DULUTH — For the past two years, Scott "Starfire" Lunt has spent his birthday in a relatively modest way — though anything would be considered modest compared to celebrating with a weeklong music festival, as he has done for decades.
In 2020, he hung out with a small group in Chester Bowl, where the annual kickball match between local rock 'n' rollers had been canceled. Last year he played a alongside his longtime bandmates from Father Hennepin beneath a tent on the grounds of Earth Rider Brewery.
"It's going to be weird seeing big rooms full of people," said Lunt, who started Homegrown Music Festival in the late 1990s to celebrate turning 30. Then he kept going. It has grown to eight days of music, visual and performing arts, secret shows, poetry and kickball at dozens of venues in Duluth and neighboring Superior, Wis. — though Lunt has since handed off organization to a committee.
Festival organizers scrapped in-person plans in 2020, facing the threat of COVID-19. Some musicians got creative, most notably one who wasn't even originally signed up for a Homegrown set. Folky bluesman Charlie Parr played for 90 minutes in an mostly empty cidery — a performance still available on YouTube. More online-based festival events followed in 2021, with organizers creating blocks of submitted music videos and musician interviews.
"It wasn't the same," festival director Melissa LaTour admitted, "but it was the best we could do with the situation. We tried to create excitement."
LaTour and her team made the call in mid-November: this year's Homegrown Music Festival would be in person. Probably. But things can change by the hour, she has learned.
This year's festival opened at noon Sunday at the Duluth Public Library Plaza with a lineup of kid-friendly shows like a sing-along with Dan the Monkey Man, who provides bins of instruments and microphones so his young audience can jam along. (Lunt's alt-country band played Monday at Duluth Cider.)
In keeping with the mystique of the event that has seen pop-up shows by Trampled by Turtlesand Black-eyed Snakes in past years, Duluth Entertainment Convention Center officials recently dropped news of a Tuesday night after-party. After a handful of shows in its Harbor Side Ballroom, Cars & Trucks, a local favorite rock trio fronted by Tony Bennett, will play Symphony Hall.
