the booty to walk around all weekend with it."
And we really thought through it, and we ended up kind of really checking with the health department. And we decided, "yeah, let's do this." And all the advice was "make it optional". And we're like, "oh my God. Well, then what's the point? And nobody's going to like this." And sure enough, we kind of threw it out to our crowd, and they loved it. They're like, "should we get rid of plastic?" And it kind of went early days of going viral, but it went viral.
David Roberts
So it was the cups first.
Zale Schoenborn
Oh, yeah, that was the big first step. But it worked so well. And it just seemed like, "duh". We were just like kind of like, "of course you should do this. It kind of pays for itself."
David Roberts
I know. Well, this is the thing. You go to the festival, and you walk around for three days with your cup attached to your belt, filling up free water from all these faucets around you. And you just cannot ever go back to a normal festival, where every time you get thirsty, you have to find somewhere to pay $8 for a small bottle of water. You're just like, "I could never go back to that." It's absolutely primitive. It's one of the many things that seems so obvious once you do it.
Zale Schoenborn
Yes. In Portland, we ruined the ability to charge for water. It was such a blowback for years. I remember MusicFest Northwest was charging for water in those years, right after we started giving it away. And there were people just couldn't, were just up in arms. They're like, "what are you doing?" We're like, "we're sorry. I guess we ruined it. We didn't mean to, but we're going to give it away again. Can't help it."
David Roberts
And so then comes the food. And of course, everybody who goes to Pickathon is very struck by the food system and ends up talking and talking about it. I remember my first year that I experienced it. I went through, what I'm sure everybody goes through the first time they encounter it, which is sort of initially presented with this idea of like, you have a token, you exchange it for a bowl. When you're done with the bowl, you exchange it back for your token. Sounds a little bit complicated. You do it once or twice, and once again you're like, "holy shit, how does the whole world not work like this? This makes so much sense."
So explain kind of the bowl-token system, and who thought of that? And when was the first year that you attempted that?
Zale Schoenborn
So 2010 was when we did cups, and that cut our waste stream down by a third. Just that one thing. And we were like, "yeah", but what we kind of noticed is we still had a ton of single-use dishes, and forks, and all kinds of things that were related to just throwing it away. And you couldn't really compost a lot of that. You could say you're going to compost, but a lot of it ended up going to the trash because these compostable things at the time just are not truly, like, just trash compatible.
And we just said, "well, God darn it, what can we do? Can we actually go further and have this goal of getting rid of single-use?" And it's still kind of like a North Star because it's almost impossible. But I do believe, from the festival side, we were pretty successful. We said, "you're going to have one bowl, so what is that going to be? And you're going to have one utensil." So we came up with the perfect food bowl being a nine-inch pasta bowl.
David Roberts
Oh, man, I love your freaking bowls. I am not kidding. Me and everyone I know who's been to this festival has at least like a dozen of these bowls, that I've used for years and years. I mean, the bowls that I got the first year I was there are still in my house holding up somehow.
Zale Schoenborn
And the cups. And they're so easy. Going back to your point, these also just pay for themselves. Like, you buy a token, which costs you basically the amount of the bowl. You give that token every time you want to eat to a vendor. They give you food in the bowl. You finish it, you give it to the dishwasher. We wash those dishes all weekend. And then when you're leaving for the weekend, well, you get your token back from the dishwasher. And so you're not carrying your bowl.
It's not like the cup was. Like we said, "you can carry the cup. It would be a lot more awkward to carry your own bowl and wash your own food." At the same time, we kind of created a do-your-own washing station, in case people didn't want to use ours. But we weren't going to give you any plates, so you have to bring your own or use ours. And almost everybody uses our token system. And then you're carrying around a token. It's really easy. But the cincher, and the way it kind of really works for everyone, is at the end of the weekend, you'd give that token to the dishwash station, and they give you a clean dish to take home, right? That's it, closes the loop.
David Roberts
It also serves as a souvenir, and it's incredibly useful. It is like the Platonic ideal of a dish. It works for everything.
Zale Schoenborn
Soup? Salad? Really nothing doesn't work in a nine-inch pasta bowl. It's kind of the spork of dishes.
