Welcome to Sandy, Oregon, up Highway 26 past Gresham in eastern Clackamas County, where outer Portland Metro’s sprawl is overtaken by the mountains. We are at Camp Tasty’s, an RV campsite and outdoor event center that can host thousands of people. It’s also the home of a former private plane hangar that has been converted into the primary manufacturing center for Tasty’s Cannabis Edibles, a THC gummy manufacturer.
Look closely at the architecture left behind and you can see traces of this space’s previous life as a private airstrip for small jets. One person at the site told me it used to service various rock stars who would fly into Portland on private jets for big shows. Last weekend, from July 16 through 19, it served a smaller sort of rock star as the annual home of the Shady Pines Festival, a yearly gathering of local musicians, craftspeople, and enthusiasts who come together to literally build their own four-day-long music and art festival.
The Shady Pines Festival is put on by Shady Pines Radio, a freeform group radio station that serves the needs of Portland-area artists and curators on a continuously running stream. Before 2020, Brian Bauer, an audio guy, and his wife Callie Bauer, a photographer, were doing live event production for local music types. When the pandemic hit, they pivoted to a streaming radio project engineered to serve the same population, which soon grew a large community. After the pandemic ended, they directed their efforts towards a festival with DIY vibes and a kicking mainstage sound system.
This was the festival’s fifth year and its best attended. Shady Pines is booked by a large committee, a whopping 17 people who browse and rate more than eight hundred submissions from local musicians using an app one of their volunteers developed in-house. The festival strives for an expansive palette in their booking; metal bands co-mingle with hip-hop and dance acts.
Friday’s lineup was twangy guitar heavy, with Bitches in the Beehive, Brian Bauer’s project Chonk, and Mike Coykendall all strumming on the smaller Barn Owl Stage. Maggie Ray and the Last Wild Ones, who had performed on the small stage in previous years, brought their alt-country singer-songwriter force to the main stage. Ray herself sported a flashy pair of white and red cowboy boots, not the only pair on display.
Later in the day, Palmas Del Sol, a Spanish language cross-cultural polyrhythmic pop band, lit up the main stage. Seeing them in conjunction with the more traditional country adjacent acts, the continuity between Spanish-language popular music idioms and the rootsy American songcraft practiced by Ray was surprisingly apparent. Also striding this line were Federale, an anthem-peddling indie rock band who accentuated their choruses with moves from Spaghetti Western soundtracks.
Night Heron seemed a little like aliens on a rootsier stage, a Steely Dan-infused yacht rock concern with a lot of different singers and two horn players, dressed in pastels and dealing smooth grooves. They were stunning, a blast of aural ketamine in the hot July sun.
The entire space was overrun with cute stuff people constructed for the weekend. A little colorful mushroom garden sat catty corner to the Werewolf Tavern, a robust, fully-operating Dungeons and Dragons-looking tavern made from recycled coffee shipping bags that serves drinks, hosts comedy acts and poetry readings, and gives people Skyrim-style side quests. I never figured out how to finish one, but other people seemed like they understood it.
Across the field was a large installation by Scott Allen and Bobby Coole, called “The Oracle of Mouses,” a “Chello-Graphic Object.” In the evening, three projections were fired onto three screens that rotate around a silver department story dummy, like a media idol from the future. During the day, attendees were also invited to join in on the creativity by building mouse statues, so that the installation would reach its intended audience, which was, according to Allen, mouses (not mice). “It’s a pied piper story. A mouse media story about the perils of mouse media. We are the mouses, the mouses are we.”
The venue offers a variety of stages to fit different musical moods. After a stroll uphill, over a bridge that sits on the edge of a small swamp riddled with bullfrogs who fire off otherworldly sounding croaks in the evening, you see the main stage, sounding fabulous and sporting a handsome lighting rip—clearly professionally built. Right next to the stage, though, there is a handmade UFO themed DJ Booth, just to keep the DIY in balance.
Return to the lower portion of the campground, and see a permanent gazebo hosting their smaller stage. “We just built that Barn Owl Stage,” Brian Bauer told the Mercury, “and before we even used it, someone got married on it. They broke it in for us.”
The vibe at Shady Pines is unusually warm. Usually, when I am tasked with drifting around events like these with a camera around my neck, looking to record interviews, there is a bit of a social hill I need to conquer in order to get someone to actually talk to me. Here, everyone is chatty by default, here to meet people, all that stuff. Most attendees camp, and some bring families, who are rewarded with a surprisingly child-friendly environment. It seems like it’d be tough to keep the friendly vibes and DIY spirit going as a festival like this keeps growing—but if anyone’s going to do it, it just might be Shady Pines.