Umphrey’s McGee at the 2007 Green Apple Music Festival in Chicago. Photo by flyin’ dutchman on Flickr, licensed under the Creative Commons.
The Green Apple Music Festival comes pretty close to hippie perfection. With free performances in eight cities across America on Earth Day, the festival combines an environmental message with live bands, ranging from The Roots to O.A.R. Representing an impressive feat of musical organization, the man responsible for the festival is independent filmmaker and music industry mogul Peter Shapiro, Communication ‘95.
A native of New York City, Shapiro developed a love for film in high school that would push him to apply early to Northwestern as a Radio/Television/Film major. On campus, he became a member of Phi Kappa Psi and joined the Ultimate Frisbee team that he would ultimately become captain of during his senior year. But it is his love of music, he said, as developed over his junior and senior years, that came to define the rest of his achievement at Northwestern.
“I started to go to see jam bands in bars like Otis’s, the Cubby Bear [and] the Vic,” said Shapiro. “I saw Phish at the Vic in 1993, and started seeing all those [kinds of] bands in Chicago.”
In his junior year, Shapiro embarked on an ambitious independent study. With the blessing of former professor Richard Maxwell, and the help of a friend, he decided to make a movie about the jam band music that had filled his weekends. Five weeks of the summer after his junior year was spent making Tie-Died, a film that involved following the Grateful Dead on their summer tour, submersing himself in Deadhead culture and interviewing an impressive set of personalities. The hour long documentary was peppered with interviews with “sixties luminaries,” as he called them, including Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Wavy Gravy. The film premiered during his senior year, at the 1995 Sundance Film festival.
After Northwestern, Shapiro made a purchase that proved to define the rest of his career. He had heard that the Wetlands, a New York music club and jam-band haven, was up for sale. Interested in the prospect of owning a piece of music history, Shapiro decided to buy the club.
“I learned that Wetlands was for sale and was looking for someone to continue the environmental vision,” said Shapiro. “I didn’t know anything about the night club business, or putting on shows, but I had this very unique opportunity, and I went for it.”
Aside from being a music venue, the Wetlands also ran its own environmental activism center, out of the same building. It was a haven for the environmentally conscious, the jam-band fan, and any kind of crossover between the two. Brokering a deal with the owner to pay for the club over time, he pledged to extend the owner’s own environmentalist hopes for the club, and ran it for over five years until its closing in September 2001.
His work at the Green Apple Music Festival is an extension of the passions he cultivated during his stint at the Wetlands. With the same environmental zeal, he decided to bring free music to New York City with the first Green Apple festival in 2006. The next year saw an expanded festival, with performances in Chicago by jam bands Umphrey’s McGee and the Disco Biscuits. This year’s festival promises equally spectacular acts across eight major American parks, including the National Mall in Washington D.C., which has been a stage for American activism throughout the nation’s History.
The Jammys are also a product of Shapiro’s vision. An awards show for the jam band community, the idea sprung out of Shapiro’s experience as a co-owner of Jambands.com. Shapiro has translated his affinity for improvisational, jam-heavy rock music into an annual show, now in its seventh year, for the jam-band community.
“We thought the boy band thing was huge then,” said Shapiro. “We wanted to do an awards show to celebrate a different kind of music.”
Doing things differently has been a general theme in Shapiro’s life. His career seems to mirror the music he enjoys: Both share a love for improvisation and creativity. And it was his time at Northwestern, his immersion in the Chicago music scene and his time on the road with the Grateful Dead that defined him as the music and environmental advocate he is today.