David Roberts
Exactly. So then you eliminated single-use cups in 2010. So maybe 2011, the first year I came, was the first year of the bowl tokens?
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah, you experienced the very first year. And I mean, we had a lot of hiccups in that dishwash system. We engineered a very low-flow special dishwasher, that can run off of water that we had from the farm. And there was a ton of engineering, by a local dishwashing company, to figure out how you could do this and do it on a farm at enough volume to keep up. And it was rough, but I think to the most people, it was a great experience. And it was another just, "Aha", we got another third of our waste stream down in just one year. It was incredible. There's just so much being thrown away.
David Roberts
Was there any blowback at all? Was there any complaints at all from the attendees?
Zale Schoenborn
Maybe one or two over like ten years, but it really isn't. It's incredible. And that's what's so astonishing to me is, like, we've been trying to, like, give this away to festivals. Like, "look, it doesn't cost you any money. This actually pays for itself. You should just do it. It's so great."
David Roberts
But to your knowledge, like, you've been doing this system now, which has eliminated, or almost eliminated, single-use bowls, and plates, and stuff for over a decade now. Has anyone else picked it up? Has anyone else?
Zale Schoenborn
I think there's some people trying the cups. There are some spin-off, but I don't think anybody's doing it. There's a lot of optional stuff, a lot of, like, "oh, if you want to do it." And that doesn't work, and you can't predict on how many to buy. And it basically feels like a disaster to the festival organizer because they spend money, and nobody did it, and then nobody really actually, you didn't get any benefit. But the only way this works, and we've told it to everyone, is like: you know how many people are coming, you buy that many plates and dishes, it's not optional.
David Roberts
What's left in the physical waste stream bucket that you're going after?
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah, there is trying to get all of your vendors to bring kegs of things, right, not to bring packaged goods. So we've pushed wineries to put stuff into kegs, and that's now a very common thing people are doing, and it's cheaper for them. So we've been pushing a lot of the people that want to bring us cases of glass and cases of packaged things, that we want to get these things in bulk from you in reusable containers.
That took a while to really say "no" to people if they wouldn't do it. They're like, "really, you don't want this free stuff?" We're like, "no, we can get it from somebody else. And we really want to. I think it's good for you too. Like, you can start delivering to bars in this way." And sure enough, Portland, you do see a lot of reusable stuff and things in kegs. And for us, going back to why other festivals aren't doing it, I don't really know. And I think there's a really kind of American sense that you don't want to force people to do something. It would be so inconvenient to have a reusable dish or carry a cup. It's just terrible experience.
David Roberts
But it's crazy, like, the audience loves it. It feels like you're doing something. It feels like you're helping, right? It feels like you're involved in something with other people, where you're out of the ordinary.
Zale Schoenborn
It doesn't feel bad. That doesn't feel weird, does it?
David Roberts
No, it doesn't feel like an imposition. It feels like a fun thing you're doing together. How much physical waste is left?
Zale Schoenborn
There's compost from food mostly. So what we still have is people don't eat all their food, and our vendors have some compost waste in our kitchen. So then I think that most of our waste, though, comes from our campers, as much as we ask them to try to. Like, I would say 80% of our waste is people in the campground, and it's hard to police that. So we talk about it, we get folks to kind of be into it. But we are very generous on people being able to come because a lot of families come. A lot of people need to bring a lot of stuff. And what a pain in the butt if we were just policing every little thing.
But we've made it so that the festival side, when everybody gets up with a blanket at the end of the night, right, the only thing that's on the ground is blankets that people leave.
David Roberts
Yes, I remember. I mean, I don't know. I keep going on about this. My first year there, it took me a couple of days to even pinpoint it. What is different here? Why does this feel ... and it wasn't until the second or third day, I was like, "oh, there's just no trash. There's just no trash everywhere. I'm so used to trash everywhere."
Zale Schoenborn
Yes.
David Roberts
It's really mind-blowing.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah.
David Roberts
So let's talk about some other sustainability aspects then.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah.
David Roberts
And as you say, one of the other striking things about the festival experience, when you go. is just that it's not mobbed, it's not crowded. Like, you can get food, you can get water, you can see the band. There's never been a band at Pickathon that I've wanted to see that I've not been able to go and get a pretty good view of, just because there's not that many people there. So tell me about sort of, like, the capacity of the space versus the sort of number of people you let in, and kind of what is that calculation, that balance? And how has that evolved over the years?
