Sean C. Morgan
Sweet Home contractor Tim Murray has been a faithful Oregon Jamboree attender for the duration of the festival, but this year’s was the high point for him.
Murray, who has a front-row seat each year, got called up on stage by performer Thomas Rhett Saturday afternoon and put on a show himself, dancing to a cover of Luke Bryan’s “Shake for Me” and then joining Rhett in a duet.
That was just one of many highlights from this year’s Jamboree, which broke records of the heat-related variety.
Three-digit temperatures didn’t slow down Dierks Bentley or country music fans as they kicked off the annual Oregon Jamboree Friday night.
“It was a great weekend,” said Festival Director Erin Regrutto. “It was a tremendous event. We had a lot of things working against us, primarily the weather, the temperatures.”
That can spell a bad weekend for an event like the Jamboree, she said, but it didn’t hurt the festival at all.
“Everything went really pretty well,” Regrutto said. “There really weren’t any real hurdles besides the heat. Being prepared early made a real difference.”
The Jamboree had a couple of things going for it, the lineup during the day and all of the activities, promotions going on during the day and the shade and shows in Sankey Park, Regrutto said. That kept people at the event. They could be hot in their camps or hot at the festival, with a chance of shade in Sankey Park.
Many chose the event, she said, and the festival used 48,000 bottles of water, the most ever. The water was either given to volunteers or sold to concertgoers. The Jamboree went through more water on Friday than it did during the entire event two years ago.
That might drive down beer sales, Regrutto said, but it didn’t. Beer and concessions set new records this year.
The festival kicked off with Michael Ray Friday afternoon. Love and Theft followed.
Throughout the weekend, CMT filmed its “Hot 20 Countdown,” which people should look for next weekend, Regrutto said. The TV channel gave some “amazing” coverage highlighting Sweet Home and the Oregon Jamboree.
Dierks Bentley finished the evening with an engaging performance, Regrutto said. Opening for him, “people just really connected” with Lee Brice, who paused his show to allow Wal-Mart and Project Rebuild, a partnership between the Dr Pepper Snapple Group and the Military Warriors Support Foundation, to award a newly renovated, mortgage-free home in Salem to Sgt. Brian Lesh.
Lesh was born in Portland and grew up in Salem. He joined the U.S. Army in 1994 and served in Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, Ft. Bliss, Ft. Lewis, Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Germany. He served several deployments in Iraq where he sustained combat-related injuries. He earned numerous medals.
“That was a really cool thing for us to help fulfill,” Regrutto said.
The following night, following Sam Hunt’s performance, Thomas Rhett helped present a $100,000 donation from the Safeway Foundation to the Fisher Home, a veterans home in Vancouver, Wash. On Thursday, the Safeway Foundation presented a check for $5,000 to the Sweet Home Community Foundation during the annual Parking Lot Party at Safeway.
Thomas Rhett, son of Rhett Akins, grew up in the business, and “he’s really good at it,” Regrutto said. “He’s really popular.”
Murray said he enjoyed his time on stage with Rhett immensely, although he was “totally reluctant” at first.
Rhett doing Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places” and decided he wanted to get some audience participation.
“These girls were raising their hands and he was kind of interviewing them – ‘You’re not it, You’re not it,’” Murray recounted. “I was pointing to a girl in front of me because I thought she’d be a good cnadidate and he looks right at me and says, ‘You’re the one I want to get up here. You’re it.
“The first thing I tell him is, ‘Dude, I cannnot sing a lick.’ Then, even worse than singing, he’s going to make me dance.
“I’m up on stage, and I just let it go. I was hamming it up.”
Murray’s performance was a hit and he said he got a lot of positive feedback afterward.
“When it was all said and done, it was a blast. It took 23 years for me to have that kind of experience, but it was a blast.”
His big performance set up a theatrical Big and Rich show, featuring Cowboy Troy and DJ Sinister and a journey through rap, pop and country music that included a visit from Spiderman. The duo invited a Vietnam Veteran to the stage with a group of active duty National Guardsmen and performed “Eighth of November” in their honor.
Sunday, Aaron Tippin performed the noon Backyard Barbecue to benefit the Sweet Home Community Foundation, Regrutto said. That show was even better than last year’s benefit, which raised more than $5,000.
Tippin hit the stage after an eclectic performance by Chasin’ Crazy. Hunter Hayes bridged the Sunday schedule to Keith Urban.
“I think that Keith Urban performance blew everyone away,” Regrutto said. “But it’s hard to pinpoint one performance over the weekend. All the performances were exceptional.”
Urban closed out the Jamboree moving through hit after hit, stopping along the way to talk to individuals in the crowd. He singled out a girl celebrating her birthday. After bringing her on stage and taking photos, she told him the concert was an early birthday present.
He asked her when her birthday was.
“December,” she said.
Among concert highlights, without a female singer in the band, Urban was joined by a woman from Sandy selected from a contest, to perform Miranda Lambert’s part in “We Were Us” from the album, “Fuse.”
Performing “You Look Good in My Shirt,” Urban climbed down from the stage and made his way across the field where he was mobbed by excited fans, and he gave away a signed guitar.
Off stage, Tippin watched Urban, who invited Tippin on stage to help sing “Kiss a Girl.”
It was a stripped down version of his show, without the large video wall or set that accompanied him to the Jamboree in 2010.
It was a “very engaging performance” and “accessible to the fans,” Regrutto said.
The event was down just a “smidge from last year, with a consistent 17,500 fans per day.
That consistency often “depends on the lineup,” Regrutto said, and it’s something festival officials prefer to see.
They want to sell the three-day passes and have people come and stay in the community all weekend, she said. Looking forward, “we’re doing really, really well with all the pre-sales.”
Carrie Underwood returns to the Jamboree in 2016 for the first time since 2006, when she was fresh from winning “American Idol.”
“I think Carrie Underwood will be very welcome,” Regrutto said. “People are ready for her to be back.”
The Jamboree is working hard on preparing for 2016 and will probably announce another 2016 artist in a couple of months, Regrutto said.
In public safety, Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District responded to 39 calls, 11 on Friday, 15 Saturday and 13 on Sunday. That’s above average, said Fire Chief Dave Barringer, but it’s not that unusual during the summer.
Just a couple of weeks earlier, medics responded 21 times on Saturday alone, Barringer said. Inside the event, medics assisted people who were too drunk or too hot, feeding them and letting them cool down in a trailer provided by the Oregon Jamboree.
In one case, a festival runner provided a ride for someone who had gotten too drunk back to camp, he said. Overall, it was smoother, and the district had more personnel than usual, including an assist from Lebanon Fire Department despite a call for resources and personnel for a conflagration in Douglas County over the weekend.
“Considering the number of patrons and the temperatures, I think things went fairly well throughout the community,” said Police Chief Jeff Lynn. He hasn’t crunched statistics from the weekend yet, but he didn’t see any spikes in activity.
“There were fewer problems on the interior than previous years,” Lynn said. “All in all, it was a smooth year.”
The Oregon Jamboree, an annual three-day country music and camping festival is owned and operated by the Sweet Home Economic Development Group. SHEDG began as a grassroots effort among Sweet Home community members to help Sweet Home adjust and change economically as the timber industry declined in the late 1980s and early 1990s. SHEDG developed the Jamboree as a fund-raising tool for economic development projects. Numerous organizations throughout the community raise funds in conjunction with Jamboree.