SUMMERHAVEN - Tom Carpenter and his Crystal Ridge bluegrass band looked out at the sizable Music on the Mountain crowd and were pleasantly surprised.
On that first Sunday afternoon in June, there were older men in neatly pressed khaki shorts and golf shirts planted on lawn chairs. Along the hillside slope, toddlers scampered under the feet of their parents, who sat on small boulders, shaded by a canopy of low-hanging aspen trees and ponderosa pines.
Every now and then, a few young hikers in tank tops, jeans and hiking boots detoured from the mountain trails off North Sabino Canyon Parkway to see what all the fuss and noise was about. Many stood and watched the band play a song or two; more than a few found a spot on several giant logs framing the makeshift concert grounds. Or they plopped into the warm dirt, tucked their knees to their chests and sat awhile.
The music, the cool breezes and the heady perfume of sweet pine, freshly popped kettle corn, grilled chicken and warm beer put you in the mood to sit a spell. It is the perfect escape from the punishing heat thousands of feet below Mount Lemmon.
This is Sunday afternoon in Summerhaven's village center, week two of the 15-week Music on the Mountain concert series. And in the perfect world envisioned by developer Jim Campbell and longtime resident/businessman Bob Zimmerman, the crowds gathered on Sunday afternoons will come back for more than just the music.
"Music on the Mountain is, for us, the beginning of the rebirth of the village center. It brings people up there," Campbell said recently. "It lets people understand there is a reason to go up there besides hiking."
Campbell and Zimmerman have a stake in the series' success. Campbell is waiting for the economy to turn around to break ground on The Ponderosa, his 18-unit condominium project on the vacant dirt lots where he has erected the 40-by-80-foot tent and makeshift stage.
Across the street next to the post office, Zimmerman hopes to begin construction this fall on the Sawmill restaurant, a reincarnation of sorts of his family's landmark Mount Lemmon Sawmill & Co. Restaurant, which burned down in 1977. It will be built on the lot that once housed the popular Mount Lemmon Cafe, renowned for its pies. That restaurant closed last spring and the building was torn down.
"There isn't a day that goes by that people don't ask when I'm going to build my restaurant," said Zimmerman, 75, who grew up on Mount Lemmon and owns Mount Lemmon Realty. "We're holding our breath and moving forward."
Strike up the band and they will come
Last spring, not long after the cafe closed and the number of mountain visitors dwindled, Campbell began brainstorming ways to lure people back to the mountain. Although most of the Summerhaven shops lost in the 2003 Aspen Fire were back up and running - along with a few new businesses - people weren't coming like they used to.
So Campbell called Bonnie Vining and invited her to help him organize Music on the Mountain. Vining had been hosting concerts throughout Tucson with her upstart Live Acoustic Venue Association, but not to the scale Campbell envisioned for the mountain.
Campbell put up the roughly $5,500 to buy the tent, and Vining organized the lineup in three weeks. Overall, she said, the inaugural series was a success. Attendance averaged 300 to 400; at one concert, there were 600 people, she said.
"I enjoy creating a sense of community through music," she said, standing beside the stage as Crystal Ridge's young fiddler, 20-year-old Ellie Hakanson, coaxed a lonesome wail from her instrument.
The hotter the temperature in Tucson, the bigger the turnout for Music on the Mountain, which boasts a more idyllic and significantly cooler setting than anything you can find in the sweltering valley 6,000 feet below.
"This is heaven," Carpenter said between sets while his standup-bass player/Tucson dentist Brian Davies stood in a short line for a plate of barbecue chicken, beans and potato salad. "This is the best venue in the summertime in Tucson."
Two hours into their four-hour gig, a cool breeze blew in, gently shaking the tree branches above a towering ponderosa where Steve Banick and Alexis Megeath sat. Their sheepdog, Sage, lazily lay at their feet and occasionally raised his head to catch the breeze.
This was the couple's second trip to the mountain since they moved to Tucson in late April.
"It's not quite the Telluride Bluegrass Festival," Banick said as longtime Tucson music man Ned Sutton joined Crystal Ridge on stage, "but it's pretty darn good."
Sutton, whose career dates back to the 1970s, sat in on a few songs with the quartet, including showcasing a softly worn baritone on Peter Rowan's "Walls of Time."
Sutton had not intended to come up to Mount Lemmon that afternoon, but he decided to make the trip at the last minute. He had barely gotten seated in a plastic chair in the middle of the tent when Campbell spotted him and invited him on stage.
"I was so nervous," Sutton admitted afterwards, sitting on a tree stump near where Yvette Bredice was selling water and beer. "The dash up the mountain. And those guys were so good. But I guess it worked out all right."
