Umphrey’s McGee

Umphrey’s McGee will be performing LIVE on the Outdoor Stage at Salvage Station for an incredible two-night run Friday, August 25th with and Saturday, August 26th! Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country will open for the Friday Show, and Butcher Brown will open Saturday!

Day of show information:

4:00PM- Salvage Station paid on-site parking lot opens

5:00PM- Satellite lots open + FREE shuttle service begins

5:00PM- Venue doors open

6:15PM- Concert starts

11:00PM- City-wide outdoor amplified music curfew

PARKING: DO NOT park along the railroad tracks, bike lanes, or at other businesses along Riverside Drive! YOU WILL BE TOWED! PAID on-site parking is first-come, first-served with a $10 cash; $12 credit card fee per car. Handicap on-site parking is available. As always, PLEASE carpool, Uber, Lyft, Taxi, or bike when you can!

FREE PARKING: will be available with complimentary shuttle service from 5PM to 11:30PM every 20 minutes (or faster, if traffic is good to us) just down the street at the Asheville Visitor Center (36 Montford Ave.)

*NO PARKING AT ZEN TUBING FOR THIS EVENT*

OVERFLOW PARKING: Our neighbors on the other side of Southern States will be offering paid parking from 5:00PM to 10:30PM which is a short walk to Salvage Station along the railroad tracks. Please be safe walking to your car after dark and get a buddy to walk with you!

AGE LIMIT: This is an all-ages show. All minors must be accompanied by their guardian at ALL TIMES or their entire party will be asked to leave. Kids under 7 are free!

Camping Chairs + Blankets: Are NOT allowed for this event.

REQUIRED: Shirts + shoes are required at all times while on property (this used to be a salvage yard and can be very dangerous for bare feet). 

FOOD/BEVERAGE: We will have several food trucks on-site with options for everyone, so come hungry! Please, no outside food, drinks are allowed into the venue. Multiple full bars will be open with an incredible selection of alcoholic and non-alcoholic options. EMPTY water bottles are allowed in an effort to cut down on waste. Remember to reduce, reuse and recycle and LEAVE NO TRACE (aka- put your used items in the proper bins when done). 

BAG POLICY: ALL guests are subject to being searched prior to entry. No large bags over 6″x6″ are allowed into the venue. *If you must have a bag larger than 6″x6″ for medical reasons, it must be completely CLEAR. 

THE FOLLOWING ARE NOT ALLOWED INSIDE THE VENUE: 

-No Pets or Animals

-No firearms, knives, weapons, pepper spray, fireworks, or projectiles of any kind

-No drugs, drug paraphernalia, or illegal substances of any kind

-No personal video cameras, Go-Pros, drones, or lasers

-No professional audio, video, or audio recording equipment – (including detachable lenses, tripods, zooms, or commercial use rigs) without proper credentials

-No inflatables

-No tents or easy-ups

-No frisbees, hula hoops, or balls

WEATHER: Please dress appropriately for the weather. SMALL handheld umbrellas are permitted and we recommend wearing layers. Be prepared and remember there is no re-entry!

Like to be pampered? Check out our NEW Step It Up Lounge next to the sound booth. This is a limited occupancy space for those who want to indulge in a private bar, brand new bathrooms, and bistro seating. This area is only available on a first-come, first-served basis and is $25 per person. Pay at the lounge host stand upon arrival. No reservations or pre-sales available at this time. Lounge doors open at 5:00PM. 

Check out our FAQ page here to learn about large event parking options, what you can and cannot bring inside the venue, and MORE! 

Listen to Umphrey’s McGee:

About Umphrey’s McGee:

In the twenty-five years since eclectic improv-rock band Umphrey’s McGee formed, their sound has been an amalgamation of genres, moods, and tempos, effortlessly flowing from one feeling to the next throughout an album or concert—or sometimes within a singular song. But with time and repetition comes wisdom and maturity, both personally and musically, and in the case of the band’s new album Asking For A Friend, Umphrey’s McGee entered the recording studio with something to say and a wise, measured way to say it. 

The end result is an astoundingly cohesive fourteen-song album that feels like a fresh statement from a group of world-class musicians and friends reapproaching their craft with a new lens. But long-time fans will be happy to know that the Umphrey’s McGee they know and love is still very much present on Asking For A Friend, just more refined. More focused.

Daniel Donato:

Listen to Daniel Donato:

About Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country:

Donato, a 27-year-old Nashville native, has distilled those life lessons into his debut album, A Young Man’s Country, his proper introduction to the general musical audience. Recorded at Nashville’s Sound Emporium in a mere two days and produced by guitar-ace Robben Ford, the record weaves outlaw country, Grateful Dead-style Americana, and first-rate songwriting into a singular form Donato calls “21st-century cosmic country.”

