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Come the third weekend of September, roughly 35,000 people will crowd onto the North Beach in Asbury Park with their backs to Ocean Avenue and their faces to the water, waiting for a headliner to walk out over the sand.
This year it’s September 19 and 20 – it is sold out – like it is every year. The Strokes, The Goo Goo Dolls, Mumford & Sons and a couple dozen other acts across three stages. Between sets are a pro surf contest and art you can walk through. Two days of glorious fun in the sun.
But this is not a promotional article for a show – it is a shout out for the people that make it happen.
Go down to that same beach a week or so earlier and you’ll find something just as interesting, to some even more interesting than the show itself. An empty stretch of sand with a row of trucks backed up to the boardwalk, engines running, ramps down and lots of people milling around.
There is no music, no crowd, just steel and cable and a crew of people doing one of the odder jobs in live entertainment: building a concert stage on a beach.
That’s the part of Sea.Hear.Now nobody puts on the poster.
A stage on the sand is not a normal stage
Most music festival stages go up on a field or a parking lot, on ground that holds still and holds weight. Asbury Park’s beach does neither.
You can’t just drive a loaded forklift across dry sand, it digs in. So before a single truss goes vertical, the crew has to solve the floor — laying down temporary roadway and decking so trucks, lifts, and thousands of pounds of rigging can move without sinking. Every heavy thing that ends up on that beach has to first cross a surface strong enough to carry it there.
Then there’s the water. Salt air and a forecast that can turn on a Thursday afternoon within minutes. Whatever gets built has to stand up to weather that a stage in a landlocked field never has to think about.
None of this is glamorous – or easy. All of it happens before the gates open, and most of it is invisible by the time you’re standing there with a beer waiting for the first band.
The people who never make the lineup
Here’s who does that work: riggers hanging lights and sound off steel. Forklift drivers threading equipment across that temporary floor. The crews pulling cable, stacking speaker arrays, framing the stages the festival calls Surf and Sand down on the beach and the Park Stage across Ocean Avenue in Bradley Park.
They show up when the site is a construction zone, they’re gone before the people roll in.
It’s easy to talk about Sea.Hear.Now as Danny Clinch’s festival, or as a C3 Presents production — same company behind Lollapalooza — and both of those things are true. But a festival is also a few hundred people you’ll never hear named, doing hot, heavy, precise work on a hard deadline that leaves no room for error.
A few years ago I got the chance to watch the magicians at work. The images below show what it looks like before the festival. It was a Sunday morning, the boardwalk in Asbury Park was quiet – except for these crew members who were hard at work.
I sat. I watched. I was in awe. I never gave thought to how a show like that comes together. It is more than most of us ever imagined.
This week if you head down to Asbury Park you might catch them in action yourself. The unsung heroes of the show that do not get the credit they deserve.
It started with a storm
Sea.Hear.Now grew out of benefit concerts that Clinch, an Asbury Park native, and his partner Tim Donnelly organized in 2012 to help the shore recover from Superstorm Sandy. One of them packed the Paramount Theatre with Steve Earle and My Morning Jacket. The money went toward rebuilding. The festival that opened in 2018, and now brings tens of thousands of people to the beach every fall, traces straight back to that.
This is a place that got rebuilt by people who showed up and did the work. And every September, on the same sand, a different set of people show up and do a different kind of building — putting up a temporary city so the rest of us can have a weekend.
Up in days, gone in days
The other thing that gets me is how briefly it all exists.
The stages that take days to raise carry Springsteen and the E Street Band for a three-hour set one year, Stevie Nicks and Green Day another, and then they come down. Fast. Within days the beach is a beach again. Sand, gulls, the odd jogger.
As if 35,000+ people over a weekend never happened.
Every bolt gets unbolted and every cable coiled. The floor that let the trucks cross the sand gets pulled up and trucked out. Teardown is its own marathon, run by many of the same people, usually with a lot less attention on them than the build got.
That’s the rhythm of it. Empty beach, temporary city, empty beach. Twice a year the shore holds its breath, and a crew you’ll never meet does the inhaling and exhaling.
Here’s to the builders
Next time you’re on the sand at Sea.Hear.Now, waiting for the lights to drop, look at what you’re standing in. Someone built the ground under the stage. Someone hung the thing throwing sound back at you. Someone will take it all down on Monday while you’re back at work telling people about the show.
No stage, no show. That’s not a slogan, it is fact.