Zale Schoenborn
Well, it goes back to as we were starting to grow, and it wasn't just me supporting it off of my day job. And we really started to need to kind of, like, couldn't be just volunteer. The hardest part of a really dreamy idea, a concept, is probably the first couple of years, right? You're doing it off of just vapors. Your family is involved. Everyone's just willing to work for free. No one's like, "it's a dream." The third or fourth year, it's like, "I can't do that. I can't take off two weeks to work. I'm sorry, I can't do it."
Things get in the way in life. And so you start to fall back more and more on having to kind of pay for things. And that's usually the place where most of these kind of community events die. Is that kind of hard transition?
David Roberts
Right? Some professionalization is inevitable.
Zale Schoenborn
And we were hitting it hard. We were hitting it hard. We were like, "what are we going to do?" And we knew from other festivals that our path was going to take us to kind of grow in the capacity. And we just kind of like, deep down, we're like, "god, we don't want to go to that festival." But we didn't have any choice. So we really just threw it out to our audience, and asked them, "we're like, okay, here's what we can do. Do you want us to just keep our ticket prices low and just grow this thing and get it to be like a normal festival you've always been to, or?"
David Roberts
Let's just pause and make a note here. You could, the space, acreage is huge and could accommodate lots more.
Zale Schoenborn
About 5X, yeah.
David Roberts
Five times. So what is the ticket sales capped at now?
Zale Schoenborn
They're capped at $5,000. Just one of our main fields could probably hold 50,000, right? That's how big our main field is. So it's kind of ridiculous, but it's really awesome.
David Roberts
They couldn't all camp, right, though?
Zale Schoenborn
They couldn't all camp. But you could run like a day festival. Lots of things about Pickathon wouldn't — the more people would have really ruined camping, too, in terms of being a universal thing you just get for free. People forget that. Most times you pay for camping. But yeah, that was a conscious choice.
David Roberts
So you asked the audience, you said, "our expenses are growing. We can either let in a bunch more people or raise ticket prices." When was the first time you sort of presented that to the audience?
Zale Schoenborn
I think about 2007, somewhere around that Avett Brothers kind of time frame. It was somewhere in that range because we just knew we had to kind of make a choice. We were kind of outgrowing our own infrastructure at the time. The whole farm wasn't there, but we just really needed to know how we were going to do this.
And we kind of also had the idea of, way too early it turns out, David, that we should scale by being a filmmaker in digital content. That was part of our sustainability plan. We're like, "okay, we're going to stay small, charge a little bit more, but we're going to create this beautiful film. And we're going to export and infect the world, we're going to bend the arc of pop culture in some weird way." And those are all kind of, like, they were all interconnected at the time, those same ideas.
David Roberts
So you first presented that question to the audience in 2007. The audience responds, "please keep it small. We will pay more."
Zale Schoenborn
100%. 100%. Yes.
David Roberts
Have you returned to them with that same question, again, since?
Zale Schoenborn
It's kind of new. I mean, we have ... people know that about us. We have to often explain it more to people because at this point we are actually moderately priced. There was a point where we were pretty high priced compared to where festivals were. Now, festivals are pretty expensive, so we have a lot less of those questions. And we didn't grow our ticket prices in the same way, that our major ... we play Coachella on TV, right? We are like 1/200th of the size, but we're in the top ten festivals. But it's only by playing that on TV. We're really like 1/100th of the size, or something goofy, right?
David Roberts
I wonder the equation there, the sort of balance there. At a certain point, making the tickets more expensive will kind of start to make it feel exclusive, right? It will kind of start to price out some families and stuff. I know this is not a science, but is there a point at which you would consider letting in more people, or sort of how do you think about that balance ongoing?
Zale Schoenborn
Well, we definitely think about it on multiple levels. One, is we don't charge for kids under 13, so they're free.
David Roberts
And there are a bunch, I should say. There are lots of kids.
