Camp Rootpile -- We are a group people who love to go to Burning Man, but we don't like the music there, and we are sure there are other people there who don't either, so we bring high quality professional live Bluegrass music to Burning Man at camp Rootpile. We need a large circus style tent to have our nightly concerts and we also need to buy inexpensive mandolins, banjos, guitars and fiddles to teach dusty Burners how to play Bluegrass on the instruments we bring for our daily beginner workshops. Help us!!!!!
For a few years now, Andy Owens has been bringing the sound and music of Bill Monroe to the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. Burning Man 2016 takes place August 28 – September 5, 2016. Participants join in the effort to co-create Black Rock City, a temporary metropolis dedicated to art and community. Burning Man isn’t your usual festival. It’s a city wherein almost everything that happens is created entirely by its citizens, who are active participants in the experience.
Andy Owens, a long time bluegrass artist, is a driving force behind bringing bluegrass music to the dusty desert. Andy notes, "I have been playing Bluegrass Music on a professional level for over forty years and when I discovered Burning Man I knew that these were my "peeps" that this was my thing, but the music there just didn't move me. I knew that I needed to bring my music, Bluegrass Music, live Bluegrass Music to Burning Man. So I did. I started a "themecamp" as we call it, a camp of people dedicated to a particular theme at Burning Man. Our theme is live Bluegrass Music and Hillbilly culture and food.
"Over the last four years we have taken Bluegrass Music to Burning Man. We have mostly funded this out of my own pocket, but we need outside this year to increase our offering. We teach music lessons daily in our workshop tents. We teach beginners on mandolin, banjo, guitar and fiddle and we provide the instruments to do this. We also have nightly concerts by our professional house band, Black Rock Bluegrass, and we need a good safe, warm place to have our concerts, so we are raising money for a large 30x70 foot circus tent in which we plan to build our stage.
"Indigogo likes you to list what the challenges are to this project. Anytime you go to Burning Man and set up a camp it is a huge challenge, but this is our fourth year out and we are going no matter what. We have two storage units out there, we have two artcars and we have fifty camp members, we’re going, don’t worry about that.
"The tent we want to buy is 30x70 feet and is perfect for our camp size and for our stage. A tent like this typically costs about $5,000 but we have found one for $3100, we also need a trailer for it, about $1000. We have some instruements to teach on but we need more. Instruments for beginners aren’t fancy, about $100 each and we need about forty ten of each. These needs total around $6,000 so that is our goal. Of course our camp budget is much more than this, don’t think we aren’t also putting up major funds to make this happen, we just need help in this particular area. Last year we only taught banjo and had over twenty people every day, in fact we had to run it in shifts, we didn’t have enough banjos!!
"Help us bring Bluegrass Music to the dusty masses at Burning Man!! Click Here to donate and to support Black Rock Bluegrass and Camp Rootpile.