Hundreds attend Music Fest in Lynn Woods

Casey D’Eon, left, and Brandon Girard dance with Mike Taylor, the Green Man, at the Hodgepodge Music Festival at Lynn Woods on Saturday. (Item Photo / Owen O'Rourke)

By Kait Taylor / For The Item

LYNN - Hundreds of people braved Saturday’s high temperatures to attend the Hodgepodge Music Festival held at Lynn Woods’ amphitheatre.

“It’s like Lynn’s own Warped Tour,” said attendee Shawna Upton, a Lynn Classical High School junior. “It’s cool because it’s all local talent.”

That was exactly the intention of the two Lynn Classical High School seniors, Dean Albert and Dom Landry, who organized the event. The two musicians wanted to have a festival “get together” to showcase the local young talent of their friends. Now in its second year, the festival featured 14 bands in 25-minute sets from as close as Lynn to as far as New Hampshire.

“We wanted it to be a festival for the youth, by the youth,” said Landry.

The two teens said they worked with the city to get what they needed to pull the event off — including refreshments, restrooms, police officers and an ambulance to support the crowd they wanted.

“We started turning everything from a thought into a reality,” said Landry.

Before the event kicked off at noon, the show’s Facebook event page was showing 866 attendees. Landry and Albert estimated they had around 200-300 in the first two hours. They expected more would come around 4 p.m. when the temperature cooled. Until then, the musicians and audience kept cool by sitting in the shade and drinking lots of water.

“We have a ridiculous amount of water and we have some sprinklers by the pool,” said Landry, referring to the gated fountains at the reservation.

The crowd was made up of more than just high school students — middle aged adults and children were also in attendance, supporting brothers, sisters and friends in the various bands. Some sat on the slope in the shade, others wandered around the site between the sets.

Gus Tejeda, a member of Landry’s band Cosmic Origin, said the intent was to have something for everyone to listen to.

“There’s a range from ska to funk, classic rock, heavy metal, death metal — we’ve got everything,” he said. “The more variation the better — that way everyone enjoys the show.”

“Last year was a lot smaller and they weren’t selling anything,” said Classical High alum Jessica Laramie. “Now they’re selling T-shirts, food and there’s an ice cream truck down the street.”

Albert said they even had to turn down about 10 bands this year to fit the noon to 9 p.m. time slot.

Albert and Landry are planning to expand the festival to a multi-day event like Woodstock, or even to host a festival in the winter. “The further you can grow, the further the influence can go,” said Albert.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Classical students Dom and Dean organizing Second Annual Hodgepodge Music Festival

By Jeff McMenemy / The Daily Item

LYNN - Two Classical High School students and musicians who wanted something to do in what can be a long and boring summer are poised to hold the second annual Hodgepodge Festival.

Friends Dom Landry and Dean Albert of Lynn came up with the idea one day last year before school let out for the summer, they said.

"Me and him were just like hanging out and we decided kids needed to have a good place to go in the summer," Landry said recently. "So we decided to put on a festival for the kids, by the kids."

Finding something to do can be a struggle for high schools students in the summer, Landry said.

"It can get kind of boring just hanging around not really doing much," Landry said.

Last year's inaugural festival drew in total of about 500 people, according to Albert, but he expects this year's event - on Saturday, July 23 - to draw even more, and noted that the Facebook page that he and Landry set up to promote the event - HodgePodge Music Festival 2011 - has already received more than 770 RSVPs.

"It's amazing, it really is, it grows every day," Albert said during a recent interview. "It seems to have a life of its own now. It's really gone beyond our inner circle."

Albert said the large majority of the bands will be made up of high school students, or in one case, Classical alumni.

Landry said he expects people from all over the area to attend.

"It seems like every single person that I know, a whole bunch of people will be asking me about the Hodgepodge Festival," he said. "I have people from different states asking me about it on Facebook. It's pretty cool."

The popularity of last year's event has generated so much buzz - a fellow student even asked Albert during the school year if he had heard about the event - that they've begun turning bands away.

"We probably had to deny up to 10 bands," Albert, who's spending part of the summer studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, said. "We said sorry, we don't have room."

The event will be held July 23 from 11 a.m. until 9 at night at the Lynn Woods Amphitheater at the Pennybrook Road entrance in Lynn.

There is no charge for admission to the all-day concert and Albert promised the music will be as diverse as the city of Lynn is, just like the concert's name implies.

"There's going to be pop, metal bands, hip hop, there's a funk band and there's going to be a jazz blues jam," Albert said.

The concert will also be a good way for students who may not have seen much of each other during the summer to reconnect while listening to a wide variety of music, Landry said.

"They can just expect to have a good time and hang out with all the people," Landry said of the concert. "There's bound to be someone they know and there's bound to be some band that they're going to like."

Albert and Landry will both be performing at the concert, they've also organized every facet of the event, from promotion, to seeking sponsors, to organizing concession stands and getting a sound system.

But Albert acknowledges the students embrace an informal approach to the event, like concert festivals in the past, and haven't spent a lot of time worrying about which band will play first or last.

"I don't have the lineup yet, it's in no particular order," Albert said. "I'm deciding whether to pull from a hat or work with people to set the lineup."

And Landry said the show will go on rain or shine, just like it did last year.

"I'm not nervous at all, I'm on the excited side," Landry said. "Last year it went so well that I have no worries about this year."

Chris Wadden, whose business Impressive Sound is supplying the sound stage for the festival, has been impressed and surprised at how well the two Classical students have handled putting on the day-long concert.

"Dean is like 16 and he's basically done the whole thing," Wadden said. "He booked the whole thing, he did all the promotion, it's very unusual for someone of his age to be able to do something like this. I work with a lot of schools and I work with a lot of teenagers and Dean is not an average teenager."

Wadden noted the spirit of camaraderie that he saw during last year's concert and recounted a story of what happened when it started to rain.

"We put up tarps and we had multiple people holding up tarps while the bands played," he said. "It was a great atmosphere."

And it's the love of music, especially live music, that seems to connect everyone involved in the Hodgepodge Festival.

Both Albert and Landry play guitar, and Landry's metal band, Cosmic Origin, will perform at the festival.

Gene Constantino, principal of Classical High School, praised both students and said he knows their passion is music, and he noted that Albert organized a concert during the school year as a fundraiser for the senior class and the event sold out.

"It's tremendous," he said of the upcoming festival. "Dean is quite an organizer. He's one of our top students. He did every well on his AP scores that came back this week. It's not unusual for him to put something like this together, along with Landry. I'm very proud of them. Normally high school kids don't do these kinds of things. It says a lot about them and their families."

Albert and Landry have been friends for a long time and Constantino sees both of them practicing throughout the school year.

"It's a great thing they're doing for the community," he said. "It's just another example of Classical kids giving back to the community."

To learn more about the event or to help sponsor the event, visit the Facebook page, HodgePodge Music Festival 2011. To learn more about Landry's band, visit the band's Cosmic Origin Facebook page.