Zale Schoenborn
Oh yeah, there's like 1,500 kids under twelve and like 1,500 teenagers under 18. It's a lot, and we kind of made that, "Okay, these guys don't count." And it's hard for families to come. So like if you, yes, the tickets are more expensive, and if you want to come as a family, and you're paying that much for your kid to come, it becomes really proactive. So that was some of the equation. We're like, "okay, we're going to charge for the adults. People can bring families. It feels a little more economical." And I don't know where the balance there is. It's still a tough one for us. We keep our prices as aggressively low as we can, but we think about it every year. We're like, "is this too much? Where are we at in this equation?"
David Roberts
Is the video stuff? I mean, I assume part of the motivation of getting into video and streaming, and all this kind of stuff was to open up a new revenue stream. Has it brought in much money?
Zale Schoenborn
Well, not really. The most money we ever made is ... we did a concert a day with the Recording Academy right after COVID hit, and we raised several hundred thousand dollars for Music Cares. We were right there with the Grateful Dead, raising money. Pretty hilarious. And that was like a great time. But as you might know, being in the business, things like YouTube and stuff just don't pay that much. And monetization has been off and on. In the balance, it's been a positive because that ability for us to scale and kind of reach the world through our content has worked. 100%. People know us. Some early video of Mac DeMarco peaked before he was ever known.
David Roberts
Really great video too, I should say. Like, really incredibly, good-looking video.
Zale Schoenborn
We care a lot. Yeah. That crew is like 700 people at Pickathon, believe it or not. It's like a movie set, right? The whole thing. And we still believe in it. I mean, I definitely look at it from a sustainability point of view. I am happy keeping it at this scale. We really do want to figure that out. I think the timing is getting more, right, at some point in the future, there is some way that this is going to be scalable. And we spun off a company named FRQNCY to try to make it better. And we've had some success. That stuff is slow, so slow. But we think of it as a sustainable plank, if this is a good way to kind of scale, versus just trying to ruin the land and do other things.
David Roberts
Right. So, final sustainability thing I want to ask you about, and this, I guess, is probably the other big piece of impact for any festival, is just people coming and going to it, driving to and from it. So what were your first, I mean, I assume you wanted to tackle that from early on. So sort of what's the history of your efforts to reduce that? Just the sort of gas, and traffic, and everything else impact of people driving to and from.
Zale Schoenborn
Well, a lot of parts of that. So you incentivize it. For us, we knew that people driving to Pickathon was just, "how can we get less cars?" And we've been thinking of this and pushing on it. And for us, where we are kind of now, in 2022, we're like, "okay, it's all about kind of like carbon taxing, right?" Bikes are free. We're committed to that. You don't have to pay a cent ride a bike. It's only 12 miles from Portland. Anybody could ride a bike to Pickathon, like, just do it.
David Roberts
I should say you organize these sort of bike trains, these bike groups, so people can ride.
Zale Schoenborn
We throw your stuff in a moving van, and we go out together, right? And the average biker is pretty sophisticated in Portland. They have their own system, and they can carry a lot of stuff. And there's over, I don't know, I bet you there's 1,500 bikes at Pickathon. I think that's a huge number. And that's level one. And then take a shuttle, take transportation. The max is 5 miles away. So we kind of price that the next level of cost. Like, it's cheap. You can just jump on back and forth, and you're able to come and go anytime you want.
And above that ends up being cars. So you want to bring your car for the day or the weekend, you should carpool. We set up carpools. And you just kind of go up the food chain there. Then people want to camp, and there's some car camping, and there's a little bit of RVs. But we just have just a little, and those are kind of like the level of taxing people. We really have been pretty successful at getting folks on bikes.
David Roberts
On a big-picture level, do you feel like your efforts in this area have been as successful as your efforts in, like, the solid waste area? I mean, it's really, talk to any urban planner, anybody, anywhere, like, this is the hardest nut to crack of them all. Are you satisfied with how well you've ... ?
Zale Schoenborn
Honestly, I want to push more. We were toying with no cars, but the American psyche, right? Maybe we'd be just fine. We didn't find it so funny, just like you got kind of like the cups and the plates, but people are traveling from far away, and we just know that it is a tough nut. I think you just nailed it. It's not really something that we can just do and make it an easy experience for everyone. Like plates and cups.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Zale Schoenborn
But there is one really big thing we're doing this year, that I don't know if you know about, that is kind of like going to probably have the same level of impact, sustainability-wise, as all the things we've done. We've been talking about. We redesigned the festival in a way that I'm we're really excited about. I don't know if you know much about that.
