Talking Amp Jam #1 and Funky Decisions with Paul Levine [Interview]
Festival promoter, music aficionado, and arts enthusiast Paul Levine is inextricably linked to the Spirit of Suwannee Music Park in Live Oak, FL and the magic created there. For the better part of two decades, Levine has been the force behind such legendary boutique music festivals as Bear Creek Music & Arts Festival, Purple Hatter’s Ball, A Feast of Funk and Soul Food, Suwannee Rising, and the mammoth Suwannee Hulaween, which he co-produces with longtime collaborator Michael Harrison Berg.
His latest project, Suwannee Amp Jam #1, is set to go off March 6-8 and promises to revive the communal spirit and funky tenor of the much loved Bear Creek Music and Arts Festival, which ran from 2007 until 2014, while cross-pollinating it with a touch of The Wanee Festival, SOSMP’s fabled extravaganza hosted by the late Greg Allman, Butch Trucks, and The Allman Brothers Band. The first in an upcoming series of intimate festivals focusing on SOSMP’s rarefied Amphitheater Stage, Amp Jam #1 will be led by frequent Wanee headliners Gov’t Mule. This will be the band’s first appearance back at the park since playing Wanee in 2017.
Frequent SOSMP fliers and Bear Creek alumni Dumpstaphunk, Lettuce, Shak Nasti, The New Mastersounds’ frontman Eddie Roberts (who will perform with his side project Eddie Roberts & The Lucky Strokes), and The Legendary JC’s will also be there. Joining them will be up-and-coming jam band Eggy, and funk/soul collective Diggin’ Dirt, and Miami-based psychedelic fusion magicians Electric Kif — all stand out performers at recent Hulaweens.
Widely anticipated highlights include an appearance by The Headhunters, the legendary jazz/funk ensemble who lent their name and talents to Herbie Hancock’s seminal work Headhunters released in 1973. Another is a reprise of The Daze Between Band, an all-star supergroup featuring a rotating cast of luminaries who typically hold court in New Orleans between the two weekends of The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Led by three-time Grammy award winner Eric Krasno, Amp Jam’s incarnation will feature SOSMP veterans and New Orleans icons George Porter Jr. and Ivan Neville along with groundbreaking jazz fusion guitarist Jon Scofield, supreme trumpeter and vocalist Jennifer Hartswick, Crescent City-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, singer, and songwriter Ari Teitel and surprise guests.
With anticipation building for what is sure to be an outstanding event, MFN got to talk to Levine about Amp Jam #1, making magic at SOSMP, and creating an extraordinary music community. The following interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
MFN: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, Paul. Before we get to Amp Jam, I’d like to talk a little bit about your background and how you found your way into the music industry You got your start in the hospitality industry in Aspen, Colorado. Is that correct?
PL: I guess that’s where it started. I personally think it started when I started seeing the Grateful Dead.
MFN: When did you see them first?
PL: July 4th, 1987 – Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead in Foxboro (Massachusetts). Truth be told, it was my least favorite of maybe 100 shows I’ve seen.
MFN: You were actually booking shows in college. Back then, what did The Dead teach you about the music community?
PL: Yeah, there was overlap there. I went to school at Lehigh (University), which was a great place to go to school if you like seeing Grateful Dead concerts because there’d be a spring tour, a fall tour, a summer tour. Each of them would be in our neck of the woods. So we could rack up 20 shows a year without trying because they played not far from us at the Brendan Byrne Arena, Giant Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Philly Spectrum, D.C., Albany.
There was one year we went to The Cap Center. It’s probably ’89 or ’88, and they opened up the KOA Campground in Landover, MD. It was in March, and it had been mothballed for the winter, and they opened it up for The Dead shows. The whole campground was just a bunch of Deadheads and turned into a place of commerce — an active community in the campground. I never forgot that. You know, how everybody specialized in something. This person was selling this and this person was selling that. It was fascinating.
And so, I learned a lot there over the years and then went to college where I convinced my fraternity and a couple of other fraternities to give me a little bit of money to put on an event on a farm. We ended up having these farmhouse parties and they were great.
Then I moved to Aspen after college, and I was there for a few years. Me and some people, we opened up a little cafe, coffee shop, and started having music. That’s kind of how it picked up, you know.
MFN: So how did you find your way back to the East Coast?
PL: After eight years in Colorado, the business stopped and ran its course, and I moved to Austin for a year. Then I moved to South Carolina to help a friend of mine reopen an old bar in Myrtle Beach, and we started having music down there.
Then I moved to D.C. for a year and helped start a festival in West Virginia called the Mid-Atlantic Music Experience. And then in ’93, or it must have been ’94, my friend Cameron Williams, who was a friend of mine from Aspen and also the lead guitar player of the band Tishamingo, connected me with a young lady in Quincy, Florida, which is outside of Tallahassee, who was starting a nonprofit. The company was gonna focus on music and music education and stuff like that. So I moved to Florida to start the Down on the Farm Festival in 2004.
MFN: Quincy was going to be the original spot for Bear Creek but that never happened because of permitting issues. Right?
