4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Sun sets on Summer Solstice Festival in Yorkville
The Summer Solstice Festival in Yorkville, which was held in June in the city for more than a decade, is not taking place this year.
The two-day music fest, which was first staged in 2013, was always held on the Friday and Saturday in June closest to the summer solstice.
The festival was cancelled only once, in 2020 due to the pandemic.
Event organizer Boyd Ingemunson, 52, an attorney who lives in Yorkville, said given the current challenges involved in booking bands and having the capital to do it the event had run its course. He decided in January not to put on the festival this June, he said.
'I was the one who always organized and ran this and the goal from the beginning was ultimately to curate a festival that brought bands in from all over the country – touring musicians,' he said. 'It's against the grain of what you normally get in municipal festivals. There, you're getting cover bands and bands that just play around the suburbs and I wanted to do something that really was more geared towards original, independent bands on their way up in the industry.'
Ingemunson said over the years 'a wide range of music was curated and that was the main goal behind it all.'
'We wanted to bring something to Yorkville that was unique to all the suburbs,' he said.
While the scope of the festival remained fairly consistent, Ingemunson said over time it did 'morph into a program with the local cross-country team that did a road race as part of the event.'
There was also some philanthropic work with the Knights of Columbus at the festival.
'But other than that, we kind of stuck true to the event. Obviously, you have vendors and beer and food, but I really wanted the focus of the festival to remain about the music and the musicians that traveled here,' he said. 'We did have some generous sponsors over the years, but you can't go to the well too many times and be hitting up the same people for checks to fund this.'
Attendance averaged between 1,500 to a couple thousand visitors each year, he said.
Ingemunson recalled a first-year act that has since become a big name in the music business.
'We had Sturgill Simpson here in 2013 and now he's literally one of the largest bands in the entire country,' Ingemunson said. 'He plays headline spots at all kind of places now.'
The festival used to be free, but transitioned in the past few years into having to charge for tickets 'because we wanted to be able to attract bigger bands and you need to generate ticket revenue to pay bands more money.' he said.
'That's kind of where it just became difficult to compete,' he said, because some bigger corporate-backed festivals are 'generating millions of dollars of revenue, whereas with me I'm self-financing.'
He also said 'it's challenging to get people to pay for tickets in the summer.'
'It just got kind of untenable and way too risky for me to front the financing on it,' Ingemunson said.
Last year, Ingemunson said he doubled the band budget but in the end 'things didn't balance on the balance sheet and it just didn't work.'
'It's not like it's over forever. I always keep options open and maybe in some time it will get resurrected, but at this point it didn't make sense,' he said.