David Roberts
Only what's come out on the emails, and I haven't looked that closely. Just to help listeners, sort of the way it was, and has been for the last decade, is there's sort of these two big fields with big stages, and then there's like a barn and a little shack here. And then there's a stage off in the woods, the "Wood Stage". Just legendary, amazing place. Little sort of stages scattered here and there that have people playing in sort of staggered timing. But before we get to this year, let's just briefly talk about the last few years, which have been difficult for literally everyone in the world, but for you as well.
So the worst thing was in 2019, Pickathon was very well known for a long time for having these big sails, kind of big pieces of fabric hovering up in the sky, kind of blowing in the wind, sheltering you from the sun. Very visually striking. In 2019, there was an accident. Two people died trying to take those down. And that was traumatic and involved some fines, and some scrutiny. And then the next year got canceled, I think. And then the year after that got canceled because of the pandemic. So it's been a real turbulent last few years.
Talk a little bit about how you got through that because I, around this sort of 2020 years, was hearing rumors that it might be over that Pickathon might be over, that Pendarvis' farm might not be open to having it anymore. So just, I'm sure you could talk for hours about this.
Zale Schoenborn
You forgot that thousands of houses have moved into our parking lot too, right?
David Roberts
Yes. And development is sort of encroaching on the farm. So give us a sort of capsule summary of the last few years, kind of the turbulence, how you've gotten through it, and how you're feeling about this year being kind of a renewal.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah, it was a lot of grief and trauma. So our accident was kind of, like, it happened in a way that was just really tragic. Total accident. Just one of those things that experienced people with very little, ten minutes left in the last day, and an accident happened, and it was just awful. And basically, we were in a place where we were just rallying around our community, trying to understand how to do grief and trauma. And that was like a very kind of, in a weird way, brought a lot of people together, in a good way, even though we were really just kind of having this moment.
And it made us think. We didn't know exactly what, we were trying to, kind of thought, "okay, we're going to again eliminate a lot of this risk. We're just not going to build the kind of things that are here." We've been doing this for twelve years, and we kind of felt really good about our systems, and we just decided ... and that was like a pretty major thing for us. But we didn't quite get to the point of being able to execute on it because of COVID. COVID hit. And that just really felt like a gut punch not just to us, but to the entire creative world. And we were just ... "how in the world are we going to survive?"
And that's when we pivoted to the kind of concert today, helping Music Cares. Because we're like, "okay, we got these people," and then some of the PvP. And then we started doing a lot of advocacy work with NIVA, National Independent Venue Association, and became kind of a really force to be reckoned with. And generally, that lobbying effort to support kind of independent venues was one of the best things that happened out of, in terms of organizing in the pandemic. It saved the entire industry, including us.
David Roberts
Were the rumors I was hearing just rumors or was there a time when you seriously had doubt about whether the whole thing would move forward?
Zale Schoenborn
They never really know ... the combination ... We're not in a solid ground because of — not because of the farm. I mean, the farm is great. It's parking, and there's a lot of challenges. The farm is more valuable to become into houses. If it was a normal set of landowners, they would flip this thing, and the whole farm would be mowed down for houses, like every tree. That's what 95% of the universe would do in their situation. Because it totally is ready to go. Shovel ready to be giant, giant development.
David Roberts
So it's just the Pendarvis' themselves, really, their personage.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah, it's them and us willing to kind of try to adapt. We could also kind of throw in the towel, like, "no way, we are not up for another 'figure it out year'." Because it's like doing it over every time, and you're like, "wow, it's a lot of energy, it's a lot of work." And we knew that in these kind of last several years. If we came back after 2020, it's going to be a lot of work. Okay, "well, let's come back in 2021. It's going to be a lot of work. Okay, I can't do that."
"Let's go back in 2022." And so here we are. And it's even more work because some of the plans that we built for the parking lots, now they have houses in them, and we have a different lot for parking. And we're surveying it, and mapping it, and doing all kinds of things that are kind of ridiculous for a weekend event. But we're restoring and removing blackberries. Eventually, this whole thing is going to be mowed down and turned into houses. It's the last remnants of a golf course that we're using this year.
