CASEY: Buzzkill! – 2 days before launch, organizers abruptly cancel Virginia 420 Fest

In its third year, Virginia’s premier music and cannabis culture festival would feature two locations rather than one. The first was Misty Mountain campground in Albemarle County, west of Charlotteville, same location as last year. The second spot was supposed to be Garrett Farms in Glenvar.

But after collecting money from sponsors, vendors and (apparently too few) advance ticket-buyers, Marsden pulled the plug on both events with little warning. Tuesday evening he took down the festival’s elaborate website, leaving a single-page notice on Virginia420Fest.com:

“EVENT CANCELLED: VENDORS AND TICKETHOLDERS WILL RECEIVE REFUNDS,” the page declares. In smaller type is the message: “Apologies, Family – I have disappointed you.”

That’s left ticketholders, sponsors and vendors bewildered, angry and holding the bag.

For festivalgoers, “I bought $10,000 worth of products to do IV hydration,” said nurse-practitioner Rikki McConnell, owner of The Hybrid Clinic in Vinton. “I’m not going to get that back.”

Now the yanked four-day event is being compared to other ill-fated music gatherings that never occurred, such as 2017 Fyre Festival disaster in the Bahamas. Another is the 2023 Blue Ridge Rock Fest near Danville in September, which was wrecked by a late-summer storm (and poor evacuation planning) halfway through.

Marsden wasn’t answering phone calls on Wednesday but plenty of other unhappy campers were.

Garrett Farms in Glenvar, in conjunction with the Play4Life Foundation, announced it would hold a scaled-back, free-admission music festival April 20 where attendees can camp that night for free, listen to music for no charge, and smoke, vape or otherwise indulge in cannabis.

Co-founded by local music promoter Deanna Marcin, Play4Life is a nonprofit that works to raise awareness of mental health and suicide prevention. It built the stage at Garrett Farms.

“I can’t give people their money back, but I can give them their festival back,” said Ian Hill, whose family has operated Garrett Farms since 1945.

“This was a big event for us,” Marcin told me. “This was a big thing for Roanoke. It was Roanoke’s first legal-and-organized pot party.”

Hill had leased Garrett Farms to the Virginia 420 Fest — which didn’t pay the agreed-upon lease fee in advance. The same arrangement was in play at Misty Mountain campground in Albemarle County, said campground owner Andrew Baldwin.

“They paid last year,” Baldwin told me. “This year we will lose money, certainly.”

Hill estimated the sudden cancellation would cost him $5,000 and $15,000.

“Nobody’s making any money,” Hill told me. “We have no budget; I don’t have any money. We’re struggling to pay for Porta-Johns that the festival was supposed to provide. We’re going to do that.”

Marcin spent Tuesday night and Wednesday trying to cobble together a lineup of local bands to provide entertainment for the scaled-back free festival. Wednesday afternoon, she texted me a new music-and-entertainment lineup.

“We have several of the original 30 vendors [who are still attending]” Marcin wrote. They can set up and sell food or other products without paying a vendor fee.

For the two-day free festival, the replacement bands will be The DL; Dead Atlantis; Hazy Petals; Tommy Edwards; and Son of An Outlaw. Also on hand will be Star City Flow Arts, a troupe that performs circus-style aerial arts and juggling acts.

“People are donating sound and lights,” Marcin said. “I have 16 volunteers in play … Making it free means we’re making the same amount of money we were going to make if the Virginia 420 Fest had occurred.” (In other words, nothing.)

It’s unclear what the canceled festival means for RISE, the licensed medical marijuana dispensary in Salem. RISE was title sponsor of the Virginia 420 Fest, and was set up to provide deliveries of weed to medical marijuana patients at the festival.

I called the dispensary Wednesday but an employee referred me an email address for the company’s media relations department. It didn’t respond to two emails.

According to Marsden, RISE had agreed to provide cannabis deliveries to registered medical marijuana patients at the festival.

In addition to hydration, McConnell was going to offer discounted medical evaluations and marijuana prescriptions at the festival. Now she won’t be, though she will be offering initial evaluations from her office Thursday and Friday at the discounted price of $75.

Hill noted danger signals early this week that the festival organizers weren’t going to be able to fulfill their promises.

For example, on Monday, Marsden made a post to the Virginia 420 Festival Facebook page seeking volunteers to move a stage from Lynchburg to Misty Mountain campground with just a couple of days’ notice. That seemed kind of late and slapdash.

“Sunday and Monday, people stopped answering phone calls,” Hill said. “I had a hard time sleeping Sunday night.”

He said Marsden should have offered discounts on tickets sold in advance to an outdoor music festival. When the ticket prices at the gate cost the same, patrons will wait and see what the weather’s like before they decide whether to attend.

“Ticket sales doubled after your article, the few that there were,” Hill said. “One thousand, and we would’ve had a festival.”