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Here is part one of my conversation with Gary Chetkof, Producer of The Mountain Jam Festival.

Tell us about what’s new this year?

Lots of new things!

One of the coolest new things we are doing is “late night under the stars” as we call it. We are going to have Galactic and Dark Star Orchestra play on the 2nd Stage (West Stage) which is going to be cool. They will come on about 1:30am and play for a couple hours. At the same time we are going to have stuff going on inside the lodge. It’s totally different music and we figured it’ll be cool to give people an option.

We’ve got a great fireworks display Saturday night right after Mule’s set closes and right before the late night so we think that’s gonna be cool.

We have a lot of new attractions happening. We've spread out on the mountain. On one whole side of the Mountain we have developed an Awareness Village, which features all kinds of really cool alternative healing modalities and techniques that really are useful for people in their personal lives to get more aware of their health and their bodies. And non traditional ways of healing and learning more about themselves. I think it’s gonna be a very cool consciousness expanding experience where people are going to want to hang out.

Michael Franti is definitely coming to give a talk in the Awareness Village about how spiritualism affects his music and is also gonna play a couple songs. We’ve invited some other artists and hopeful they’ll come too.

The food in the awareness village is all organic and we have vegetarian foods, free range chicken, breast feed beef and organic drinks.

Also for beer this year, there’s going to be a wide variety of micro brew beer, more so than ever before.

A solar & wind powered tent called The Alpha Tent, is a last minute addition to the Awareness Village, and we have this really cool shrine at the top of the mountain which we think is gonna be really cool late at night.

We have a Ferris wheel this year at the top of the festival that will give people great views of the mountain.

So we have a lot of really cool things and it’s definitely more spread out on the mountain.

We’ve added some amenities in the camping area, like adding a VIP camping section and a family camping section. We’ve actually figured out how to make the hot water work and we'll have nice hot showers.

The VIP experience will be cooler than ever before, not only will the tent be larger and more spread out, there is a little sushi restaurant inside VIP.

I think the food in general has really gotten better and more expansive, but the highlight really is gonna be the music and the new non-music activities that we have.

In the next installment...

Gary talks about the great music line-up this year, and the rave reviews Mountain Jam has been receiving across the country!