When discussing the current state of live music in St. Louis, one band inevitably comes up as an example of the sturdiness and vibrancy of our local scene: the Mighty Pines. The roots-rock quartet, which formed in 2016, is continually one of the area’s biggest draws: Last year, they set an attendance record for the Missouri Botanical Garden’s decades-old Whitaker Music Festival when 9,000 people showed up after Mighty Pines singer/guitarist Neil Salsich raised the band’s profile by building national buzz with his dynamic appearances as a contestant on NBC’s The Voice.
This past year has been another busy one for the Pines, as its four official members—Salsich, mandolinist/fiddler Gerard Erker, bassist John Hussung, and drummer Mike Murano—have played some of the year’s biggest, rowdiest shows, including sprawling outdoor sets in Benton Park in May, at Music at the Meramec in St. James in June, and at Pickin’ on Picknic in St. Clair in July.
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Now, on August 24, comes the band’s yearly signature event: Pines Fest, now in its third year, again to be held at the Big Top. Founded by the band in 2022, Pines Fest was a result of what Salsich says was a desire “to build and curate our own festival. We had seen a lot of bands that we admire do something similar, and we wanted to establish our own version of a festival where we headline and pick all the bands.”
In the festival’s inaugural incarnation, the homegrown Pines Fest featured exclusively St. Louis bands on a single stage. Last year’s version expanded to a longer festival and bigger lineup, including Columbia’s the Burney Sisters, and added a second stage. This year, Pines Fest is even more expansive, with more artists than ever, including two national acts and, for the first time, a late-night set on the side stage after the Pines wrap up their headlining set.
“This is a significantly bigger lineup,” Salsich says, “with bigger names and is an all-around bigger event. The Burney Sisters last year were an icebreaker for a non-St. Louis band at Pines Fest. Now we have bands from Chicago and New Orleans.”
Salsich is excited to bring some authentic bluegrass to Pines Fest with Chicago’s Henhouse Prowlers. “When I say bluegrass, I mean it,” Salsich says. “I’m passionate about real bluegrass because the Pines are not bluegrass, and we get mislabeled as that, so it’s cool to lock in to a band that is truly bluegrass. They are just tremendous.”
New Orleans husband-and-wife duo Handmade Moments are tougher to categorize. “They are like pre-war jazz through Carole King songwriting,” Salsich says. With their eclectic instrument-swapping (clarinet, guitar, saxophone, tuba, and more), the duo are, according to Salsich, “sort of pseudo-jazzy and beautiful and cross the decades but still sound contemporary.”
That kind of musical diversity is key to curating Pines Fest, although Salsich says that he and the other Pines haven’t specifically defined the controlling genre philosophy of the festival.
“The most important unifying theme for us is just musical and creative diversity,” he says. “We haven’t distilled what it is in terms of genre. We rely on instinct [when selecting bands]. We know our fans, and our music is ultimately a melting pot of different kinds of stuff. True deep music fans are shapeshifters. They are always seeking out different things, and they have great taste.”
An example of the musical eclecticism is a three-year pattern so far of booking a brass band to play the festival’s main stage: Red and Black Brass Band in 2022, Saint Boogie Brass Band in 2023, and now Funky Butt Brass Band this year. “That might define the first chapter of Pines Fest, the brass-band era,” says Salsich, who then gets excited as though having a new epiphany. “Unless we bring in a brass band every year! I’m just thinking of that! We could do it. We’ll just have to go beyond St. Louis to find them.”
The Pines have gotten good at finding those connections. With help from Drew Jameson of Jamo Presents, who books and produces shows for the Big Top, the members of the Pines book the acts for Pines Fest themselves, having previously played shows with both the Henhouse Prowlers and Handmade Moments.
Other bands, such as Funky Butt Brass Band, another of St. Louis’s mainstays, have been longtime friends and collaborators, so some cross-pollination among acts at Pines Fest is inevitable. “You can expect the Funky Butt horns on stage with Pines,” Salsich says. Also, keyboardist Dave Grelle, whose jazz-rock outfit Playadors played the first Pines Fest, will do double duty this year, sitting in with both Funky Butt and the Mighty Pines.
Other acts include Steve Ewing, legendary frontman for The Urge, who will open the festival on the main stage; singer-songwriter Beth Bombara, who, coming off a stint as the musical talent for this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park, will play two sets on the side stage; and country-rockers Yard Eagle, featuring the great Jacob Baxter on guitar, who Salsich describes as “maybe my favorite band in town.”
In a couple of firsts, Americana outfit Moon Valley will play a late-night set on the side stage and also be the only band besides the Pines to make a return appearance at the festival. “We had such a visceral, positive response to Moon Valley last year,” Salsich says. “Everyone was in my ear asking who these guys were. We are really excited to have them back.”
Pines Fest has also established a tradition of an annual “artist-at-large” who has the ambitious challenge of sitting in on a song with every single act on the lineup. After singers Brian Owens in 2022 and Emily Wallace in 2023, the band decided to go with an instrumentalist this year: classic-rock guitar hero Jimmy Griffin.
“Jimmy is obviously an awesome guitarist,” Salsich says. “But he’s also sneakily a great singer, so he’ll be doing some singing too.” As for what Griffin will do with such a diverse set of artists—bluegrass, indie-jazz, a brass band, folk, twang-rock, funk-soul—the Pines themselves will find out as it develops on stage. “We put Jimmy in touch with the bands to make it happen,” Salsich says. “I don’t know what they’ll do, so that’s enjoyable for the whole band to watch that unfold along with the audience. No matter what happens, with this caliber of musicians, it’s going to be amazing.”
All of this musical collaboration is conducive to the Pines’ capacity for improvisational, hippie-tickling jamming, something that the band can tap into depending on the vibe of a particular audience. “It definitely depends on the show—if it’s a jam-friendly crowd. And we’re pretty good about reading that,” Salsich says. “There’s an organic aspect to it. It just reflects our ongoing growth as musicians and our deepening trust and relationship with each other as bandmates.”
Food trucks (Wok-O Taco, Chicken Scratch, Pete’s Pops) will be on hand, as well as sponsors Four Hands (the first 100 attendees will receive a free Four Hands/Pines Fest koozie), Swade Cannabis, Alliance Credit Union, and Bootleg Revelry. Also for Pines Fest this year, the band will partner with the Angel Band Project, an organization that provides music therapy experiences to women who have been affected by sexual or intimate partner violence.
Looking beyond Pines Fest, Salsich says the Mighty Pines plan to be in the studio this fall to work on a new album, and that the wheels are turning for a big touring year in 2025. “The longer we are together, and we keep growing as people and evolving,” Salsich says. “It just deepens the music so much, and the band just gets better each year.”
