Soundbites: Avi Salloway Wants to Save the World 

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• Courtesy Of Hank Miller
• Billy Wylder

I remember standing in a dust-strewn Tennessee parking lot, the summer sun beating down mercilessly as an endless procession of cars left the festival, feeling a specific kind of disgust.

I had spent a long four days in Manchester, taking in the annual Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival for what would turn out to be my final camping-at-a-music-fest experience. I'd slept little, eaten worse and certainly drunk more than I normally would have. It never seemed to get below 90 degrees, and my skin, desperate for a shower, was coated in several layers of dust and dried sweat. For all the incredible music I'd heard, I was physically and mentally drained — and that was before I noticed the grounds.

Amid all the dust and scant patches of grass rose heaps and heaps of trash. Plastic bottles, open bags of garbage, piles of human shit, plenty of drug paraphernalia, discarded sleeping bags and ruined tents. For all my festival experience, I had never hung around at the end and seen the mess that 100,000 assholes can create. Knowing I was one of them didn't sit well with me.

Nor has it sat well with Avi Salloway. The Vermont-based Billy Wylder guitarist and frontman, who spent years touring with internationally acclaimed Tuareg musician Bombino, has kept note of all the environmentally unsustainable moments he's observed in his career, and he's long wanted to take action.

"Oh, man... there's a real element of guilt for me when it comes to this subject," Salloway told me by phone as he and his bandmates and his dog, Lujah, sat squeezed into his Toyota RAV4, driving from his home in Woodstock to a show in Portland, Maine. "I've played across six continents over the years, and that's a lot of flying, a lot of carbon usage," he said. "And I've seen the heaps and heaps of garbage after a fest."

A show in Italy, where Bombino supported acoustic pop star Jack Johnson, opened Salloway's eyes to the power an artist has to fight for environmental issues. Johnson, a former professional surfer turned singer-songwriter, required the venue to observe an assortment of green-minded initiatives, including banning all single-use plastic items from the show.

"It really inspired me to see an artist of his caliber use his agency on that scale," Salloway said. "It showed me what was possible if we fight for it."

To that end, Salloway helped produce the Imagine Zero Music Festival. The one-day fest, to be held at the Fable Farm in Barnard on Saturday, September 7, is dedicated to achieving environmental sustainability by striving for zero carbon use and leaving zero waste.

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• Courtesy
• Lakou Mizik

The lineup features Haitian music collective Lakou Mizik and New England musical talent such as the Wolff Sisters, Chad Hollister, Beecharmer and, of course, Billy Wylder. But the festival's real star is its environmental mission.

The entire event is solar powered. Shuttles will help reduce car traffic. Even the Porta-Potties are actually composting toilets, ready to turn all that shit into natural fertilizer.

"We're in a critical moment with climate change," Salloway said. "The wake-up calls are blatantly obvious; even Vermonters are seeing it now with all these biblical kinds of floods.

"And the reality is that the music industry is a significant contributor to climate change," he continued. "We're not helpless, though; we can change that."

With the festival entering its second year, Salloway went from being an advisor to founders Ben Kogan and Cliff Johnson to helping the duo produce the entire show. Kogan, whose band is also on the bill, used to play bass in Salloway's old Burlington-based folk act, Avi & Celia. The festival's brain trust hopes to educate the concert-going public on embracing sustainability while keeping the spirit of festival fun alive.

"Globally, we're in a space of doom and apathy when it comes to climate change," Salloway said. "So a big goal of the Imagine Zero festival is to help shift the consciousness around climate change. We don't need to act like it's the apocalypse or anything; we're here to have fun and dance. We just need to make the necessary shifts to remain, you know, living on this planet."

While the model Salloway and his partners are using to achieve their environmental goals is based on a sample size of about 1,000 concert attendees, he maintains that any festival, from Waking Windows to Coachella, can push for the same green initiatives.

"Our hope is to make what we do open source and for this format to be duplicated worldwide," Salloway said. "The solar power resources are there, and any venue can be proactive about using plastics. It just takes a commitment to want to do that."

Salloway pointed out other local venues that are getting in on the act, noting that the Higher Ground Presents crew transitioned from diesel generators to clean battery technology for its entire 2024 Ben & Jerry's Concerts on the Green series. Rock band Guster played the first show on the newly decarbonized stage.

"There is a groundswell of support to truly address climate change, finally," Salloway said. "It takes a groundbreaking concept to transform live music towards a sustainable model. That's what we're aspiring to do."

Not many things could restore my faith in humanity these days, but if Salloway and his friends can transform the concert festival set into an environment-loving, no-waste-leaving crew of Captain Planet's Planeteers, I may have to reevaluate my disdain for music festivals.