David Roberts
Is this a long-term worry? I mean, are you going to get closed out of parking entirely? Eventually?
Zale Schoenborn
We have some plans, hopefully, for the next three to five years, I think is our hope. That's good news, but I can't promise. I think all we know is we're on this year, and the intention is there. Pickathon, I think is strong enough. It should be able to last. We don't know if our future will be there, but I think there's a path for at least three to five more years. And we're looking to try to come up with something even longer. But it would really be nice, David, if it was just, like, set, and we could just operationally get better.
David Roberts
Yes, it would be nice if the fundamentals weren't constantly shifting.
Zale Schoenborn
Yes, I had little joke with people. I was like, "man, wouldn't it be great if we just had our businesses just running and not reinventing itself every time?" Maybe it wouldn't be as much fun, but sometimes you just think about that.
David Roberts
Well, all that said, then you're coming back here in 2022, August 5th-7th, approaching this year, you sort of had a little bit of a blank slate because you had a couple of years off. So what's the new thinking this year in terms of kind of the grounds itself, and rearranging, you're rearranging the physical space itself into what you're calling neighborhoods. So a) what does that mean? And b) what does it mean for sustainability? In what way is it more sustainable?
Zale Schoenborn
The big takeaway for us was, "Okay, this 2020 hindsight, here," when we were just sitting around talking with kids, in the music, and thinking about it, you start wandering. You're like, "well, if you were going to redo it, how would you do it?" And so one of the big things you mentioned, you said you really love the "Wood Stage". And that "Wood Stage" was kind of a big part of how we came to an "aha". There's this stage that David mentioned. "Wood Stage" is essentially a permaculture artist town Mark Lakeman built. We harvest sticks from the forest, and we make a sculptural stage.
David Roberts
It's like a natural amphitheater that it's sitting in. And it looks, to all appearances, like a stage grew out of the woods there.
Zale Schoenborn
Yes, and we're rebuilding this year in a really very awesome, sculptural way. But yeah, that stage wasn't a big lift for us. We built that every couple of years. We had to clean it up and repair it. But in essence, the other stages we built, which were impressive. I mean, the Mount Hood stage you mentioned, which was one of the larger temporary tension fabric structures in the world. And the "Tree Line Stage", which is a very kind of elaborate project where we try to reuse materials, and they have to go somewhere else. Diversion architecture, we call it. It's a whole nother sustainability part of Pickathon.
And they're wonderful. But no matter how much placemaking, I call it placemaking, people love the "Wood Stage", no matter how grand, no matter how big it was. And the "aha" was like, "nature kicks your butt, kicks everyone's ass, you just can't beat nature. So like, well, why try? Why don't we go the opposite way, and rethink about this entire property, and say there's so many beautiful places on this farm? Why don't we just think about those beautiful places as settings, and then kind of come in, and vibe, and add things to those places? And what if we go a little bit further? What if we think about times of day and places? What if you, in the daytime, when it's 100 degrees in Oregon, in the summer, what if we're in the woods, and there's not as many people in the morning?"
So we can be a little more intimate and kind of keep the energy up, and we can migrate back and forth between spaces that are shaded in the woods. And then as the day goes on and the sun starts to set, we can kind of move out into bigger fields. And as it sets a little further, we can move out into the, finally, the biggest fields. And that's what we did. We're like, "oh my God. Aha! This is how you should build a festival." And if you think about it, it's like a bunch of wood stages. That's kind of the vibe we're trying to create this year.
David Roberts
There so there are several brand-new stages, areas, places this year
Zale Schoenborn
This year neighborhoods we're calling them. And they are kind of zones that are natural zones, like they're a bowl or a hill. There's some geographical thing on the farm, and we, basically, are kind of connecting those all together. And the carbon footprint result of that is, we haven't done the math, but it's many, many factors lower because you're now not needing all this incredible heavy equipment. You're not trucking tons and tons of materials across the universe to give them to you. You're not spending all of this energy and gas to kind of build things that have to be quickly torn down. You're just dramatically reducing what it takes to put on something, even at the scale of Pickathon.
David Roberts
So some of these new stages are going to be like the wood stage, in that they just stay there?
