top of page

14th annual Joshua Tree Music Festival Arrives this week!


The 14th annual (Spring) Joshua Tree Music Festival dances its way into town May 12 - 15 out at the Joshua Tree Lake Campground. The family-friendly global music experience features musicians from around the globe (Ukraine, South Africa, Morocco, Puerto Rico, India, Pakistan, Canada, Colombia, Australia, and Germany), as well as all around the U.S., including quite a few local hi-desert acts—Tomas de la Noche, TryStates, Megan Hutch, Adobe Collective, Desert Rhythm Project, Cactus Wine Experience, Gene Evaro Jr., and 3rd Ear Experience). In addition to a great musical line up Thursday through Sunday, there’s Kidsville, Family Camp, yoga and healing classes, the Positive Vibration Station (including hi-dez locals Phillip Rosenberg and the JTMF Kazoo Orchestra, and Mojave Shakti), Catherine Svehla, and Jewels & Johnny). The Joshua Tree Astronomy Theatre will be there as well, to share our desert night sky with festival folk.

Barnett English & the Joshua Tree Music Fest

(from our sister publication, The Joshua Tree Tortoise Telegraph)

All photos by Mike Smalley

When the first Joshua Tree Music Festival was announced, I remember wondering who was the clearly crazy person trying to launch an event of that size and scope out here in the hi-desert? I’ve organized events before and there’s an awful lot more to producing them than most people realize. So much so, in fact, that they’re daunting to even contemplate. Barnett English was the crazy man, and I’m happy to note that his madness has caught on, with the now bi-annual fall and spring Joshua Tree Music Festivals celebrating the 14th anniversary of the original spring festival in May. Barnett and his experienced crew of staff and volunteers, has made the festival one of the very top cultural events of the hi-desert, equaled really, only by the annual Hwy 62 Art Tours in scope. The first few years of the festival established the look and feel that has become its hallmark. It’s everything Coachella is not: smaller, informal, relaxed and relaxing, friendly, accessible, and fun without long lines, ticket fees the size of mortgage payments, and people on stage the size of ants. It’s far more like someone from Joshua Tree is hosting a party out in the desert, than what Coachella is—LA hosting a party for LA out in the suburban desert. That’s not to knock Coachella. They’ve done a great job doing what they do, but hey, this is Joshua Tree, and this isn’t some giant corporate shindig. This is the dream of one driven man and those who love the dream along with him. And as a result, Barnett’s not making quite as much money as Goldenvoice, and his festivals aren’t packed with 100,000 people either. “It’s an organic growth. I never had any money to speak of. Ever. I still don’t. Which is kind of good. It kept me from ruining it at the beginning,” Barnett explained. “If I had a bunch of money I would have advertised everywhere, had a bunch of people that didn’t know each other come out and make a mess and had all these things I didn’t need. But this way, the crowd has really, a lot of festivals say it, but this one this really is the case, this crowd has grown organically. It’s made it amazing.” As far as Coachella goes, Barnett puts his festival on the other end of the scale. “It really is just the antithesis of it, he said. “I started the festival initially because I love music, but the main thing is when people get together outdoors for music over three days, it really does make a magical experience. Like you leave on Monday saying, ‘Oh my God, I just met three of my best new friends, ever.’ It’s really about connecting with people, in this shared experience of being outdoors, that lifts it up. “That you can’t really get at Coachella,” he explained. “You go to Coachella and you’re with your one group of four people and then you’re texting each other every five minutes because you’re lost. So it’s not really a, hey, let’s go meet Steve and hang out with him all day, go back to his camp, cook dinner together thing. That doesn’t happen. That really is the main thing. It really is about an experience with people together. Barnett’s system of finding bands from around the world for the festival has evolved, and while the festival isn’t big enough to fly bands over to perform from around the world, he brings in a significant number of international acts while they are on tour in the United States. I remember watching a band, from Nigeria I believe, eating broken glass on stage while performing, and thinking they had come a long way to get to Joshua Tree to eat glass and play music in front of a few thousand people. “Now at Coachella I see bands we had years ago,” Barnett said, explaining how he finds the bands for the Joshua Tree Music Festival. “There’s always four or five I know from another festival. I’m constantly listening to music. During the winter, I wake up at 4 a.m. and sit here listening with my headphones on. Now I’m getting 50 or 60 e-mails a day from artists that I don’t know, on top of all the ones I already know. “Or reading blogs, or looking at every other music festival in the world. Looking at their line ups. “It’s kind of what I’ve been doing since I was 12 years old buying albums with my brother, sharing the cost, collecting albums, making tapes, all through growing up,” he noted. “It has evolved into a live mix tape basically.” “I got in the habit of it (getting up at 4 a.m.) the last four years and I love it,” Barnett explained. “I get more done between four and seven, and the rest of the stuff I get done during the day is like gravy. It’s become a time of day that’s freakin’ awesome. I love it. You see the sunrise out here. Everybody’s got their times. The musical