APPLETON - As Appleton's 11th Mile of Music approaches, its former performers tend to wax lyrical when reminiscing about the four day festival's founding. While the event is only a little over a decade old, that's enough for some to feel the sting of nostalgia — especially when things move so fast in the music industry.
Co-founders Cory Chisel and Dave Willems started Mile of Music over a few beers and a conversation about how great Appleton's geographic layout is for a music festival. Fast-forward 11 years, and Chisel and some of his fellow performers spent some time on the phone with The Post-Crescent in the week leading up to the festival, aiming to share some of their memories of how it all came to be.
“I was on tour [performing] outside the community, but really missing home,” Chisel said. “Willems and I got together and spent some time talking about how the layout that we have in downtown Appleton would be easy to throw the kind of festivals that I’ve played in.”
Chisel was no stranger to festivals like Outside Lands, South by Southwest (SXSW) and Glastonbury. “This is all fine and good, but often doesn’t feel real until it happens at home,” he said.
New Orleans-raised and Los Angeles-based musician Ben Alleman met Chisel through mutual friends and ended up touring with him, leading Alleman to play Mile of Music in 2014. While playing shows on his tour route to Mile of Music, he'd met more musicians, like Ruby Amanfu, who has worked Beyoncé, H.E.R. and Jack White, who he ended up playing with during one of the sets that year.
"I remember those shows vividly, because I've never seen anything like Mile of Music before," Alleman said. "I just kind of like taken aback by going to a town in Wisconsin that I didn't know about before."
Willems was the owner of a marketing agency so he had a staff who helped out with finding funding and Chisel had a network of booking agents and fellow musicians. One of the first sponsors was the Appleton Post-Crescent, which Chisel said helped the fledgling festival gain a bigger audience.
“We had so many people — the right people — take us seriously,” Chisel said. "The amazing thing about this community is that people give things a chance in a way that, (in) other cities, people often want to see things fail.”
More: 200 artists, 700 sets: Here's how Appleton's Mile of Music came to be, and what keeps it in tune
Nashville-based musician Lauren “Lolo” Pritchard agreed, when speaking about her experience at her first Mile of Music back in 2016.
“All we (my band and I) knew was that we were like flying to Appleton to play a festival,” Pritchard said. “Didn't really realize how, how much of a true community event Mile of Music is, the whole community is so ingrained.”
Luke Zimmerman, a Minneapolis-based musician, said that, speaking as a performer, the first Mile of Music, its organization and its crowds, really surprised him.
“Everything was real professional right away,” Zimmerman said. “People were excited about it and it was kind of like a party rather than, you know, what some things become. It felt like it was aiming to strive to be something like SXSW ... I think the Mile of Music was real, like it felt like a community event that extended outward, rather than something where the things were coming from outside sources and taking over."
While being compared to SXSW is exciting, Chisel said, he aims to make the festival more community-focused.
“Of course tourism is an exciting thing,” Chisel said. “But oftentimes they leave the actual venue owners completely exhausted, and they don't necessarily make as much as they would on a normal weekend. The attempt was, 'How do we make this good for the community itself?'”
Alleman also noted that some of the performances were in unique spaces that he never expected to play in.
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"I remember (being) like an art gallery of sorts," Alleman said. "It was like a big, long warehouse full of really interesting art and items, and it was just this wild experience, completely unexpected."
Eleven years later, Chisel tries to keep things exciting, and continuously exceed expectations.
“Listening to what is exciting, what is emerging and what's coming out is always going to be the way,” Chisel said. “I think (this festival) does its job best when it's about discovering people who have yet to be discovered, and we have an amazing track record of that.”
Mile of Music has hosted many musicians who have gone on to do some incredible things. Like Pritchard, Zimmerman and Alleman, many have gone on to win awards and write some of the biggest songs in modern day music. Big names like Norah Jones and Sturgill Simpson, and members of bands like Guns N’ Roses, R.E.M. and Wilco have all performed at Mile of Music.
Contact Abra Richardson at arichardson@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Cory Chisel, Ben Alleman, Lolo Pritchard talk early Mile of Music memories