Zale Schoenborn
No, mostly in the shade side. So, like, when we built the "Tree Line Stage" or the "Main Stage", the "Main Stage", we built a lot of that sales for shade. We don't need shade because we're using nature. We don't need to use giant settings. The way we oriented the "Tree Line Stage", which was a stage that's built by grad students at the Portland state every year, they built it out of pallets, out of concrete tubes, out of 2x4s. And after they were done.
David Roberts
Very visually striking.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah, after the festival, it went back to become 2x4s.
One year, it was built out of a kit of parts that became a homeless village for veterans in Clackamas County. So pretty cool ideas there, too. But the scale of those kind of settings, we built because behind them, there really wasn't anything to look at. So you're building these kind of places. We're flipping that, and now you're looking at trees like you said, or the farm setting. And I think it's just better. Like nature kicks butt. Like it kicks ass. Like, why, you try to, why fight it? Just lean into it.
David Roberts
You got, what, like a week and a half, a week and a half to go? Are neighborhoods in place? Have you had a chance to sort of walk around and experience these yet? Because this will be brand new to the audience.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah, I mean, there's another whole factor we're doing that's new as part of that because we knew we couldn't pull all this off, so we kind of divided all of these neighborhoods and went out to the community and kind of presented like, "okay, each of these neighborhoods is a design-build challenge." And we went out and tried to recruit kind of a combination of architects, designers, project managers, builders.
David Roberts
Oh, interesting.
Zale Schoenborn
For each one of these teams, and then kind of treat it like their own little Burning Man. Not just because people build these elaborate things in Burning Man, I'm kind of using that. But it's like the PSU idea, where we found a community that could, every year, design and build. And those grad students, it works because it's a class and because those grad students actually get amazing jobs after they do this project because everyone — they've won National Architecture Awards. We're like, "well, we can figure out other sustainable models for communities on why they'd want to do a design-build." And it turns out there are many. So we have like 15 of these incredible collections of design-build teams, and they are all spinning things up that are to die for.
David Roberts
So each neighborhood has a team in charge of it? A team that owns it?
Zale Schoenborn
Yes. It's going to be incredible.
David Roberts
Oh man, I can't wait to see that.
Zale Schoenborn
I think it'll be awesome. A lot of people have been manufacturing and building, and a lot of this material is going to be reused again somewhere else. So it's very awesome. I know that this approach to kind of doing festivals, and kind of involving community, and kind of creating all these other tie-ins. How can you do this in a way that all these teams, it's a sustainable process, they'll do it year after year? There's a lot to be mine there, and maybe we can talk about on your next podcast.
David Roberts
One thing that's striking about this, and all the other things you talk about, is just how bespoke it is, and, thus, how much care and investment it requires. This is not something — this is not something a big company could buy, and scale up, and make lots of money off, right? This is just a high touch ... and that's just not something that makes pure business sense. It just doesn't.
Zale Schoenborn
Yes, it doesn't. We like to call it — the whole thing is completely irrational. Absolutely.
David Roberts
But it's commensurately beloved.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah, well, it is that kind of underlying dream sandbox. We often say, like, "the Olympics of what everyone does," come do something at Pickathon. It's probably like, what, "you do what you do, but do the Olympic version of what you do," and that works. And you kind of like, getting folks to kind of have that break in life where they do something very much what they do, whether carpenter or something, but they're doing something in this context where it just has such a big impact. It's just a really rewarding thing for everyone.
David Roberts
Yeah, and you can see people enjoying it, and using it, and loving it. It's a very direct feedback loop there.
Zale Schoenborn
And in many cases, it furthers their professional life, too. So that's where it all ties back together. Like sometimes they show off, and they're recognized, and their connections are made, and businesses grow. And so we take a small band that ... Pickathon is known for discovery. We are known for kind of taking bands to the next level. And we've been saying that this is great music, and having faith, and you should just book good music, and that's all that matters. It doesn't need to be known.
David Roberts
I will say, and this is not true of many festivals, I have discovered lots of new bands through Pickathon. Like, it's genuinely the "not quite, just about to break" bands, you know what I mean?