Creating a new mountain community
Sutton sees promise in Music on the Mountain and the potential it holds for Summerhaven's revival. He can recall the mountain's 1970s heyday, when he and his musician friends would work the old inn on the weekends. The regulars would come out and sit alongside the weekenders - those folks from Tucson who had second-home cabins.
"They would put us up in a big ol' room in the hotel," he recalled.
There was a sense of community back then. Familial. Inviting.
"We don't have anything like it now, a place for the community to get together, have dinner, swap lies," Zimmerman said of those long-ago days. "That's all gone. When I had the inn, it was a community center. People would come in, kibitz and talk, have a beer. We had shows and a movie theater with the old Bell and Howell projectors. We had church on Sunday morning."
He gets something of a sense of those days on Sunday afternoons, when the village center fills up.
"This was enough to give people a reason to show up," Campbell added. "It brings the people up to the village. It activates the village, which is probably the most important thing."
On StarNet: See photos of Music on the Mountain at azstarnet.com/gallery
7 years after the fire
• The Aspen fire on Mount Lemmon burned for a month after it ignited on June 17, 2003. The fire swept into the village of Summerhaven on the third day, June 19, taking with it some 360 structures, including a smattering of landmark businesses. Some of them were:
• Mount Lemmon Cookies and Cabins: Reopened in June 2005 as the Mount Lemmon Cookie Cabin and added pizza to the menu.
• The Living Rainbow: Gift shop reopened in late May 2005.
• Alpine Lodge: Never replaced.
• Mount Lemmon General Store & Gift Shop: Rebuilt and reopened one year to the day of the fire, on June 19, 2004.
•Spared: The Mount Lemmon Realty office and the Mount Lemmon Cafe, pictured below, which was renowned for its homemade pies, were among a few of the buildings in the village center spared by the blaze. The cafe closed last spring, months after its owner, Pamela Rinella, died in September 2008. The building was later demolished.
Sounds of summer
Here are some other summertime music series in the Tucson area:
Summer of Enchantment
La Encantada courtyard, 2905 E. Skyline Drive, at North Campbell Avenue. Hosted by the Southern Arizona Arts & Cultural Alliance. $10 in advance through www. saaca.org; $11 day of the show. Performances begin at 7 p.m. Details 299-3566.
•July 9 - Soulero.
• July 23 - The Last Call Girls.
• Aug. 6 - Los Esquineros with pianist Amilcar Guevara.
• Aug. 20 - Jive Bombers.
• Sept. 3 - Heather O'Day.
• Sept. 17 - Jovert.
• Oct. 1 - Bill Ganz.
A Concert in Your Backyard
Crossroads at Silverbell District Park, 7548 N. Silverbell Road, Marana. Hosted by the town of Marana and presented by the Southern Arizona Arts & Cultural Alliance. Admission is free; concerts begin at 6 p.m. Details: www.saaca.org
• July 10 - Amber Norgaard.
• Aug. 14 - Bad News Blues Band.
• Sept. 11 - Good Question.
Park Place Live Music Series
Park Place, 5870 E. Broadway. Series is presented in partnership with the mall's owners and the Southern Arizona Arts & Cultural Alliance. Performances begin at 6 p.m. Thursdays. Admission is free. Details: www.saaca.org.
• July 1 - Sherry Finzer.
• July 8 - Ergo Logic.
• July 15 - The Guilty Bystanders.
Did you know?
Bob Zimmerman's planned Sawmill restaurant would be the long-anticipated replacement for the Mount Lemmon Sawmill Co. & Restaurant. Also called the Mount Lemmon Inn, it was a fixture in the community from the time it was built in 1945 as a country store. Owner Tony, Bob Zimmerman's dad, added a two-story structure in the 1950s that served as a 12-room hotel. The building was destroyed by fire in April 1977 and was never rebuilt.
Source: Star Archives.
If you go
• What: Music on the Mountain series.
• Presented by: Mesquite Homes.
• When: 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 5.
• Where: 12901 N. Sabino Canyon Parkway in Summerhaven.
• Admission: Free.
• Details: www.lavamusic.org
• Do's and don'ts: You can bring a chair or a blanket, but no outside food and drinks. Proceeds from food and beverage sales help pay the musicians.
Schedule of events
• Today: Bad News Blues Band.
• June 27: The Jim Howell Band.
• July 4: The Kevin Pakulis Band.
• July 11: Black Leather Zydeco.
• July 18: Chuck Wagon and the Wheelchairs.
• July 25: Retro Rockets.
• Aug. 1: The Wyatts.
• Aug. 8: Strait Country.
• Aug. 15: The Dreadnutts.
• Aug. 22: The Last Call Girls.
• Aug. 29: The Wayback Machine.
• Sept. 5: Chuck Wagon and the Wheelchairs.
Contact reporter Cathalena E. Burch at cburch@azstarnet.com or 573-4642.
