He sent in a four page proposal - "Everything Dixon" - and soon got a call saying the town had made the short list. Chicago's Jam Productions, which is assembling the Gentlemen of the Road Stopovers, took a tour, followed by the band's management. That's when he learned it would be a British band, and he says there was a brief moment when he was afraid it would be One Direction. So when word came through they'd won a bid and the band was Mumford and Sons, Albrecht was relived. "It's a good fit for what we listen to and what we create," he says. "It's aided in getting the approvals we needed."
Dixon Main Street found out in late March it would host Mumford and Sons. The announcement came in May, and all 15,000 tickets sold out in eight hours. And now the weekend of the mini-festival is upon us. Set up started on Monday, which makes sense because the amount of infrastructure in place is staggering. Albrecht says this is easily the most people ever to attend a single day event in Dixon, though the annual Petunia Festival attracts some 20 to 30,000 over the course of a week.
Set up for the Stopover is not restricted to Page Park, where eight bands will perform on two stages. There's also a festival taking up most of downtown, where the streets are blocked off to cars and almost every business - from barbershops to Thai restaurants - has flung open its doors and decorated its windows. Places not equipped to deal with the volume of people (so pretty much every place) could arrange for volunteers, who would get passes to the concert. Dixon Main Street also recruited help for everything from street cleaning to traffic control. All told there were some 1,000 volunteers on hand through the week of the show.
Business owners were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the Stopover, commending its attention to incorporating places and people in Dixon rather than simply barreling through.
The result was a weekend of some of the best vibes you will find at any major summer music event. Say what you will about Mumford & Sons, about the passport tickets for this thing and the logo-fication of handlebar moustaches. A hipster-ready affair, maybe, but under no circumstances an ironic one: The visitors marveling to the local paper about how much they loved the local flavor in Dixon were earnest as you can be.
