Stone Mountain Arts Center in tiny Brownfield isn’t on the way to anywhere, certainly not from the perspective of a band on tour looking to pack in lucrative back-to-back live performances. The stage is small, making setup a challenge. Internet access is iffy. To reach the venue, bands must drive a few miles down a dirt road. And there’s not a whole lot for them to do in the village (population 1,631, per the 2020 census) once they arrive.

But Stone Mountain owner Carol Noonan has at least one powerful ace up her sleeve to entice performers — internationally known names like Lyle Lovett and Taj Mahal — to venture to her quirky, out-of-the-way venue: beautiful, delicious, home-cooked meals.

Musicians, some of whom have been living on the road for months, making do with fast food sandwiches and other uninspired convenience meals, will find a spread that could have sprung from the pages of a glossy magazine feature on stunning summer buffets. That’s what the 16 members of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, also their manager and production manager, were greeted with when they played at Stone Mountain in July. Dinner, made from local ingredients and served family-style, materialized in the green room after sound check: a platter of roasted salmon strewn with fresh herbs and lemon slices; another with sliced sirloin steak and caramelized onions; heaping bowls of lemony sugar snap peas; herbed rice; and Greek and garden salads.

For dessert, no matter the band, there’s always a personalized cake baked by Suzie Whalen, who has worked for the center for 19 years. This evening, it was a stunning two-layer chocolate-raspberry cake — the raspberries picked that day from her garden. She’d written on the cake in big block icing letters, “MAINE LOVES LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO!” and encircled the words with bands of icing in the colors of the South African flag.

“Every time I’m here, they always treat us like this,” said Ladysmith band member Mfanafuthi Dlamini, motioning toward the spread. The year before, the meal included lobster, he remembered. “This doesn’t compare to anything.”

A buffet of chicken drumsticks, house-made cornbread, and a simmering pot of “Marty Stuart veggie chili” (named for the country star who especially likes it) had been set out for Ladysmith when they’d arrived earlier that day. And if anyone was still hungry after the show, there’d be house-made pizza, maybe a popular pie with figs, mushrooms and feta.

“If they’re going to haul up here in the middle of nowhere to this weird place that is so unlike all the other venues they are going to, you have to make it special,” Noonan said. “When I was on the road with my band, when we talked about gigs we loved, the guys always talked about the gigs that had good food.”

FOOD LURES

Staff at performing arts venues across the state say they take pains to feed performers — and drivers, crew, managers and opening bands. They want the bands, some on grueling monthslong tours, to feel good and have plenty of energy when they go on stage. They want to show off their home state through its restaurants, local ingredients and food producers. And they are fulfilling specific (often quite specific) food requirements in tour riders. Most of all, they want to give performers a reason, beyond good ticket sales, to return.

At Thompson’s Point in Portland, where shows are put on by the State Theatre, those reasons may include freshly brewed coffee and breakfast when a weary band arrives on a bus after driving all night. The Super Basic Sandwich from LB Kitchen, with egg, cheese, bacon and sriracha mayonnaise, is a popular option. It can also mean a cheese and charcuterie plate from Sissle & Daughters, and oysters personally shucked pre-performance by Eventide Oyster Co./Big Tree Hospitality co-owner Arlin Smith, a music lover who speaks with giddy joy about his 10-year connection with the venue; he says he’s careful not to annoy favorite bands by “fanboying out” while shucking.

At Jonathan’s in Ogunquit, a tablecloth is laid in the green room for performers and candles are lit. The tour can choose a meal among classic entrees like caramelized salmon, seafood-stuffed haddock and Maine mussels. Tom Rush orders the mussels whenever he performs at Jonathan’s, said Caitlan Etchevers, who helps run the 50-year-old family business with her father, Jonathan West.

At the Maine Savings Amphitheater in Bangor, which routinely attracts huge names like The Lumineers, Bonnie Raitt and Billy Idol, it can mean a backstage buffet line to feed the tour that morphs through the day, from a coffee and smoothie station to shellfish bar.

“A few weeks ago, we had a lobsterman literally from Vinalhaven bring lobsters right in the backstage for Zac Brown,” said Alex Gray, founder of Waterfront Concerts, which produces the shows. “They’re in bait buckets with seaweed on top of them. You just don’t get that experience anywhere else.

“We are militant about filling people’s needs here,” he said. (The venue also offers performers a backstage gym, go-kart track and putt-putt golf course.) “We want them to have an incredible experience here. If you’re doing a 50-city U.S. tour, Maine is a cul-de-sac. You’re going to drive in and you’re going to drive right back out and we’re not on the way to anything unless you’re starting a Canadian tour. The idea is exceed their expectations so they want to come back and so they tell their friends.”

CONTRACTURAL OBLIGATIONS

Long before a musician or other performer ever shows up on a stage near you, they or their representative will have negotiated a rider specifying various needs during their visit — like steam irons, makeup mirrors and Sharpies — but mostly diet-related. The venue pays for the food, drink and other items on the rider, and factors the costs into its overall budget for the performance. Bigger names, naturally, can negotiate more extravagant riders.

A rider is the place to list the visiting performers’ allergies, like a major ballet company at the Merrill that nixed “apple, avocado, habanero, pepper, hazelnut, mushroom, papaya, peach, pineapple.” Performance venues take these restrictions very seriously, said Portland Ovations Production Manager Eric Hager, noting a venue in Connecticut last year where a MOMIX dancer died of anaphylactic shock after eating a mislabeled peanut cookie.