Zale Schoenborn
If you lived here, David, we'd be hanging out playing cornhole, and joking, and debating music. I could tell, It's a very open source idea where you just kind of dig into communities of music, and whatever is like the hot red, red hot, like, Elvis kind of movement of that scene, probably isn't well known yet to a lot of people, but the people who really care, this is it. And you listen to those people. Typically, you don't even have to be a fan of that style. You literally put that next to ... When you experience it, you'll be like, "oh my God, that's amazing."
David Roberts
Yes, I've had many of those experiences over the years, and I've kept you for too long. But the one final thing to say about the music, too, is I think Pickathon has become somewhat legendary in that bands love it. And you can tell, by the time they play, they've usually been there for a day or two, and they're like, "man". They love the bamboo bowls, and they've just been, like, wandering around, chilling out. It's hard to put into words, but I've been to a lot of music shows, a lot of music festivals. I've seen a lot of live music. And you can tell when a band is, like, relaxed and into it.
Zale Schoenborn
They're on vacation. We get a lot of bands who just know that they're going to come and chill out or be fans of other ones. It's really easy for us now. The music is really easy. We are sought out by musicians and by agents.
David Roberts
I'm sure in the grind of touring life, like, going to Pickathon for two or three days is like, feels like a vacation from work.
Zale Schoenborn
And, like, again, that sustainable thing. We hope to kind of bend pop culture in a weird way with good music. I mean, artists that play Pickathon, immediately, their lives change. They bump up several places in what they can do. And that's so awesome, right? We can take all this energy that's been focused back to kind of making them not only have a good time but actually their life changed, right after.
David Roberts
And so this year, the big, I guess the big two artists, insofar as you'd called them, headliners, are Valerie June and Wet Leg, which I feel like is a good snapshot of kind of.
Zale Schoenborn
Oh, and JGZA. Don't forget GZA.
David Roberts
Right. The the diversity involved. Alright, well, I've kept you forever. I mean, it's probably obvious that I'm a fanboy in this.
Zale Schoenborn
Are you coming this year, David?
David Roberts
I actually am.
Zale Schoenborn
Okay, good. We will continue this conversation in person.
David Roberts
Yeah, exactly. I'd love to hang out once we get there, but sort of the final question. Obviously, your priority in the years going forward is just to help things survive and fight to preserve a little bit of parking against the incoming development. But in terms of sustainability, in particular, is there a next big item on the list, or is it mostly at this point just about kind of buffing and dialing in the pieces that are in place?
Zale Schoenborn
I can't think past this year. We have to land this ginormous spaceship on a dime. Where we leave ... the ambition we have this year is kind of staggering, in terms of like taking all these teams. So something will go wrong, and then that will be the kind of ... or some things will go really right, and we'll build on them. I don't know. I hope what we are thinking about is, "this is amazing," and I think it is. And it's going to be the first year a lot of teams kind of hit their mark. If you remember way back when, when the PSU started, they had a pretty moderate pallet stage. You remember that stage?
David Roberts
Yeah, I remember the first one.
Zale Schoenborn
And it grew and grew in ambition. I think if we get this right, all of these teams are going to kind of have that same arc. Whatever they do this year is just a tiny taste of what is to come.
David Roberts
And we should say that for listeners who can't attend the festival, which I assume is probably most of them at this point, that the whole thing is live-streamed.
Zale Schoenborn
Yeah.
David Roberts
You can buy a live-stream ticket? How does that work?
Zale Schoenborn
You can go to FRQNCY.live. There's no vowels in that F-R-Q-N-C-Y-.live, or go to Pickathon, and you'll see a Pickathon livestream. You can basically get access to every show or kind of like a curated broadcast, where we kind of pick and move around different stages. There's a couple of ways you can do it, and it's great that you can kind of see the 700 people working hard in person on the Internet. We take it very seriously. As you know, David, we're big film buffs.
David Roberts
Awesome. So people can at least, maybe, drop in and see a little bit, see what these neighborhoods look like, even if they can't make it out.
Zale Schoenborn
It'll be a wonderful experience.
David Roberts
Awesome, Zale. Well, thanks for taking all this time, and I will see you in a couple of weeks. Maybe we can play some cornhole.
Zale Schoenborn
Okay, take care.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time.
Volts podcast: a music festival that treads lightly on the earth