By GAIL OBER, InDepthNH.org
GILFORD – The three-day Christian music festival Soul Fest will go on as scheduled despite the recent turmoil within the Gunstock Mountain Resort operations and political community.
Gunstock Area Commissioner Doug Lambert said he and Commissioner Jade Wood, who have been de facto running the resort since the abrupt resignation of the senior management team, met Wednesday with the heads of various public safety teams and all the necessary logistics are in place.
“Late [Wednesday] we were able to tell the staff that Soul Fest is a go,” said Lambert by telephone Thursday afternoon. “We’re very happy about that.”
Soul Fest is one of the three biggest single draws in Gunstock’s annual calendar, in addition to the regular ski-season. Laconia Motorcycle Week and race week at New Hampshire Motor Speedway are the other two. It is also the largest Christian music festival in New England.
Like every year, except 2020, the base of mountain looks like the load-in and set-up of any other outdoor music festival. Tractor trailers holding the pieces of a 115-by-75-foot stage are being off-loaded and assembled by crewmembers with forklifts and brute strength.
White big-top tents, soon to be filled with vendors and festival goers, circle the stage and off to one side, hundreds of portable toilets sit idle in multiple rows waiting to be strategically deployed.
New Sound Concerts, the parent company of Soul Fest, has their single-digit management team huddled around computers and cell phones on the ground floor of the Stockade Lodge.
“We are small but mighty,” said New Sound General Manager Vanessa Ayersman. “At least until our volunteer teams kick-in.”
This is Ayersman’s ninth Soul Fest and the 24th year of Soul Fest – an annual mainstay at Gunstock since 2004. It was at Loon Mountain until it came to Gunstock.
She said New Sound has scaled back the number of festivals it usually hosts this year but continues to promote other shows so staff can concentrate their efforts on a new Soul Fest site in 2023.
Both Lambert and Ayersman said the current political and management strife which has closed most of the county-owned recreation facility, has nothing to do with New Sound Concerts’ decision to relocate for 2023 – a determination made long before the present controversy.
Soul Fest typically brings about 8,000 to 10,000 people to the Lakes Region, many of them campers at Gunstock. Though largely self-contained, local businesses generally see a bump in demand for their services.
Production manager Sarah Atherton said this year’s Soul Fest will have about 75 to 80 acts, speakers, and vendors and will rival previous festivals held at Gunstock in the years before COVID-19. There was no festival in 2020 and last year’s was a “diet version” of a traditional Soul Fest, she said.
When asked if the recent resignations of Gunstock’s top management hurt her efforts, she allowed that it wasn’t helpful but many of the middle-level management and employees who had been at previous Soul Fests were still on hand and pretty much had the set-up and tear-down to a science.
“We’ve been here for so long, they know what we need,” she said.
She said it was too bad that the Panorama chair lift to the top and the adventure park, with zip lines, monkey bars and the mountain coaster won’t be available for festival goers but that the music will go on.
For volunteer Zach Wengert, Soul Fest has been one of his spiritual guides since he was 14.
“This is the festival that made me fall in love with music,” he said.
He said he was a teen from southeastern Maine when one of his buddies suggested he come along with them to Gunstock.
“Performers just gave it their all,” he said, adding that there is something for everyone’s musical tastes and that many of the artists were “literally from his backyard.”
“I’d be lost without Soul Fest,” he said.
“This has been a lovely home for Soul Fest,” he said. “It’s been a beautiful relationship with Gunstock and we’re leaving on the most positive of terms.”
Next year’s Soul Fest location will be announced at Thursday’s opening show that features For King and Country as one of the opening acts. Soul Fest begins Aug. 6 and continues through Aug. 8.