After 17 years, Adam Zacks’ Pacific Northwest-based music festival Sasquatch is being ushered back into the woods where it belongs, as much as doing so may hurt the Hendersons. In other words, the festival is shutting down, with Zacks announcing in a press release (via Portland’s Willamette Week) that he and the rest of the organizers are going to “take a bow and bid fond farewell” to the music festival. He says he will no longer be producing it, and there will not be a Sasquatch in 2019.
The festival started in 2002 with an emphasis on indie rock and jam bands, with initial headliners including Dave Matthews Band and the String Cheese Incident, but it gradually expanded into a Lollapalooza-esque multi-day event, with bigger acts and comedians. Later, the festival tried to expand into two separate weekends in one year, but the second event was canceled and overall attendance started to plummet. Last year, headliner Frank Ocean dropped out a few weeks before the festival, which surely put a damper on the whole thing.
In his statement, Zacks said that, “17 years is a long time to do anything,” noting that “The Beatles lasted a mere eight years,” and while he acknowledged that Sasquatch wasn’t as “indelible as ‘Hey Jude,’” he hopes they left a “lasting mark and proudly represented an independent spirit.”