Dave Matthews matches $650K already raised for Center For Large Landscape Conservation, American Rivers
By Fischer Genau DIGITAL MEDIA LEAD
Editor’s note: Outlaw Partners is the producer of Wildlands and publisher of Explore Big Sky.
“This is a magic part of the world,” Dave Matthews told the crowd of 6,000 at the Big Sky Events Arena on Saturday night, his second of two shows for Wildlands weekend. As he spoke, magic was occurring all round—the fans in the crowd moving with his music, the silent bolts of lightning from a faraway storm, and the surprise that took to the stage just before his set.
Going into Saturday, the event had already raised over $600,000 for American Rivers and Center for Large Landscape Conservation, the two beneficiaries at this year’s conservation and music festival. The weekend featured a charity auction on July 31, and two sold-out nights of music from Dave Matthews, Lukas Nelson and Molly Tuttle at the Big Sky Events Arena Aug. 1 and 2. Just before Dave’s set on Wildlands’ final night, Outlaw, the event organizer, was set to announce the total amount of money raised over the weekend. Minutes before the check presentation, Dave and his team doubled it.
The iconic Grammy-winning artist, who headlined both nights with two-and-a-half hour sets, matched the money already raised by the event’s charity auction, ticket sales and individual donations, and contributed $650,000 from his foundation, Bama Works.
“We knew we were getting about [$600K],” Deb Kmon Davidson, the chief strategy officer for CLLC, told EBS after receiving the check. “The big surprise was that Dave Matthews and his foundation doubled it, which is huge and shocking and also a testimony to who he is as a person and what he cares about. I think he was really inspired by all the people here and the energy and the landscape and our work.”
Davidson and Tom Kiernan, CEO of American Rivers, and members of their team accepted the $1.3 million check onstage from Outlaw Partners CEO and founder, Eric Ladd and CMO and co-founder, Megan Paulson, to an audible roar from the crowd.
This year’s Wildlands was the biggest to date, and Ladd told the crowd that this was “literally a ‘Field of Dreams’ moment” for him and the company. Over 12,000 people descended upon the Big Sky Events Arena over the weekend, many of them traveling from all over the country to see Dave Matthews—ticket data showed ticket holders from all 50 states and close to 1,000 different U.S. cities.
The Dave Matthews experience
The Dave Matthews Band is known for its devout following, and for fans who have seen him at arenas across the globe, Wildlands fulfilled expectations. Fans began queueing outside of the arena at 10 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. Many of them have seen Dave Matthews hundreds of times, like Darin Baldwin who traveled to Big Sky for Wildlands from Sacramento, California. Saturday night was Baldwin’s 240th Dave Matthews show, and he was there with a group of people he called his “best friends,” all of whom he has met at Dave Matthews shows. One of those friends was Matthew Silcox from Seattle, Washington.
“The Dave fans are the family that we travel to see every summer,” Silcox said.
Scott Dippolito from Charlotte, North Carolina, another avid fan in attendance’s making off his 246th Dave Matthews show but his first in Montana. He told EBS that he loved the location.
“We hope you guys build a permanent venue here someday, and we can come here every year when the bands go on tour because it’s so easy to get to,” Dippolito said. “You’d be crazy not to come here. Normally we’re standing in line in a dirty parking lot somewhere, but here we’re standing here and looking at this view. This is just a great spot.”
Dave played most of his set solo, strumming his acoustic guitar and playing through a diverse sampling of his extensive catalogue, occasionally slipping into a funny accent as he spoke between songs. The audience watched in rapt attention.
Later in his Saturday set, opener Molly Tuttle and her bandmates joined Dave onstage, and Lukas Nelson and the Shadow Band returned for the last three songs of Dave’s set. The group concluded the night with a cover of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “Cortez the Killer.”
Lukas Nelson is no stranger to Big Sky, having played at last year’s Wildlands with Dierks Bentley and Wyatt Flores, as well as at its inaugural year in 2022. During his set on Friday, Nelson talked about what it’s like playing music and raising money for conservation.
“It’s nice to be able to listen to good music and feel like you’re doing a good thing at the same time,” Nelson said after leading the crowd in a singalong to his hit song “Find Yourself.”
“There’s nothing better,” he said.
‘It gives me hope’
“I’m a bit speechless. To think that this many people care about conservation is really encouraging,” CLLC’s Davidson in the post- check presentation adrenaline on Saturday.
CLLC works to connect fragmented landscapes for the health and resilience of wildlife, and the climate. The nonprofit is pushing to build wildlife crossings on U.S. Highway 191 along a wildlife-vehicle collision hot spot area between Bozeman and Big Sky. This check will help them make that project a reality.
“The world’s a crazy place, and to see people coming together for an event, to hear really great music but also to work on conservation just really touches me,” Davidson said. “I’ve been in this field for 30 years and it gives me hope.”
The other Wildlands beneficiary, American Rivers, is a 50-year-old national nonprofit organization and one of the leading voices for rivers across the country. They advocate for healthy, clean and swimmable rivers, and they will use the donations from Wildlands to continue that work.
“It’s a lot of money,” Katy Neusteter, American Rivers’ senior director of marketing, told EBS after the check presentation. Just a week prior, Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke announced his Greater Yellowstone Recreation Enhancement and Tourism Act, a proposal that would place 98 local river miles under a Wild and Scenic designation, a bill American Rivers has been an advocate for.
“One of the things that we’re engaged in right now is working to protect nearly 100 miles of river in the Madison and Gallatin river watersheds, and this will go a long way to help us keep advocating, keep working with our local partners, and make that as strong of an effort as possible,” Neusteter said.
During his set on Saturday night, Dave Matthews acknowledged the value of the landscape he was playing in.
“This is a magic part of the world,” he said. “And it’s such a strange and upside down world so much of the time, and somehow we can justify terrible things and somehow we can ignore our bigger problems and somehow we let greed get the best of us so we make bad decisions and somehow we can be cruel as cruel can be.
“But we still know what it is that’s most important, which is that we love each other.”
