photo: David Gray @graypeakimages

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Over a beautiful weekend towards the tail end of Vermont’s mud season, the picturesque Okemo Mountain Resort served as the home of the third annual Music on the Mountain festival. Presented by the Phoenix, whose mission is to build a sober active community around music and other activities, the event was a benefit for the Divided Sky Foundation and the recovery center co-founded by Trey Anastasio in 2023. The property was adorned with countless signs displaying testimonials from clients, the latest in a demonstration of the significant impact the center has already had in the two-and-a-half years since its opening; and the recovery scaffolding wasn’t just decoration. 

The weekend consisted of a Friday night campfire jam; a Saturday 5k run, followed by seven proper sets of music and an all-stars after party; and a Sunday acoustic brunch. And running beneath all of it like a pedal tone was the working premise of the Phoenix: that one of the most valuable resources for a person in recovery is other people. Forty-eight hours sober is the only cover charge The Phoenix asks; they’re at a million members and, as more than one staffer mentioned from the stage, gunning for ten in the next five years.

A variety of tables peppered the property, offering information and resources related to recovery, mental health, and wellness. The Phellowship, a sober support group for Phish concertgoers, was unmistakable with its yellow banner and balloons. A descendant of the Grateful Dead’s Wharf Rats, the group and its ambassadors serve as a judgment-free support center for anyone facing the challenges inherent in a day or night of music in a scene that so often has gone – but doesn’t need to go – hand-in-hand with substance use. David Manheim, host of the Dopey podcast about “drugs, addiction, and dumb sh#t,” admirably served as emcee, keeping the crowd engaged and introducing various speakers between sets. Throughout the day, countless listeners approached him with love and gratitude, sharing their stories and the positive impact his show has had on them over the years.

Following a Friday night campfire jam featuring Anders Osborne, Jackie Greene, and Daniel Donato, the festival served as the centerpiece of their BIG Weekend of sober-only music and programming. The sunny day began with the fifth annual Divided Sky Fun(d) Run, a 5k walk/run presented in partnership with the Antelope Running Club. Divided Sky’s Executive Director Seth Dolinsky talked the crowd through the origin of the 3000-person run that started five years ago with 100 people and can be completed at any pace, whether you’re an “antelope” or a “llama.” Once the doors opened, the Trombone Shorty Foundation Band, consisting of a handful of talented adolescents, was the first musical act of the day, circling the grounds in a second line of joyous New Orleans jazz. (The Foundation’s mission is to inspire musical youth through education, instruction, mentorship, and performance.) 

Anders Osborne and Jackie Greene opened the main stage as a duo and came out swinging with Osborne’s “Flower Box.” Osborne, sober and not shy about why, sang “if you can’t be yourself, the hell with that,” like a man reading his own discharge paperwork aloud. Greene took the next one from the piano bench as he did for most of the set, though he switched to guitar throughout. The set’s nerviest move was a brand-new Osborne tune, “In My Bones,” that Greene appeared to be discovering in real time – the best kind of trust fall two writers can display before thousands of people – answered later by a Greene song still homeless on any record. Daniel Donato slid out on electric for “Fool’s Gold,” all Telecaster twang and country-fried bends, then stuck around to torch a Greene-led “Like a Ball and Chain.” 

2LØT followed and snapped the afternoon sideways. New to the festival this year, the outfit runs on twin keyboard-and-synth rigs, a bassist with a sampler, and a low end so thick it reorganized your skeletal system with funk welded to electronica and topped, at points, with a creole chant that read as more ritual than hook. Undergirding the grooves was a social-justice charge they didn’t bother to soften: enjoyably heavy and strange on a bill that could have coasted on niceness.

Karina Rykman and her trio took it from there with a set of the bass-forward psych-trance she’s refined by way of seemingly nonstop touring since her 2023 debut LP, Joyride. Opening her set with the title track from that album, she pulled from across Joyride and back to pre-LP cuts like “City Kids,” then floated newer ones – “Change My Flight” and “Shoegaze Summer” – bound for a second album that can’t come soon enough. Guitarist Adam November led the trio’s trademark funky, high-energy take on Björk’s “Atom Dance” before closing the set with “Elevator,” her first single that ultimately made it onto Joyride.

LaMP, the Burlington-based avant-funk trio composed of Russ Lawton, Scott Metzger, and Ray Paczkowski, delivered the afternoon’s clinic in saying more with less. Jennifer Hartswick sat in early on trumpet, another of the weekend’s many collaborations. (The set also included some bass octave pedal jams that Rykman may or may not have provided.) Paczkowski, who usually step dances left and right as he plays, was straight-up jumping in place. Metzger spent one jam dropping “Voodoo Child” shadings into a passage, then commenced his original “Pork ‘n’ Slaw” before cutting out entirely and letting Russ and Ray cook, comping just enough to stay in the room. Lawton’s meat and potatoes style went well with the tune, the drummer content to live on the hi-hat through an entire jam or set up shop on the ride: no flash, no frills, all funk. (For his part, Metzger appeared to hold his phone over a pickup at one point – perhaps playing a tune into his pickups.) Paczkowski uncorked a massive solo on “Elsie’s River,” a sunny South African tune featuring the kind of exemplary organ run that justifies the instrument’s entire existence.

Eggy closed the set and did so emphatically. The band took the stage to a synth drone and opened on “Woah There,” featuring drummer Alex Bailey on lead vocals with guitarist Jake Brownstein providing harmonies. Keyboardist Dani Battat took lead vocal duties on “Trixieville,” which found bassist Mike Goodman looking extremely joyful, like a guy who couldn’t believe this was the gig. Yellow balloons bobbed over the crowd, and after a particularly driving “Peace Upon Us,” Brownstein poignantly shared the importance of the festival’s mission to the band; their namesake, childhood friend Edward “Eggy” Torrence, who passed away nearly a decade ago after struggling with substance abuse and addiction. The band carries a name freighted with exactly the weight this festival exists to carry, which made the closing sit-in by Hartswick and Natalie Cressman feel more like a benediction: the TAB horn section gilding a young band ever on the rise.

As if that weren’t enough, the BIG Weekend All-Stars After Party presented a supergroup of the day’s players plus Dogs in a Pile’s Brian Murray and Jimmy Law, TAB bassist Dezron Douglas, and NOLA drummer Joe Dyson trading a fistful of covers, many of them by bands who lost members to substances, including “Loose Lucy,” “Soulshine,” “Listen to Her Heart,” and “Psycho Killer.” (A sober room screaming along to “Psycho Killer” is its own small joke, and everybody in it was in on it.) Murray’s Law closed out the weekend of music the following morning with a mostly acoustic brunch jam, featuring sit-ins by Rykman, Donato, and Evan Jennison.

Scott Strode started The Phoenix because he found something on top of a mountain that he couldn’t find at the bottom of anything. Eighteen years later, the organization staged the literal version of that metaphor: a mountain, a stage, three thousand people, and not a drink in sight. The only things that left anybody high were the altitude, the playing, and a boundless sense of gratitude.