The North Pacific String Band
It’s getting warmer in Santa Cruz these days, festival season is brewing and the North Pacific String Band’s Stevee Stubblefield sits in a friend’s courtyard, wrapped around a breakfast beer and a fresh printed poster for an event that ripped through his contact list like a lawn mower a few months ago.
In January, Stubblefield got a call from Jonathan LaBeaud, Assistant Director at Boulder Creek’s Camp Krem. Could Stubblefield and his friends get a three-day festival of local music at the campgrounds together by April?
“I thought about it for a couple days, and basically got to the point where I said ‘hell, we’re young, I have faith that we can do it,’” says Stubblefield. “It was pretty spontaneous, a classic decision on my part to bite off more that
I could chew on a whim. In terms of a logistical standpoint, if you were to ask anyone who plans these things, it would be like, ‘oh yeah you need a year.’”
“Stevee came over and said ‘we’re going to throw this festival in April,’” remembers engineering student and volunteer Zo Morrin, arms crossed in a metal lawn chair next to Stubblefield. “I told him it was going to be insane. That’s so much work.”
The Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) Festival is billing seventeen artists that have been collaborating and networking for years with the loosely organized North Pacific Company, an independent music collective working with headliners at the Crepe Place, Moe’s Alley, Kuumbwa Jazz Center and pretty much every other venue this side of the hill.
“I started North Pacific Company a year ago because I wanted there to be some sort of common thread or place of contact between all of these like minded performers,” explains Stubblefield. “So the second that something like this emerges and we make that call out, everyone is up by their bootstraps and ready to make it happen.”
Dan Pothast and the McCoy Tyler Band approached the company on their own, but half the bands have at least one member that went to high school alongside Stubblefield in San Diego and another quarter of performers were sucked up from time spent in UCSC. Guitarist Saadi Halil saw the North Pacific String Band busking, and told them that when he was in second grade, he actually rode the bus with NPC’s Kendra McKinley.
“We’re bridging the gap,” Stubblefield says. “Like, Dan P and the Bricks is a bad-ass ska band. But they shred. String Quake is going to be doing the revival on Sunday morning, these guys are a harp and cello duet, it’s going to be epic and beautiful.”
Kendra McKinley sits in a house downtown as the afternoon sun starts to sink, stressing that all of the people in the bands are also the ones responsible for lugging their equipment up to the camp and making sure there’s food, security, porta-potties, and coordinated deliveries.
“Stevee is really good at generating, as he would say, ‘stoke’ amongst his friends and other creative communities,” says McKinley, performing vocalist in gypsy jazz band Farouche, as well as her own eponymous group. “All of these bands will be doing it for free.”
A hand drawn map of Camp Krem depicts a quarter mile square if you don’t count the hiking trails, and Morrin admits that some things were more of a hassle than they initially thought.
“I was all, ‘how is the parking going to work for all these people’? And Stevee were kind of like, ‘actually that’s a really good question’.”
So Morrin and Stubblefield spent an afternoon measuring parking spaces.
The ticket cap is set at three hundred, and the music is happening Friday night through Sunday morning. It’s the size of some graduations or Hollywood weddings, alternating between two stages while Stubblefield’s lifeguard buddies supervise the camp pool.
“I don’t feel like Coachella is about to happen in the mountains,” says McKinley. “The way that we’re organizing it really appeals to the SC crowd. It’s just, come on up to the forest, where you can dance for cheap all weekend.”
Stubblefield leans into the patio table and brandishes the black and white poster.
“It’s been a long, short time,” he says. “You know what I mean? Jesus Christ, I just got this two days ago.”
Do It Ourselves Fest
April 26-28, Camp Krem, Boulder Creek
