LANSING — Every July, from 2000 to 2018, the landscape of downtown Lansing changed for about a week because of the annual Common Ground Music Festival at Louis Adado Riverfront Park along the Grand River.
At its peak, the festival attracted more than 50,000 concert-goes.
It began as a six-day event, stretched out to eight days and then was shortened in its waning years. In 2019 and 2021, the festival was held at the Lugnuts baseball stadium on Michigan Avenue. The COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the 2020 event.
The festival evolved during its tenure, but the focus remained on the music. Long lines of people would wait to enter the concert area, at times spilling out across bridges at Saginaw and Shiawassee streets. Once inside the venue, concert-goers would find food trailers, beer tents, vendor booths and band merchandise.
The community looked forward to CG. More than 200 volunteers and a staff of about a dozen worked to make CG a success. It was a huge boost to the local economy. People left work early, some took the entire week off, many traveled across or from another state to attend the concerts.
The music was as diverse as the people who attended. Some folks planned their vacations around Common Ground. Others attended only once or twice because a favorite performer was on the schedule. The first year featured famous bands such as The Beach Boys, the Charlie Daniels Band, the Doobie Brothers, and Styx on the main stage.
Throughout the years, acts such Vanilla Ice, Lyle Lovett, REO Speedwagon, the Violent Femmes, Alice Cooper, Snoop Dog, and Earth, Wind, & Fire performed on the main stage.
Common Ground also offered side stages, where people could see lesser-known or local up-and-coming musicians play.
In 2016, bluegrass musician Billy Strings played one of those small stages on ‘country music night’ for about three dozen people who were mostly family and friends. Then unknown, the Grammy winner now sells out large stadiums and has a cult-like fanbase.
For Alfonso Civile, 43, of Lansing, playing Common Ground was a sort of reckoning, or dream come true. Civile, the front man for the heavy metal band Heartsick, moved from Florida to Lansing to study journalism at Michigan State University in 1999.
“A seven-day music festival was unheard of at that time. When I heard about Common Ground, that became my goal.” Civile played Common Ground two years in a row with his bands Know Lyfe and Heartsick.
“I wanted to play it since its inception,” he said. “I thought, ‘If you play this festival, you’ve made it as a local musician in this town.’”
Civile is still the front man for Heartsick. He works with the Lansing School District and is also a concert promoter. He looks back on 20 years of Common Ground with nostalgia.
“I miss it and I’d love to see it return. Since COVID, seven nights (for a festival) is way too much now, but to have a three- or four-day festival featuring different genres, people would come,” he said. “Music is nostalgia, and it always comes back every 20 years or so. If they brought back diverse and eclectic acts from the ’80s and ’90s for a three- or four-day festival, it could work.
“Millennials are in their 40s now and we have money to spend,” Civile said. “You’d have to market it right, and be as invested as the promotor and creator. I’d love to see a country night, a rap night, a metal night, an alternative night. It just has to be some of those old school acts we grew up with in the ’80s and ’90s.”
This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Remembering Common Ground: Music festival brought life to downtown Lansing for two decades
Reporting by Matthew Dae Smith, Lansing State Journal / Lansing State Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
