More Than Just Fun In The Sun

Image by Ben Jones

What started out as a fun camping party with a few friends, quickly grew into the multi-faceted Rainbow Trout Music Festival. Situated on the beautiful Oroseau property (St. Malo) owned by Georges and Florence Beaudry, the festival is centred around great times, great tunes and making great memories with great people.

We caught up with Rainbow Trout Music Festival organizer/co-founder, Will Belford about the fest’s glorious beginnings, its friendly, down-to-earth vibe, and this year’s amazing line-up!

JA: Can you go into the history of the festival? You have a really interesting story of how it all began.
WB: Eight or nine years ago, we were on the hunt for somewhere to go camping. That was it. There wasn’t even an idea of a festival in our mind. We heard about this old quarry to go camp and swim at. We went to go check it out and it was awesome. It was so fun.

With quarries, they have an agreement with the government to lease the land and after their lease is up they need to return the land to a usable state. This place had campsites and more importantly, the quarries that were all deep with crystal, clear water was all well stocked with fish – one of them being rainbow trout!

We had a number of camping trips out there and we decided it would be really fun if we brought some bands out, so we had a camping trip but with live music.

JA: And that sort of snowballed into this huge thing now.                                                                                                  
WB: Yeah. At first, it was less of a festival and more of just a really good idea for a party! It started to snowball after the first one and in the second year, we decided to try a little bit harder, bring out some wood and make a little stage.

In the third year  – this is the big twist in the story – we were getting ready to plan the festival. We had all the organizers ready. But there was a bit of a drought that year. It hadn’t rained at all and there was a travel ban, which meant it was so dry you weren’t allowed to pass through that area because you could start a fire. It was panic mode! “Where are we going to go? Where are we going to have this excellent party?”

Ben Jones, the artistic director, and a couple of his friends sat down in front of a map and just looked for blue spots thinking, where is some water?; because that was the quintessential part of the festival – swimming, fishing, being able to relax and watch music from the water.

They ended up finding another quarry in another location so we hatched a plan. We went a few days early and cleaned up this place. We brought out the stage. The locals were all into it. They were saying ‘I’ll bring you a tent! I’ll bring some firewood! I’ll be right back with my quad!’

On the first day of the festival, representatives from the RM came. What we didn’t realize was that it was actually an active quarry. They were essentially mining in that area, so they kicked us out and the festival was canceled.

Tears were shed. We were so disappointed. Everything we were working towards was canceled. It was at that point that we said we’ll never get canceled again. We needed to find a new permanent home for the festival and that’s how we ended up at Oroseau where we are now.

JA: Can you talk about that lot. The people who own it sound like they have a cool story too.
WB: They do yeah. [The Beaudrys] lived in Winnipeg for quite some time. Florence is a teacher and Georges, for many years, helped plan Festival Du Voyageur.

In their retirement, they decided to go out and find this place at St. Malo. It was basically a little patch of land with river side access. The way it is now they completely made it that way. They made this great big field, which we now use as our camping site.

Basically, when we found them, they were looking for us. We were looking for a home and they were looking for a festival to invite to their land. It was very serendipitous.

 It was very grassroots in the sense that its very beginnings were merely to have fun with your pals and invite anyone who would like to come.

JA: How did you guys actually find each other? 
WB: It was just one of those things. We were casting lines all over the place looking for somewhere with water access within about an hour’s drive of Winnipeg. Keeping it nice and close was part and parcel of the whole deal.

We were asking campgrounds that were already established. No one was really getting back to us. We weren’t getting much traction but [The Beaudrys] actually have a private campsite. They have a huge field which is as big as a soccer field. Then there’s the festival site which is the same size. They have a network of trails. They also offer river access that you can go canoeing, kayaking, and tubing. We were getting in touch with their neighbors. They heard about it and got in touch with us.

For the first time out we invited 30 people or so. We basically did a tour of the land. We said “Okay. We’ll try it out.  We’ll do one year and see how it works.” It went so well that they invited us to come back and said: “you have a home here.”

JA: Was there any other kind of inspiration behind the festival?
WB: To be honest it was very organic. It was very grassroots in the sense that its very beginnings were merely to have fun with your pals and invite anyone who would like to come. As interest got bigger, we realized it was actually the people of Manitoba who wanted this thing to exist.

JA: What’s your favourite part of the festival?WB:
Of course the cornerstone for the whole weekend for me is the open mic. It sort of harkens back to our roots because the first couple of years we would have pals go up and tell jokes – bad jokes, you know groaner jokers – in between bands [laughs]. The open mic now hearkens back to that. Anyone can come. You get five minutes of fame. You go up and do your thing. There’s song, dance, acting, poetry and improvisation. We do it all around Carpet Beach, our little swimming hole on the land.

The experience of seeing a pal go up and do something funny is so fun and alternatively, seeing somebody you’ve never met before going up and doing something amazing. We had three sisters do a song last year. It was just the sweetest thing that I remember from last year. It was just these three sisters doing this song and getting the whole crowd clapping and everyone just falling in love with them. They sang and their voices were just so happy. They were all smiling and everyone in the whole place was just beaming.

It’s just like having an amazingly catered, amazingly comfortable, amazingly entertaining camping trip.

JA: Aw. That’s so nice! I guess then you could touch a bit on the whole festival vibe and atmosphere.
WB: Sometimes I describe it as going on a camping trip with a couple of hundred friends, some of which you haven’t met yet. I say that because the site is quite small. It’s very intimate. So you just bump into the same people because you can’t help it. You have these little festival habits: wake up, go outside. Have a soda water. Walk down to the river and maybe have a swim. Walk up to the food. Get a sticky bun and a cup of coffee and then go over to the music and everyone’s in the same place.

It’s beautiful. It’s just like having an amazingly catered, amazingly comfortable, amazingly entertaining camping trip.

JA: So you’ve touched on food and the music. What else can people do there?
WB: There is a network of trails so you could go on a hike if you wanted. But mostly people watch the music, or they go swimming. You can go swimming in the river but there’s a swimming hole as well. We call it Carpet Beach. It’s basically a nice big pond that is fed by an artesian well so it’s brilliantly cold. We call it Carpet Beach because the first year the land owner made it, he lined all of the outsides with carpet so it wasn’t all mud. The carpet is gone now but the name was too good to lose.

We have artists do a number of things. They’ll do art installations. You know something to be looked at it, whether it be the back of the stage, something hanging from trees, guerrilla art projects or collaborative art, like a huge project like paint by numbers that everyone can add to.

JA: Can you talk about this year’s line-up and who you’re excited to see the most?
WB: Yeah. 3Peat is going to be tight. They played last year and it was so great. They played an afternoon slot and it was just so hot. Everyone was laying down, conserving energy and 3peat hit the stage and everybody got up and onto their feet.

Slow Spirit is really good. I think a lot of them are Brandon School of Music alumni so the musicianship is really fantastic. Smoky Tiger is one for the books. He’s going to be playing the After Hours tent. Every night after the main stage closes down we put on a smaller stage with an artist who brings a bit of a night mode. Nobody knows what he’s going to do next whether it’s an original song or he plays the super Mario Brothers theme and raps over it. Anything goes. It’s really fun.

Another favourite for me has got to be RasTamils. The band has been around for a long time. Their crew has been growing and evolving over the years and I’m really excited. I think they have the biggest band this year. They have like eight members on stage so it’s going to be a super exciting and cool sound!

 

Catch all the action at Rainbow Trout Music Festival 2017, August  18- 20, 2017. Grab your tickets early! 

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