Duluth Homegrown Music Festival

Description

The Homegrown Music Festival is Duluth's annual showcase of rawk and/or roll devil music. It began as a simple birthday party with a handful of bands and a bunch of beer. Now it's a complete bureaucracy, run by a volunteer steering committee and a fiscal agent, featuring well over one hundred musical acts, along with a few filmmakers and other artists -- and a bunch of beer.

Scott "Starfire" Lunt founded the festival in 1999, one year after his infamous 30th birthday party, which served as the unofficial first Homegrown. After growing the festival from 10 bands to over 70, Lunt sold it to Tim and Brad Nelson in 2005.

The Nelsons booked over 90 acts that year, and found the event was becoming too large to manage as a for-profit. So they donated it to the Bridge Syndicate, a local nonprofit organization committed to increasing cultural opportunities in the Twin Ports. In 2006, a steering committee, made up primarily of artists, was put together to organize and run the festival.