Lakes Jam

The asphalt at Brainerd International Raceway does not ask for a car paddock. It asks for a stage. In 2013 Jerry Braam planted Lakes Jam on that Minnesota track with about three thousand listeners and a headliner coverage will not drop: REO Speedwagon, who decades earlier had already played the same grounds as an opener. Anyone arriving in search of Lakefront Music Fest in Prior Lake or Laketown Rock in Canada has the wrong lake. The lake here is Brainerd’s and the ear is country and rock of a weekend on a racetrack.

Braam did not rent a city park. He used what he already had: logistics, security, the Raceway grounds. Local notes remember him as the owner who had the idea and who, two years later, opened the capital to investors — Ken Lacy, Dan Kavanaugh and other sponsors who already knew the site — so he could pay names a single operator could not carry. Toby Keith and Styx appear in that coverage as the measure of that widening. Anyone who treats Lakes Jam as a festival born already massive skips the three-thousand-person debut and a founder who first stacked fences on a track.

The ear is country and rock, together, not on separate tracks of another brand. The 2013 bill already states it: Gwen Sebastian and The Kentucky Headhunters one day; Great White, Night Ranger and REO Speedwagon the next. That is not a single-genre festival adding a guest. It is the thesis: a Midwest that puts on the same grass anyone who comes for a country radio hymn and anyone who comes for a classic-rock riff. Anyone picturing a compound of urban novelties has the wrong contract. The contract here is a chart of hits and camping beside the straight.

The audience experience follows the real format. Camping opened on Thursday; the concert grounds, Friday afternoon. You enter on a two-day pass or a single day. You sleep in a rustic tent or on a reserved pitch. Anyone arriving from Minneapolis or the lake towns does not find a bar street. They find a paddock turned into meadow, Minnesota dust, engines that no longer run and a stage that does. The weather can be northern June weather: heat by day, cool at night, a shower that turns the grass to mud. The race lent the ground; the crowd lends the folding chairs.

Lakes Jam grew from two days to three. That widening is not a slogan. It is the consequence of a site that already had space and of an ear that wanted more hours of country and rock without moving to a stadium. Later figures — thousands that coverage cites with caution — should not become a trophy. They measure how a 2013 debut of three thousand reached a scale Braam did not sketch alone. Growth does not erase the origin: the Raceway remains the skeleton. Anyone working the site is not only tour staff. It is people from Brainerd and Baxter who treat the last weekend of June as theirs.

The Brainerd lakes country is not a Minneapolis suburb. It is cabin country, boat country, a place where people are already on holiday when the last weekend of June arrives. Lakes Jam leans on that geography: anyone who camps is not only coming to a concert; they stay on grounds that would otherwise be a paddock. Official notes speak of Jammers, rustic camping and reserved pitches. Country and rock fit there because the crowd already knows how to sleep near noise. Anyone picturing a festival that packs at midnight and gives the city back has the wrong contract. The contract here includes the tent and breakfast with track dust.

This track must not be mixed with Lakefront Music Fest or with Laketown Rock. Lakes Jam is Braam’s, the 2013 one, the REO Speedwagon one at Brainerd International Raceway. Mixing it with a Prior Lake festival or a British Columbia ranch because all three sell rock beside a lake name is mixing a Minnesota straight with another coast. The ground is the Raceway. The ear is country and rock of a gathering that fits between a campsite and the finish line.

Anyone who walks from the tent to the fence when the sun drops understands why the paddock did not go back to being only a paddock. Between Braam and the investors, between the 1970s opener and the 2013 headliner, between Kentucky Headhunters and Night Ranger, Minnesota had a country and rock festival that did not borrow the track from anyone. Jerry Braam lends the craft; Brainerd International Raceway lends the asphalt. What remains is a Lakes Jam that learned to be large without ceasing to be, at bottom, a debut of three thousand people on a race.