The tubing business has been a constant wellspring (well, except that one year they banned alcohol on the Apple River). The once-prevalent row of strip clubs came and went (well, except that one out on Hwy. 35). The old liquor laws are definitely changed (that one crazy era when 18-year-old Twin Citians could drive across the border to drink).
For those reasons and more, the rural western Wisconsin town of Somerset has long been on the radar for young Minnesota fun-seekers. Arguably the one thing that kept it a hotbed of hedonistic activity in the '90s and early '00s, however, was the concert business. But even that slowed to a trickle in recent years.
The muddy heavy-metal festivals of old dried up around 2005. A costly country music fest held there the past three years finally went belly up last year. Were it not for Jack Johnson, who has played River's Edge four times in recent years, Somerset likely would have lost its place on the back of concert T-shirts.
Now comes a hip, two-day indie-rock festival that's part of a bold reinvention of Somerset's tubers + tents + ticketed-concerts formula.
Next weekend's SoundTown Festival is Somerset's first big concert of the year. It's also the first event ever hosted by Matt Mithun, the 34-year-old son of Minneapolis advertising mogul Ray Mithun, who bought up the 60-acre Float-Rite Park amphitheater grounds last year as well as an adjacent 100-acre plot of farmland. He hopes to turn the two properties into the one big haven for music festivals and other big campout events.
"There was already a lot of groundwork and infrastructure here for hosting concerts," Mithun said. "It would've been a shame to see it go to waste."
If it succeeds, SoundTown could introduce a new generation of music fans to the scenic river town and its colorful history. Here is a primer for those newbies on its sometimes rocky past.
1938 (down the tubes): While local legends vary, the most often-cited account of the first professional tubing business in the former logging town begins around this time at the Terrace nightclub and restaurant on the Apple River. Then a plug in Life magazine in '38 really opened the floodgates.