Mumford & Sons, Foo Fighters to play in Walla Walla in August

A music festival will double the size of Walla Walla for one weekend this summer.

Grammy-winning folk rock band Mumford & Sons will be joined by Washington rock royalty Foo Fighters, plus Flaming Lips and about 27 other national, regional and local bands to bring big-time music into small-town America. Nate Mendel of Foo Fighters is a Richland native and graduate of Hanford High School.

Parts of the lineup were announced Monday morning as Mumford & Sons posted its 2015 tour schedule online.

That posting was followed by a press conference at the Marcus Whitman Hotel & Conference Center, where the city and Downtown Walla Walla Foundation detailed what’s to come for the festival that starts with smaller acts downtown Aug. 13 and runs through Aug. 16.

The event is expected to infuse upward of $12 million in the economy, said City Manager Nabiel Shawa.

“Hold onto your boots, downtown merchants,” Shawa said. “We’re looking forward to a nice little sales tax increase this summer.”

The Gentlemen of the Road Stopover — as the tour is known — carries on Mumford & Sons’ intent to bring live music to communities off the beaten path.

“The Gentlemen of the Road Stopovers are all about live music,” the band said in a prepared statement. “We get to put them on in towns not normally frequented by touring bands in buses or splitter vans. We deliberately look for towns that have something unique, or some vibe of which they are proud, explore them and enjoy what they have to offer.”

Other stops on the tour for the British band known for incorporating bluegrass and folk instrumentation — banjo, mandolin, upright bass — are Seaside Heights, N.J.; Waverly, Iowa; and Salida, Colo.

Mumford & Sons will tour to support its third studio album, Wilder Mind, to be released in May through Glassnote Records and produced by James Ford, who also produced Arctic Monkeys, HAIM and Florence & The Machine.

The new album is a departure from 2009’s Sigh No More and 2012’s Babel. Described as minimalist yet panoramic, it plays with different texture and dynamics — fewer acoustic instruments. More drums.

Not all of the communities, however, will get the added treat of Foo Fighters. Started in 1994, Grammy-winning Foo Fighters took root in Seattle as Dave Grohl’s new project following the death of Kurt Cobain and the subsequent dissolution of Nirvana.

The tickets are $199 and cover the entire festival. They go on sale at 10 a.m. March 6 through Mumford & Sons website. A designated amount will also be available through the Walla Walla Visitors Center booth.

Other performers include: Jenny Lewis, Dawes, The Vaccines, Tune-Yards, James Vincent McMorrow, Blake Mills and Jeff The Brotherhood. More artists will be announced as the festival nears.

The Friday and Saturday headliners will take place at the Whitman College Athletic Field. That venue can accommodate 35,000 to 40,000 people.

Veterans Memorial Golf Course will be shut down for a week to accommodate camping for 26,000. The left turn onto Middle Waitsburg Road from Highway 12 will be closed, said Walla Walla Parks and Recreation Director Jim Dumont.

The DeSales High School field will serve as a vendor facility. DeSales will operate as a public safety facility for fire, police and triage.

A second venue will be downtown Walla Walla, which will serve as stage for continuous band performances throughout the weekend.

Dumont said Second Avenue to Palouse Street will be closed, as will some side streets, including Spokane and Colville streets.

The tour, put on in partnership with Madison House Presents, pays up front for estimated costs to the community, including overtime for law enforcement. Any money left over after the event closes are returned.

Walla Walla police spokesman Tim Bennett said the invoice for projected overtime has already been submitted.

Bennett said help will come from the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Department, Washington State Patrol and departments in the Tri-Cities and Pendleton. Though still a lot of planning left to do, he said there will be one guarantee for the event: no vacations granted for local law enforcement.

Chef Andrae Bopp, owner of Andrae’s Kitchen, said this morning he anticipates adding extra temporary help to manage through the festival.

A few years ago, he worked the Sasquatch Festival, feeding staffers on the tour buses for the Foo Fighters. He hopes to get to relive that.

“I’m just excited for Walla Walla to be able to host something like this,” Bopp said. “Whether you’re in retail, restaurants, or wineries — it’s going to be the biggest thing to happen to your business.”

Shawa said businesses in communities where Mumford & Sons brought their festivals in the past reported running out of items within 48 hours.

Event organizers budget about $3.5 million just for staging and crews alone with lodging, fences, food and any other needs, said Tourism Walla Walla Executive Director Ron Peck.

“This is a great opportunity for Walla Walla to show what a great town we are and raise the overall interest and awareness of us as a visitor destination,” Peck said. “It’s literally a once in a lifetime opportunity for a town of our size.”

The idea of coming to Walla Walla was first floated last September through an email to the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation.

It grew from there but had to remain a secret.

Shawa said the idea has been thoroughly vetted. He said local officials particularly looked for insight from Troy, Ohio, which was on the tail end of Mumford & Sons 2013 Gentlemen of the Road tour before a hiatus.

There the community estimates the economic impact was as much as $20 million. Shawa said officials described it as hectic with a lot of congestion. But overwhelmingly “they would do it again very happily,” he said.

“We’re going to have our hands full,” Shawa said.

According to the Dayton (Ohio) Business Journal, Troy was still reaping the benefits of its festival a year later.

An estimated 40,000 visitors came through the community of 25,000 for the festival.

“That event changed the course of this town,” said Will Harrelson, a board member Troy Main Street, the equivalent of the Downtown Walla Walla Foundation.

One year after the festival the downtown properties were fuller than they’d been in five years at about 99 percent capacity, then-interim Troy Main Street Director Andi Trzeciak said.

Businesses also became more engaged in social media, marketing themselves in savvier ways after learning how to engage visitors before their arrival, Harrelson added.

Visitors returned to relive the experience they had from the festival.

That, perhaps, is the best publicity of all, Shawa said.

“Working as a community, working as a team, we are going to have a great celebration,” he said.