As summer approaches, so does the sixth annual summer concert series at Lake Morey. Hosted by the Lake Morey Resort, this year’s performances begin June 18 and continue weekly through the end of August. The Adam Ezra Group, a band featured in the inaugural series, will kick off the free summer festivities that feature Shaggy, Andy Grammer, Natasha Bedingfield, and nine other renowned artists and bands.
While the series now brings multi-platinum and grammy-winning performers to Fairlee, it started in a vacant hotel during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like so many other business owners, Mark Avery, co-owner and general manager of the resort, faced a difficult situation once the realities of lockdown settled in. That March of 2020, he watched what was expected to be another typical summer on the Lake turn into cancelled reservations, empty rooms, and a ghost town.
Throughout the pandemic, Avery says, he began to appreciate the importance of gatherings and human connection, and realized how depressing the resort had become without people around. Maintaining the business was a challenge without visitors, but more than anything else, he missed community.
Thousands gather for last summer’s Kaleo concert on the Lake Morey Resort golf course. Kaleo and 13 others headline a stacked roster of talent coming to the lakeside venue as part of this year’s summer concert series. All photos courtesy of Lake Morey Resort.
Mark, Jen, and Jeff Avery took over operations at the resort from their father in 2008, and they still manage its hotel, golf course, lakefront amenities, and various dining options. While they officially took the helm almost 20 years ago, the siblings have spent their entire lives at the resort, which was purchased in 1972 by their grandparents. This third generation of Avery owners describe fond memories of running around the resort as children, going off to college, and returning to the lake as adults.
In dreaming up the concert series, Mark recalled performances in the resort’s ballroom by Chubby Checker, Herman’s Hermits, and other rockers when he and his siblings were children, hosted by their father in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Jen says Mark showed his first inklings of what was to come in the early 2000s, booking smaller artists he’d enjoyed in college.
When Mark started planning the first concerts in what has become the resort’s Summer Concert Series, he had virtually no experience booking musicians, building a safe and functional venue, or working in music production. With the help of Google and experienced friends like Molly Stone, the artistic director at Catamount Arts, the small team began preparing for the 2021 concert. “I didn't even realize I needed a production team to do this,” Mark says with a laugh. “I always thought that bands brought their own sound equipment and just did it themselves.”
At last summer’s Kaleo concert.
Catamount Arts operates out of St. Johnsbury and provides services and equipment—from microphones to transportable stages—to artists and venues across northern Vermont and parts of New Hampshire. This makes the two businesses—Catamount and the resort—a perfect pair. While Mark donates to and sponsors some of Catamount’s other projects, they never charge him for their services.
Stone became friends with Mark Avery before the series and has fond memories of the first summer as she helped him learn the craft. “Mark's always had this really fun curiosity about how it all works. We just consider him part of the production team with us,” Stone says. “We've become family down there.”
In the first rendition of the series, shows took place on the lakefront and turnout was low. With pandemic nervousness and social distancing, Avery says, one of the biggest challenges early on was simply spreading the word. For the first few years, 250 to 300 people would show up. But by 2023, those numbers were climbing. In 2024, the stage moved from the lakeside over to the golf course, and thousands began coming for concerts.
The road leading to the concert stage is lined with food carts.
As the word got out, the resort also began gaining credibility as a venue. For smaller, off-the-beaten-track venues like the resort, leaving a positive lasting impression on performers is critical. “Artists verify it's a good venue and properly managed, and then once you have that verification, you can start getting more and more artists,” says Jen Avery, who runs marketing for the resort, concert food and beverage, and plays various other roles. As the resort began attracting bigger and bigger acts, the stage moved again: It had moved from the lakeside to the first fairway, but now is at the 10th fairway to accommodate the thousands that turn out. The Averys estimate that concerts can draw as may as 6,000 to 8,000 people.
And with more and more attendees, the more intense preparations have become. From finding enough parking spaces for hundreds of cars to coordinating four food stations, five pop-up bars, and various food trucks, the Averys have their hands increasingly full. Since shows are free and don’t even offer tickets, the team is never even certain exactly how many attendees will turn up.
“Taking on a 17- or 18-hour day is easier with your friends and when you’re on the same journey and mission,” Stone says. ”Even though it's humongous, it is still the same mission: reducing barriers to participation.”
The concerts feature various pop up dining and beverage options. Mark has fond memories of enjoying making pizzas with Andy Grammer after a show last year.
For the Averys, the concerts have never been about profit. While the resort makes some money back on food, beverage, and room bookings, Mark waves off questions regarding the finances. During the early years by the lakeside, smaller performers would charge roughly $5,000 to put on a show. Other artists might charge four or five times that; according to online concert reviewers and aggregators such as LiveRate, artists like Bedingfield can command upwards of $30,000. It’s not an investment that is making anything back in a financial sense, he says, but there are other, less quantifiable returns: Knowing they’re giving families an opportunity to see internationally acclaimed artists without facing the “evils of Ticketmaster” makes it worth it, Mark says. He also always wanted to bring his favorite band, Collective Soul, to the resort, a goal he’ll achieve this summer when they play on August 20.
There’s another benefit to offering a free show, says Adam Ezra, lead singer and guitarist for the opening show of the summer: It’s unusual, and artists and agents recognize it. For Ezra, whose band has always been grassroots and focused on charitable causes, the concert series’ community-focused goals impressed him from the jump. While the band often gives free shows, he says, Mark always insists on paying them a typical rate.
The Adam Ezra group has performed at the resort many times and will return to kick off this year’s summer concert series on June 18. Courtesy of Last Minute Productions.
“Artists are used to playing big venues and big festivals, and Lake Morey hangs with them in terms of what they are able to provide,” Ezra says. “All the artists stay at the resort and are taken very good care of, and then they walk out onto a super professional stage. It doesn’t feel like quirky backwoods.”
When the Adam Ezra Group kicks off this summer’s series later in June, it may perform unreleased songs from their latest album, which debuts at the House of Blues in Boston the following weekend. The group never goes into a show with a set list of songs, however, so you’ll have to be there to find out.
As the resort and its staff prepare for the largest slate of performers in the series’ history (and some of its biggest names), Mark Avery is already looking to 2027. The more popular the artists, the more ahead of the game a venue needs to be to land them. While the series’ growth over the years excites him, he’s also limited by costs and not owning an NFL stadium for the ever-growing crowds. Some years he’ll have the budget for bigger names, more shows, and other years, maybe not. And he says he’s fine with that.
“I choose to book these caliber of artists and this amount of shows, because once I see that sea of six, seven, eight thousand people, and everybody getting along, there’s just so much value to that,” Mark says.
Duncan Green is a rising senior at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he is studying journalism and history. Next fall, he will be taking on a lead producing role for the Newshouse, a campus publication covering SU and the city of Syracuse. Duncan graduated from Lebanon High School in 2023 and is based out of Plainfield this summer.