styles of the bands that play at the festival are wide-ranging, to say the least. Asked about the enormous variety of music you can encounter at the festival, Barnett said the mix is definitely intentional. “I’d go to all these other festivals in the last 23 years, I think it’s somewhere between six and seven hundred music festivals, and I’d go to a bluegrass festival, and I love bluegrass as much as the next guy, but after three-and-a-half days of it, I’m not so sure I love it any more,” he explained. “Same with a reggae festival. Or blues festival. But when you mix it all together throughout the course of the day, it might be awesome to listen to four violins and a cello at 10 a.m. by the coffee bar, but by 9 o’clock at night, there’s a hard hitting New Orleans funk band going. “It makes sense as it progresses through the day that the sequencing of the music changes,” he continued. “I put a lot of thought into it. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Huh, heavy metal at two in the afternoon when everybody wants to nap? Not so great. It’s definitely intentional to try to make it diverse. It’s much more fun that way, I think. “It’s really kind of funny, I heard Trampled by Turtles, a really good bluegrass band, and I had a 20 year-old come up to me, ‘I had no idea you could dance to bluegrass.’ He’s exhausted. They go hyper speed.” One thing about the Joshua Tree Music Festival that makes it unique is its setting at the Joshua Tree Lake Campground, and the relationship between the festival and the campground. “In the morning there’ll be someone starting on the Cafe Stage, it’s right there in the bowl still,” Barnett said. “It kind of starts there, then goes to the main stages. That’s one unique thing about this festival is we have the festival grounds. When I say we, I mean Sally and Ken who own the property, have generously basically gifted me five acres of land and said build what you want, make it cool, keep doing the festival and let’s work together. “Because they’ve gifted us this land, we are able to build the stage and take our time on it and leave it,” he added. “Other festivals have to have union employees, 500 of them, with lifts, and cranes, doing it all that stuff. I can’t imagine doing all that work. “It has gotten to the point where we have six or seven folks helping us all year,” Barnett continued. “During the festival itself, there are probably 50 people who are all paid and are managing some aspect of it. Then there’s a 180 volunteers for the weekend, and then 120 volunteers before the festival starts, helping prep and build. Then there’s 150 people out spreading posters around. “We have some people who have helped so many times now, this will be our 24th time now doing the festival, and there are some people who have been with us all 24 festivals, and others for 15, others for 10,” he added. “With all those people in charge, they don’t really have any questions they can’t answer. “When you start adding up all those people, and all the vendors, then all the visual artists who have put stuff up—that’s another thing that really connects the crowd—all those people feel invested. Even the kid that comes out and paints the wall. He feels ownership of it. It is kind of community-centric, that’s a lot of people, and most of them are from the greater area here.” The festival has evolved to the point now that throughout there are all kinds of yoga and healing workshops, children’s activities, art installations, a great roster of vendors and food booths, and more. It has many of the offerings of larger festivals while retaining its small, accessible, casual feel. “It’s been really cool,” Barnett said of the involvement of the hi-desert community and artists with the festival. “Every time I run into somebody, they say, ‘Hey, I have this idea.’ I’m pretty sure we’ll do it. It’s really great, every time we get more local people saying, ‘Can I bring it out there?’ Absolutely.” And there’s still room to grow. “There’s probably 4,000 population total,” he explained. “We still have room to sell more tickets, which would be nice since I basically keep spending everything we get on it. We basically pour everything into it. I have since the beginning. A good friend of mine described it recently, she’s like 75 years old, and she’s like, ‘You’ll never make money on it. You love it too much.’ That’s a good way of putting it. I never heard it put that way.” Asked whether he had a single favorite festival, Barnett answered with the enthusiasm that has made all these years of the Joshua Tree Music Festival such a success. “The one we’re having right now,” he noted. “And before that, the previous one. I just enjoy them all. I really do. They’re all their own separate animals and take on their own life. “The first time I came to Joshua Tree I went to a party, and literally, there were like 25 people there. After dinner everybody picks up an instrument and 23 out of the 25 are really accomplished, and then there’s me with a tambourine. “This last fall there were so many bands from Joshua Tree and the cool thing was the people in the audience and the other artists were all commenting on that. ‘Where are they from?’ they’d ask. ‘They’re from right behind that rock.’ It kind of blew their minds that all these people live in Joshua Tree. It really is an artist town.

When you’re out at the Joshua Tree Music Festival, keep a look out for this guy. He’s armed—with cameras—and does a great job of capturing images of life at the festival. His name is Mike Smalley and he shot all the festival photos for this story. If you want to get an online feel for what the festival is like, please check out Mike’s festival gallery: www.mikeysphotoart.com/joshuatreemusicfestival.

Thanks Mike!

bottom of page