PL: Yes, that’s where the original Bear Creek was supposed to be, in Quincy at a property that my old partner Lyle Williams had purchased. It was a beautiful nature preserve. A month out, the board of county commissioners revoked or denied the permit, even though we’d had three years of success with Down on the Farm, which was not at the same place.
So a month out from that show, we moved to Suwannee. Miraculously James Cornett allowed us to come with such a short notice.
MFN: And a legend was born – Bear Creek. Regretfully, I never got to experience Bear Creek, but everyone I know who’s gone put it near the top of music festival experiences. Many fans would like to see it come back in some form. That’s where Amp Jam comes in.
PL: Bear Creek was a work of art, not necessarily a smart business decision. You know, back when you could do things and not lose your house necessarily if things didn’t go well. It’s a different time now.
It was five stages, and it was art and it was a community. It was a time and place too. A lot of people have said, “Well, bring back Bear Creek!” And it’s like, well, you really can’t do that. You can bring back something that’s called Bear Creek, but it’s not the same. The reason is that there were a lot of factors in it, like my age, the age of the bands, the age of the people who were enjoying that music and developing that community. A lot of us were coming of age then, and now we’re all old. We’re not gonna go back and do the same thing.
Plus everything costs more. So the economics would be different. If you wanted to do something different, it wouldn’t be with the same players. So bringing it back just kind of doesn’t make sense to me. But you can bring back something with the spirit of it.
MFN: Which brings me to my next question. With Amp Jam, it’s clear to me that you’re purposefully bringing back the spirit of Bear Creek, including bringing back many of the same artists who appeared there and at other festivals at Suwannee. When did it come into your head to do a smaller-scale festival like this?
PL: I mean, it’s always been there. I’m always ready to do that kind of stuff. It should be noted that this is equally, or maybe not equally, also kind of throwback to Wanee. Obviously Gov’t Mule played every single one and essentially hosted the festival in that Warren was a member of the Allman Brothers as well. Dumpstaphunk probably also played every one. You know, The New Mastersounds played Wanee once, I think. Eric Krasno played Wanee. I’m not sure if Scofield was ever there, but George Porter Jr. certainly played Wanee plenty of times.
MFN: And then, of course there’s Hulaween, which is a whole other animal. But there’s some crossover there too.
PL: We created Hulaween. I love Hulaween. I think it’s an incredible event, but it’s not for everybody. We have a lot of bands at Hulaween that played Bear Creek or played Wanee. But that doesn’t mean the people that went to Bear Creek are all interested in a show like Hulaween, though a lot of them are.
You know, a lot of the festivals in the country now have become more focused on electronic music or multi-genre kind of situations. So they’re all over the place to try to please everybody and then, in some ways, not pleasing anybody.
The community at the park is a lot of people who went to Wanee and went to Bear Creek over the last number of years and have longed for something. We scratched that itch a little bit with Suwannee Rising for a minute. But that was a show that was being produced by the park. The park doesn’t love being the promoter. They like being the venue. That was a great show, but it was more like a placeholder. It’s been a few years since Rising’s been around. That community of people is more like the Wanee community.
I do think the Bear Creek community has been serviced to some degree by Resonate a little bit, or by Hulaween, or whatever. But a lot of the Wanee crowd really didn’t have anything that they could dig their teeth into — maybe the roots and bluegrass festivals. Some of those people would love that, but not everybody. That’s not everybody’s cup of tea either. So, there’s something for those people that just love, love those crunchy jams, and they love their grooves really funky. And you know that they wanna see people on stage playing great live shows but also interacting with each other — having each other play on each other’s sets.
One of the great things about Bear Creek was that there was a very fine line between the audience and the fans — that everybody were friends. And it wasn’t an ego situation. I mean, there was some ego, of course, in that everybody was trying to outdo each other on stage, Every guest appearance and every solo was better than the last and so, it was just this energy that just kept rising. By the end of the weekend, everyone was exhausted and blissed out in a special way. That’s what we’re hoping to achieve again.
Bear Creak 2013. Video Credit: FunkItBlog
MFN: The community you’ve created throughout your storied career is a magnificent thing to witness. There’s a genuine feeling of family, inclusion, and community at you shows and beyond. You and your partners have built it well over a decade’s time, and it’s huge. Yet you still manage to maintain a sense of transparency with fans. Everybody considers you part of that family for better or for worse. You’re intertwined with this community close enough that you personally attend to people’s questions and comments on social media and in person. You personally cater to each and every customer. I’m sure your hospitality background plays into that a bit. So is that kind of interaction part of a business model? Or is it just something that happened organically?
PL: I think it’s more organic. I see music festivals very similarly to restaurants. The restaurant business essentially started in somebody’s kitchen. It’s like, I invited you to my house to have a meal and an experience. You’re at my house and I’m gonna try to give you the best experience possible. I’m gonna try to feed you well and make you comfortable and all those things. That grew into the restaurant business, and I see the the music festival business exactly the same way. It’s extremely personal.
