At a time when independent music festivals seem more likely to fold than flourish, Mountain Jam Festival‘s return after a six-year hiatus marks a rare triumph for the live music community. Having wrested control of the festival back from its corporate partners, founder Gary Chetkof looked back to Mountain Jam’s roots to formulate a new vision for the event—one that prioritizes the music and overall festival experience, rather than the bottom line. With a limit of 8,000 attendees, Mountain Jam’s 16th edition (set for June 20th–22nd, 2025) promises an intimate and community-focused experience, but with a lineup that rivals bigger fests.
Back when he created Mountain Jam in 2005 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Radio Woodstock/WDST (a nationally renowned rock station he took over in 1993), Chetkof couldn’t have predicted how rapidly the festival would grow. What began as a small, single-day gathering of 3,000 locals soon ballooned into a full weekend event, attracting 40,000 fans from all around the Northeast.
“In those 12 years of owning the radio station, I had started producing small concerts in the Hudson Valley because nobody was bringing really cool music up here at the time,” Chetkof told L4LM. “I just started doing it as an adjunct to the radio station, and then by the time the 25th anniversary of the radio station came around, I was like, we should throw an outdoor party. … We didn’t know what we were doing as far as producing an outdoor festival, but we got through it and it was so great that everybody afterwards was like, ‘You should do this next year.’ I was like, why not? Let’s do it next year. So it expanded eventually to two days and we added camping. And then the year after that, we went to three days and the third year, the festival really took a leap.”
Chetkof attributed that leap to the third year’s headliner, Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, who had just received a life-saving liver transplant. “He hadn’t played in a year, and Warren Haynes had gotten him to play,” Chetkof remembered. “His first festival appearance after his surgery was at Mountain Jam.”
As the years went on, Mountain Jam continued to grow, eventually achieving a level of recognition among fans on par with festivals like Gathering of the Vibes and All Good. “The growth of the festival has always been spontaneous and organic, coming from a good place,” Chetkof said. “As someone who always loved music festivals, my goal was just to recreate the magic that I experienced as a fan.”
According to Chetkof, that magic is about more than just a solid lineup. “I went to Bonnaroo and I went to Glastonbury, but there’s something special about a music festival that’s in nature where people just drop their guard and get away on a three-day mini vacation,” he said. “Things happen and relationships and friendships are formed, and there’s a sense of camaraderie that you just don’t get anywhere else.”
That deep understanding of what makes a music festival a magical experience was at the forefront of Chetkof’s mind when he convinced Live Nation to abdicate its majority stake in Mountain Jam.
“We had to give up a lot of our ethos and a lot of our independence in order to have the financial security and resources of a big partner,” Chetkof admitted. “So after the pandemic, when the Live Nation team that worked on Mountain Jam was pretty much gone, but they still did Peach Festival, and they launched another festival called Catbird, I said to them, ‘It’s just not right that Mountain Jam is just sitting dormant.’ And eventually they agreed.”
Of the six years Mountain Jam was on hiatus, five were spent “reformulating” what the festival should look like when it returned. “Once we got it back, it took those five years to figure out how we were gonna do it. That took a bunch of creativity and I needed to find some new ways of doing the festival where it could exist as an independent festival in this world of corporate festivals.”
In the end, Chetkof and his team came up with a plan to revive Mountain Jam at a manageable scale without sacrificing any of the magic. “We really worked on the model and said, if we keep costs down and we streamline things and just limit the number of people that are coming, but yet keep the talent budget the same, which is a pretty unique concept, we think we can make this work. And it looks like it’s working right now. But come back to me in June, I’ll let you know,” he joked.
To achieve its vision, the team selected a new venue, Belleayre Mountain, a modern ski resort with amenities perfectly equipped to accommodate the outdoor gathering, including a gondola that will allow festival-goers to ride up the mountain for enchanting views of the Catskills. They also scaled back production to a single stage, which will let fans catch all the action with no overlapping sets, and no long walks from stage to stage.
Chetkof was also eager to share that Mountain Jam 2025 will feature a cannabis village, making it the first festival to embrace cannabis in New York state (yet another benefit of being independent and thus free from the influence of corporate alcohol sponsors).
The highlight of Mountain Jam’s offerings, though, is definitely the killer lineup topped by Goose, Khruangbin, and Mt. Joy—and those are just the headliners. Additional performers include Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Trampled by Turtles, Michael Franti & Spearhead, Julien Baker & Torres, moe., Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, Dogs In A Pile, Karina Rykman, Kitchen Dwellers, Grace Bowers & The Hodge Podge, Mikaela Davis, Upstate, Shane Guerrette, and more.
With so many festivals falling by the wayside, Mountain Jam 2025 is not just the rebirth of a pre-pandemic event, it’s a major victory for the music festival community. The festival’s return marks a big step forward on a path charted by Chetkof and inspired by his belief in the power of music to connect people and build community—and, hopefully, it is a harbinger of more good things to come.
For more information on Mountain Jam and to secure your tickets before they sell out, visit the festival website.
