BREAKOUTS>>>>

Go and do

What: North Atlantic Blues Festival

When: 11 a.m. Sunday (gates open at 9)

Where: Harbor Park, Rockland

Sunday headliner: Elvin Bishop, 4:30-5:45 p.m.

Tickets: $30 per day, available at the gate

By the numbers

50: Number of people who attended the first Rockland blues festival

1,500: Number of people who attended the first North Atlantic Blues Festival

16,000: Number of people expected to attend this year

In love with the blues
EL grad helped create the renowned North Atlantic Blues Festival

When Jamie Isaacson was 14 or 15, he routinely sneaked into some of the seediest bars and clubs in Lewiston-Auburn.

Not to drink, not to look at the scantily clad women.

To listen to the blues.

“It’s just got a real feeling to it,” he said. “It’s really an emotional music.”

Now 53, Isaacson gets his music fix without sneaking. He co-organizes the North Atlantic Blues Festival in Rockland, which takes place this weekend. Performers take the stage at 11 a.m. today. Elvin Bishop, a 45-year veteran of the blues and a master of the slide guitar, will be the headline act, performing from 4:30 to 5:45 p.m.

Isaacson will be there, but he won’t perform. His passion for the blues led him to join a band as a pianist after graduating from Edward Little High School in 1972. The band, the Blues Prophets, was one of Maine’s first touring blues bands.

Isaacson couldn’t make a living from the blues. He went to work in the family business, which manufactures lumber and pallets. He played a bit, listened a lot, but music took a back seat to life.

Then, around 1993, he got the idea to start a blues festival.

“I thought the time was right for it in Maine,” he said.

He was looking for a place to hold it when a friend told him about a tiny festival that another blues aficionado – Paul Benjamin – was running out of a hotel parking lot in Rockland.

“We got teamed up and decided to bring it up a step,” Isaacson said.

Fifty people showed up for Benjamin’s original festival, the one held in the parking lot. About 1,500 people showed up for the first North Atlantic Blues Festival.

This year, about 16,000 people are expected – more than double Rockland’s average population.

“When you look out over the blues festival grounds, you can’t see the grass,” said Bob Hastings, executive director of the Penobscot Bay Regional Chamber of Commerce. “It goes from a green park to just a sea of people.”

The North Atlantic Blues Festival has grown to a two-day event that requires 50 to 60 volunteers to run smoothly. Performers take to the main stage every hour from 11 a.m. to evening, with a nighttime “club crawl” that allows blues fans to see musicians in smaller, more intimate venues. The blues fest now leads into Rockland’s summer festival season.

But more than local entertainment, it’s become an international phenomenon.

In 2002, Isaacson and Benjamin won The Blues Foundation’s Keeping the Blues Alive Award, honoring the Rockland festival as one of the best in the world. The award had previously gone to festivals in New Orleans, San Francisco and Chicago.

Blues aficionados from across the country and around the world travel to the Rockland festival. It’s also popular with performers.

“It’s gained a reputation as being a really great place to play,” Isaacson said. “They all want to play here.”

Benjamin, now president of The Blues Foundation, books most of the performers. The festival draws rising stars such as Grammy-nominated blues singer Susan Tedeschi who played there a few years before her career took off. It also draws industry giants: Bo Diddley, and Muddy Waters alum Pinetop Perkins.

Many are Isaacson’s favorites, but he’s almost always too busy overseeing the festival to watch them perform.

He still plays with the Blues Prophets, but he’ll stay backstage at the festival, he said.

“Through the years I realized, you know, I’m not in the same caliber as these people. I found that out,” he said. “But it’s just great to be around it. To bring great music, great blues to Maine.”