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At the Bike Stage, musical performances are powered entirely by eight solar panels and 14 stationary bicycles.
One of the most infamous moments in Newport Folk Festival history took place on July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan performed with an electric guitar and amplified band for the first time and was booed by the audience. Fans called him a traitor, critics called him a sellout, and a consensus formed that electricity had no place at hippie-dippy Newport Folk.
Almost 60 years later to the day, most artists at the festival are using electricity to power their sets, but the original luddite ethos remains.
You feel those values the moment you arrive. A two-way street leading into the festival grounds becomes one way, with one lane reserved for cars and the other for the 1,800 attendees who bike to the festival each day — the largest number of people biking to any music festival in the U.S. Cyclists are led to a bike-only valet, alphabetized by rider’s name and run by the nonprofit Bike Newport. A volunteer named Art at the bike valet told me that bikers have the easiest access to the festival entrance and don’t have to worry about traffic on the way out — a surefire way to encourage participation. But the main purpose of the program is to encourage festival attendees to choose fossil-fuel-free transportation: “Each person who bikes to the festival offsets around 7 pounds of carbon dioxide,” Art says.
If, like me, you didn’t ride your bike to the festival, there was still an opportunity to take part in the pedal-powered action. At the smallest of the festival’s four stages, called the Bike Stage, I saw Cameron Winter (singer of the band Geese) performing his solo album Heavy Metal (a misnomer because the album is in fact soft and sad). Before the set, in typical Newport Folk fashion, a guy climbed atop a speaker stand to announce that the performance would be powered entirely by eight solar panels and 14 stationary bicycles. The bikes — ridden by a long line of rotating audience members — and solar panels placed to the side of the stage generated enough electricity to make the set climate neutral. Each bike generates between 40 and 75 watts of electricity, and the panels create about 225. During the 30-minute set, I watched riders cycle through every few minutes. “People are really excited to bike,” Jeff Gorman from the band Illiterate Light told me. “We’re trying to get people talking about the fact that you don’t need to emit carbon to make music.”
Illiterate Light, who also performed at the festival, has run the Bike Stage at Newport Folk for the past four years. The alt-rock duo is focused on normalizing alternative energy production because “it doesn't take a war to fuel a bicycle,” — nor to power a set at a music festival. In true Newport Folk nature, the two farmer-turned-rockers even biked to the festival all the way from Harrisonburg, Virginia.
We’re trying to get people talking about the fact that you don’t need to emit carbon to make music.
– Jeff Gorman, Illiterate Light
Although I didn’t bike to the festival myself, I did take a turn pedaling at the Bike Stage during Matt Berninger of The National’s set, and got a great view of the stage, while also feeling connected to the music I was hearing in a deeper way.
At a music festival backgrounded by panoramic views of the world’s largest carbon sink, a no-frills approach to sustainability begets itself. Newport Folk’s emphasis on doing no harm to the land it occupies gets at the heart of what folk music is all about: authenticity, simplicity, and community. With those values in mind, it becomes imperative that any festival, but particularly this one in “the Ocean State,” considers the sanctity of the natural world in its operations. And no festival I’ve attended takes sustainability as seriously as Newport Folk.
