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Stealing the show
Described as a cross between The Everly Brothers and The Rolling Stones, the Ruen Brothers Band had the audience at the 2019 SpringSkunk Music Fest gathered around the stage and dancing like no one was watching.
Photo by John Gillespie
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Master of ceremonies
With a small army of friends and volunteers at his side, SkunkFest founder Glynn “Zig” Zeigler has grown a large barbecue for friends into one of the best underground music events in the Carolinas.
Photo by John Gillespie
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Stage craft
Over the years, SkunkFest organizers have expanded the outdoor stage to include a dance floor and plenty of Americana touches.
Photo by John Gillespie
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All that jazz
They might have been overdressed for the occasion, but the Canadian folk jazz trio David Myles won the SkunkFest family’s heart at the spring event.
Photo by John Gillespie
To get skunk-bit, you first have to travel north of Greer, through the rolling farmlands at the foot of the Blue Ridge Foothills. A few signs—hand-painted on weathered barn wood—will show you the way, with arrows pointing toward SkunkFest, but when you get there, you might know it by the smell.
Which, thankfully, is not the odor of Mephitis mephitis—that species of Pepé Le Pew—but instead a heady blend of incense and wood smoke. Or, more likely, you’ll know you’ve arrived by the sight of hundreds of Skunkers in a grove of oak trees in front of a stage, yelling out their signature cry: “Fest-aa-vul!”
It may seem, at first, like an unlikely place to host two of South Carolina’s best and most hidden music events—the Albino Skunk Music Festival (aka SkunkFest, scheduled this year for Oct. 3–5) and SpringSkunk Music Fest (typically held each April). But then you remember that Woodstock was held at a farm in the middle of nowhere, New York. That Burning Man and Coachella take place in deserts. That Bonnaroo happens every summer in a Tennessee farm town off I-75. And you realize that the out-of-the-way and the hard-to-find is the only real location that makes sense for the free-spirited.
The smile factory
SkunkFest started in 1995 as a gathering among friends who shared a common love of bluegrass music, recalls founder Glynn Zeigler, known affectionately to everyone by his “skunk name” of “Zig.”
“I said, ‘Let’s have a party, barbecue some chicken, and just play music and bring the wives over or whatever on a Friday night,’” he says. “I’d been to MerleFest. They had a raccoon as their mascot. I said, ‘Well I’m just gonna call this thing a festival for the heck of it.’ And we’d seen a white skunk on the property.”
At the first annual SkunkFest, they had three bands playing on a plywood stage for an invited crowd of around 60 people. But Zig, who worked for a construction company in Greenville, did what some of the best musicians do—he began improvising as he went along. He added the spring festival, and he sought out bands that run the gamut from bluegrass (in all its forms) to Americana, roots, folk, singer-songwriter and alt-country.
“I decided I wanted to get more touring bands. Of course, that costs money, so we started charging admission,” he says. “Six or eight bands, and you come and have a good old time out there under the trees. It just kind of kept growing. It just grew about as organic as we can.”
They brought in vintage campers to use for offices and musicians’ lodging. They brought in singer-songwriters on Friday night. Zig assembled a volunteer team of “Skunk Boys” (the brotherhood that helps him maintain and improve the facilities year-round) and “Skunk Birches” (the sisterhood that helps sell tickets, update the website, reserve RV spots and do just about everything else under the sun).
“From the start, I just decided to have fun with the festival,” he says. “We decided to start doing themes with the Skunkers just because we could. It’s just a creative outlet, I guess. ‘Planet of the Skunks’ and ‘Keep on Skunkin’ and ‘Skunkin on Top of the World,’ ‘Skunk-Powered Aeroplane,’ you name it.”
And name it they do. Like any close-knit community, the Skunkers have their own lingo full of “Skunk-worthy” names and music puns. The children are the Skunksters. The wood pile is called Woodstock Too. The chefs in the food trucks are the Hill Grillies.
They say that if you build it, they will come. But if you are a builder like Zig, and you have built something this community-minded and special, they keep coming. The organic coffee-roasters and the burrito-rollers, the tie-dyers, the bumper-sticker-sellers, the portrait artists, the chalk artists, the puppeteers, the woman with a mobile of paper butterflies attached to a surf-casting rod—as well as, of course, their kids and their dogs.
They gather ’round their tents and RVs, their pop-up campers and their lean-tos, their VW vans and graffitied school buses. They tote folding chairs down to the stage. Some knit or color in coloring books while listening to the music. Others head-bob and sip beers. Some go up close to the stage and dance like nobody’s watching.
“We’re kind of a smile factory,” says Zig. “If you walk around out there, anywhere you go, walking up a trail or backstage or onstage or in a sitting area, everybody’s smiling.”
Stay long enough at SkunkFest and you realize his positivity is infectious. It runs down from Zig and on out through the people, who all form a chorus singing the festival’s praises.
John Sconlon, a puppeteer walking an alligator puppet like a dog, says: “This is the perfect size for what we do and what we enjoy. Small music festivals like these are our festivals of choice.”
Stewart Prather, a vendor and artist, engaged in a friendly debate about the origins of the “Just Say Know” bumper-sticker quote, adds: “There’s just good vibes and lots of groovy people. Here it’s small, local, family-friendly.”
A guy in tie-dye says to another guy in tie-dye: “It’s like we died and went to heaven, isn’t it?”