It might surprise some that the Telecaster-wielding wunderkind, who at 16 became the youngest musician to regularly play the iconic honky tonk Robert’s Western World while gigging with the Don Kelley Band, began his musical journey in a purely millennial fashion. Before he ever picked up a guitar, he discovered he had an aptitude for music via the video game Guitar Hero. At the time, he didn’t feel compelled to try his hand at the real thing until one day, about the age of 12, he heard the electric perfection of Guns ‘N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” blast from a set of speakers and his world was changed forever.

“It was the first time I ever had a vision for my life,” says Donato, who was partly drawn to music because he sucked royally at skateboarding. “I then took one of my dad’s old guitars . . . and I literally fell in love with it.” From then on, Donato lived and breathed music, practicing his chops around the clock. He’d play before school, during his lunch break, and in the evenings at home, sometimes falling asleep with the six-string in his hands.

It wasn’t long before he was busking on lower Broadway in Nashville, playing eight hours a day on weekends for tips. It was after one of those day’s sessions that he got a wild hair and snuck into Robert’s on a night when house act the Don Kelley Band was playing and his wig-dome was blown. “It was the first time I ever saw a band that was that good up close,” Donato said. “So I’m literally watching them play and I’m crying. I decided right then that I wanted to be the best guitar player in the world.”

Donato continued busking outside arenas before John Mayer and Phish concerts and on the streets of Nashville and it was then, while playing on Broadway, that he’d give Don Kelley his business card every Saturday night, hoping for a chance to audition. One day, while still a junior in high school, he got the call to come play. Donato was more than ready, and he delivered the goods in spades. He was so good, in fact, that he became a regular member of the band, performing four nights a week for more than 450 shows with the group.

Playing nightly with the Don Kelley Band was a formidable education for the young musician. Jamming regularly with Nashville’s most seasoned players, stalwart pickers who may have played in Buck Owens’ band, or Dolly Parton’s, or Alan Jackson’s, ex-panded his musical vocabulary while honing his stage presence. Along the way he was soaking up stories of adventures on the road and learning about the ups and downs of the music business. In short, he was gaining priceless life lessons and a mu-sical education from wells that run deep into the musical history of Nashville.

Around the time he turned 18, one of Donato’s high-school teachers, a serious music lover who had seen his student play at Robert’s, gave him a Grateful Dead box set. It was another eureka moment for the guitarist. His love for the Dead may have been ig-nited much earlier by virtue of the fact that his mother was a bona fide Deadhead who followed the group on tour when she was pregnant with the future guitarist, but it was that collection that changed the way he looked at music. “It gave me a tie to all of the classic country gold I’d been working down at the honky-tonks each weekend,” he said. “Grateful Dead and Merle Haggard had always lived in my heart, but now, the link was made, and I had a vision on how to keep it alive for this generation that I am coming from.”

During the days of his Robert’s residency, Donato continued to busk at various locales, even playing the Grand Ole Opry, and it is the sum of all these gigs, experiences any teenage musician would kill for, that inform the sounds on A Young Man’s Coun-try.

“Ain’t Living Long Like This,” one of three covers on the album, is a song by Waylon Jennings, who was recording at the Sound Emporium the day Donato was born. “Angel From Montgomery,” a song Donato learned on the fly while busking for tourists, pays tribute to the late John Prine. Donato recorded his unique take on the tune before Prine’s death. The Grateful Dead’s “Fire On The Mountain” is tacked on to “Meet Me In Dallas,” a tune Donato wrote while on the road with Paul Cauthen. The other seven songs, all originals, showcase the promise of a young songwriter coming into his own, one of the highlights being “Luck of the Draw.”

The message of these songs contain the central tenet of Donato’s “Cosmic Country” ethos, which is about finding the courage to blaze your own path. As such, it is an ethos the artist extends beyond music into the channels of social media, where he’s built up a huge following of devoted “DD Heads,” as his fans call themselves. His pod-cast, “Daniel Donato’s Lost Highway,” brings together like-minded creatives to get at the heart of what makes artists tick, for which he’s interviewed Brothers Osborne, Brent Cobb, Orville Peck, and Garry Talent of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.

Incubated to the sounds of the Dead, educated by some of Nashville’s finest players, and having more than 2,000 shows under his belt and a social media presence, Dan-iel Donato is indeed a millennial whirligig of creative fire. He’s been dabbling in pro-fessional music since the age of 14 and yet he’s just getting started. A Young Man’s Country is the portrait of a restless artist as a young man, one whose story is singular and is still in its exciting, early chapters — and as this effort shows, the future is indeed cosmic.