I think the problem with music festivals and corporate music festivals is they’re not personal. They don’t answer individual questions. Everybody, in my opinion, everybody has different issues. Every problem is a different problem, even though they’re similar sometimes. People have real lives and real problems, and they deserve an answer. I always learned that it’s okay to say “no” to somebody. But give them a good reason why you’re saying “no.” Don’t just say “no”. You know people people accept “no” if you give them a real good answer even if they don’t like your answer. They appreciated that you’re honest with them.
MFN: Amp Jam will be a smaller, more intimate festival with some amazing artists on the lineup from the Wanee and Bear Creek days and a few new ones. I’m particularly looking forward to The Headhunters — a stroke of genius I might add — and The Daze Between Band. While curating this lineup, who are some your favorites that you’ll be looking forward to?
PL: Well, one thing before I do that, it should be noted that back in the day at Bear Creek, I would often call up Adam Deitch and Eric Krasno, Ivan Neville, Adam Smirnoff and people like that. I mean, friends of mine, of course, but brilliant musicians, and say, “Hey! Who do you guys want to play with?” That’s how the strategy was.
That’s how we ended up getting The Roots (Bear Creek 2013). I mean, not that we wouldn’t have tried, but like, each year, we kind of had a theme. One year we had the JB Horns, and then they ended up playing with Lettuce. One year was The Roots, one year was Bootsy (Collins). It was those guys that did that, and they were younger at that point, right? We all were. Who were their heroes, and who did they want to play with? And that’s how a lot of those things happened.
That’s how The Headhunters ended up at Amp Jam. Some of that same kind of thing is going on, you know; I still talk to those guys even when we’re booking Hulaween or whatever and say, “Hey! What are you guys digging? Hey! If you guys are coming to this, what do you think about us doing this?”
And they’d say, “Well, what about this?”
Deitch said, “Hey, we should have The Head Hunters this year.”
I was like, of course we should. You know, because he wants to play with (Headhunters drummer) Mike Clark. So that’s how a lot of those things are really collaborations, and this one as well. But in terms of this show, gosh, I mean, literally every band on the bill is one of my favorite bands.
I’m excited to see the Florida bands back at the park. I’m so excited to see The Legendary JC’s again. It’s been a long time. Their lead singer, Eugene Snowden, is just one of the greatest performers ever. But he had a stroke a year ago. So, to be able to see him back on the Amphitheater Stage doing his thing is gonna be a beautiful moment for many people, including myself.
Same thing with Shak Nasti. Some of those guys have had some medical struggles in the last year or two. You know, we’re doing a lot and we’re honoring the roots of the Florida music scene with those bands and Electric Kif too. And even with Eddie Roberts’ band with the Galbraith girls in his band; I mean, I consider them a Florida band. So there’s deep roots in the festival in the Florida music scene and in the New Orleans music scene and the jam scene.
And I can’t wait to see Diggin Dirt again. They played Hulaween one year. They were just fantastic and they have that great kind of laid back. California, almost Sly (& the Family Stone), soul, funk kind of stuff. It’s really awesome.
Of course, Eddie’s band is fantastic, and I’m thrilled to have Eggy back for two nights. I think Eggy is proving to be really one of the great up-and-coming jam bands in our world. And I think they have staying power. I think they’re gonna be around for a long time, and they’re gonna continue to grow in popularity. We’re having them for two nights, and they’re gonna headline Thursday night and close it down that night. I think it’s gonna be really wonderful. I’m really excited about that.
Of course, I’m excited to see Lettuce and Dumpstaphunk. They’re literally two of my favorite bands of all time. But you know, Warren Haynes hasn’t back to the Spirit of the Suwannee since, I don’t know, maybe 2015, maybe the last Wanee. It’s going to be beautiful.
And then there’s being able to honor George Porter with all of our friends; to have John Scofield there; and Jen Hartwick and Krasno and all of these great friends of our community — big parts of it. Of course, with Scofield, he did a whole record with Warren. And who knows what they’ll do? He’s toured with Lettuce, and then Deitch was in his band. There’s so much history in all the stuff that’s going on.
MFN: So, Amp Jam will the first in a series. Can you give us a preview of what to expect in the future?
PL: I guess it’s really hard to say. The original intention for Amp Jam and the reason we called it number one is it’s essentially what it is. It’s just a show at the amphitheater. It’s a single stage event but that really can happen any time. So like, I’m not sure that Amp Jam number two is gonna be in March of 2026. Amp number two could be in August of 2025. It could be in November.
Amp Jam isn’t necessarily associated with a date. It isn’t even necessarily associated with a genre of music. We could do an Amp Jam with Greensky (Bluegrass) and Leftover Salmon and a couple other bluegrass bands, right? Or, we could do it with country music. We could do it with reggae music.
Of course, we’re gonna keep doing some of these with jam and funk and keep that going. So, I’m not exactly sure when the next one’s gonna be. We wanted to get through the first one, see how it felt, see how the numbers work out, and then look at it and say, “Alright. This makes sense, or this doesn’t make sense,” and then go from there.
Tickets are still available for Amp Jam #1 via the festival’s official website. For more information, click on the links below.
Amp Jam #1
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