Skunk-bit
Maybe all the talk will sound to you like everyone here has taken a bite from a communal poppy plant. Or that they’ve read so many bumper stickers they now speak exclusively in quotable hippy quips. But here’s something I discovered: maybe you can’t be converted—maybe you can’t become “skunk-bit”—if you’re not initially skeptical. Otherwise, there’s no story to tell.
I arrive in late April to the SpringSkunk Music Fest in what I consider an unusual way to attend a music festival—alone. Plus, to be honest, my past experience at music festivals has meant big crowds, long lines, dirty Porta-Johns. I once spent the saddest Easter weekend of my life camping in Suwannee, Florida, at a music festival after my college girlfriend broke my heart. There, I woke up one morning in my tent to a guy handing me a chocolate Easter bunny, and that was enough for me. Also, I’ve recently seen two documentaries about the infamous Fyre Festival—that beleaguered con job of a “luxury music festival,” which left attendees stranded and angry in the Bahamas.
So, forgive me for my opening doubts, which might account for why I park my station wagon in the farthest northeastern corner of the campgrounds in The Quiet Zone (lights out after 10 p.m.), and why I set up my camp next to a pasture where two horses graze. It’s why I’m wearing a button-up shirt, for crying out loud.
Fast-forward to the end of Day Two, as if waking from a crazy dream, and I’m wearing a tie-dye T-shirt. I haven’t bathed and don’t feel the need to. I’ve cried out “Fest-aa-vul” so many times that I’m hoarse. Nevertheless, as I wander (not lost!) in the morning to get my breakfast burrito and my organic coffee, I’m waving to my friends who have welcomed me into their campsites with food and drink. People I’ve listened to strum guitars until the wee hours, and with whom I’ve ridden around on golf carts spouting such truths as one Birch named Butterbean spouted: “I think it’s the love, the blood, sweat, and tears of making an infrastructure based on love and music!”
Later I’ll ask how it happened—when, exactly, I was bitten by the skunk—but the question is stupid when the answer is so obvious. As in, the answer is right there, in the festival’s name.
As in, duh. It’s the music. The harmonic, foot-stomping, smile-inducing music.
Musicians need fans, fans need music
“People always say, ‘How do you get these bands?’ Zig says. “And I tell them it’s like when I was a kid, and I collected arrowheads. To collect arrowheads, you have to go looking for them! Before YouTube and all that, I would try to catch bands live and see what kind of show it is. Generally speaking, they have to have some really good harmonies.”
There’s also the fact that this festival has only one stage. You don’t get the anxiety that you’re missing out on some other band elsewhere, the way I felt once at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, when Van Morrison and Pearl Jam played at the same time, on opposite ends of the festival grounds.
“I went to MerleFest,” says Zig, of the 13-stage festival held in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, “and I said to someone I was sitting in camp with, I said, ‘This schedule, you know what it’s for? It’s for you to see who you’re missing!’”
At SkunkFest, though, because bands play in such an intimate setting for multiple days, by Day Two you recognize the songs. Sometimes you even begin to sing along. You carry the names of the bands—Oliver Hazard, the Ruen Brothers, Ida Mae, Lula Wiles, The War and Treaty—with you out into the world, recommending them to everyone you meet.
This is important because, as Zig explains, in “this day and age, where there are so many festivals popping up, festivals are becoming an important part of a musician’s ability to make a living, with all the streaming and all that.”
And the bands love it. They make their way to the backstage area on a trolley pulled by a tractor, and for many of them, they are in the upswing of their careers. Some bands from past festivals—like The Infamous Stringdusters, The Avett Brothers, and Trampled by Turtles—have gotten so big that they probably won’t be back, Zig says. But that also means you never know just who you’re going to catch.
The slick, English, guitar-heavy, brotherly duo the Ruen Brothers, making their SkunkFest debut, say, “We’ve played lots of festivals. This one is tops.”
And what makes it so is that SkunkFest remains true to its original ethos; it has no big corporate sponsors. They don’t even yet have an allotment of tickets. Still, their sustainability comes in part from Zig’s understanding that the relationship between musician and fan is symbiotic. The musician needs the fan. The fan needs the music.
That’s why he’s added a charity bike ride called deTour de Skunk on Saturday mornings, with proceeds going to various musicians in need. Or why he’s always wanted this to be a family-friendly atmosphere, complete with a hula hoop stand, a baby-changing station tacked onto the barn, a psychedelic school bus usually packed with teenagers, and a Neverland-ish place called KiddieLand.
That way, Zig says, the smile factory will continue cranking them out. Like the music, the good vibes will go onward and outward, and new generations of Skunkers will become skunk-bit.
“The kids love the music, too, and they love the whole carnival atmosphere,” Zig says. “It’s something where, when I’m gone, they’ll be sitting around telling their grandkids about going out to this old farm and how much fun they had.”
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Get There
The 2019 Albino Skunk Music Festival will take place Oct. 3–5 on Glynn Zeigler’s farm property, located at 4063 Jordan Road in Greer.
Bands scheduled to perform include Tim O’Brien, Lindsay Lou, Larry Keel Experience, Upstate, Sugarcane Jane, 8 Ball Aitken, Slocan Ramblers, Tellico, Western Centuries, South Hill Banks, Sol Driven Train, and more. Two bands—The Deadfields and Seven Handle Circus—will be reuniting at SkunkFest.
For tickets, lineups, campsite and RV lot reservations and festival details—including the dates of the 2020 SpringSkunk Music Fest, visit albinoskunk.com.