Another rider commonplace: “Anytime it’s a singer, there’s going to be a tea/honey/lemon piece in the rider,” said Portland Ovations Executive Director Aimee Petrin. “They’re all protecting their throats.”

But those are just a start. Gray compared some riders to telephone books, “12, 15, 18, 20, 30 pages, 40 pages,” he said. “They have very specific wants and needs. It’s this kind of protein shake. It’s this kind of beef jerky. It’s that kind of gum. They come here and they want it to be their home, the things that you would have in your home that you find comforting.”

At Merrill Auditorium, a group from New Orleans stipulated, “Do not feed us Cajun food.” “I think it was Preservation Hall (Jazz Band)?” Petrin recalled. “And I thought, ‘Yes. They don’t want our version. Don’t try to make étouffée. Don’t do your Yankee Cajun.'”

At Hannaford Hall at University of Southern Maine, Russian pianist Zlata Chochieva, unusually, had no food requests on her rider, Hager wrote in an email. But when the staff asked her what she’d like for lunch, she requested just a single item: a banana. About that very same item, Blue Man Group was uncommonly fussy and insistent. “There are pages about bananas,” Petrin remembered. “Levels of ripeness, all different stuff that you wouldn’t even imagine. And they have diagrams in the rider about the ripeness of the bananas. Oh my god, these people eat a lot of bananas! And it wasn’t until we had presented them the first time that we realized that they weren’t eating the bananas. They’re in the show.”

Etchevers has seen her share of similar asks over the years at Jonathan’s. Singer songwriter Madeleine Peyroux wanted, in part, 2 avocados, 12 local microbrewery beers, ceramic dinnerware, 1 bar of dark chocolate and “good, fresh ground dark roast coffee” with cream (“no edible oil creamers”). Judy Collins preferred roast chicken for dinner and a fruit-based dessert. The Yardbirds specified, among other foods, a quart of goat’s milk, organic baby spinach or arugula and fresh fruit including honeycrisp apples. Dar Williams required vegetarian or pescatarian meals as well as “something chocolate, like cake or cookies.”

As for that reputation bands once had for partying hard? Based on the riders, at any rate, life on the road has quieted down.

“A lot of them are dry,” said State Theater Artist Relations Manager Tess Timoshin about the tours she works with. “The hardest thing I’m buying is kombucha. It’s a lot of kombucha.”

“People think riders can be outrageous, but they really are not,” Noonan said. “They’re away from home. It’s not like a (tour) bus can stop at a CVS and get some Halls lozenges. They have to really plan for everything. So their riders are set up so that they get what they need from stop to stop.

“Over the years, we’ve been kind of known for our hospitality,” she added. “So now a lot of the artists don’t even send riders anymore. Like Keb’ Mo,’ whenever he comes, he’s always got a big rider, but he’ll just say ‘Do what you do.'”

DIFFERENT STROKES

Jonathan’s — like Stone Mountain, both a performing arts space and a restaurant — mostly honors the riders in the breach, Etchevers said, adding that doing so still makes her a little anxious.

“We do our best at the time of contracting to let them know, ‘Hey, we are a full-blown restaurant,'” she said. “Closer to the date, we go over it: ‘Listen, we don’t stock the green room with a bar and we don’t put in the snacks unless it’s an absolute requirement. But what we do do… the artist will be treated just like any other restaurant guests.’ And 9.5 times out of 10, the artists are over-the-moon excited.”

Depending on the venue, a “buyout” is also an option. “We just hand them cash and then they can go do their own thing,” Timoshin said.

“Artists come here excited to eat,” Petrin said. “A lot of times they’ve already done their own googling and they already know that they want a lobster roll. There’s no good two-hour fish in a chafing dish backstage. You know what I’m saying? So if you really want fresh seafood, we’d rather they go to a restaurant.”

“There was a notorious fish in the microwave that happened last year that cleared out the entire basement (at Merrill) for three or four days,” Hager added. The fish caught fire and more or less exploded. Just which artist was the “cook”? In fact it was a staff member. Still, “I cannot say,” he replied, grinning.

The buyout system — for an amount of cash per person agreed upon in the rider — can work well for performers at State Theatre and Merrill Auditorium because Portland is walkable and filled with good places to eat. Thompson’s Point, though, is too far from most restaurants to be practical, so Timoshin contracts with local caterers and restaurants to bring in meals and snacks. Post-show eats, often road food for the band as it heads to its next destination, are ordered from the food trucks parked at Thompson’s Point and delivered backstage by the venue’s runners.

Buyouts aren’t feasible at Bangor’s Maine Savings Amphitheatre, either, mostly for other reasons. “A tour like Kenny Chesney is 120 to 150 touring personnel,” Gray said. “Twenty One Pilots, which is a pop rock band, it’s a 16–tractor trailer truck tour. So right off the jump there, there are 16 drivers that you’re feeding. It’s a 14-bus tour, so right off the bat you’re feeding 14 bus drivers. So there’s 30 people right there, just with truck drivers and bus drivers.”

Restaurants in Bangor would struggle to handle numbers like these, he said, especially if performers and crew all need to eat in the short window between load-in and sound check. The backstage commissary at the Amphitheater also makes meals for the security team, the venue’s own support staff, and the boxes/luxury suites. Many of the cooks are borrowed from Kanu, Gray’s restaurant in Old Town, which quiets down in the summer when the University of Maine students go home, just as the concerts are heating up.

“So you can imagine that our culinary team is plating 800 to 1,000 meals a day,” Gray said. “We feed an army. When you look at the volume, there are very few restaurants in the state of Maine that do the volume that we do.”

THE THINGS THEY’VE SEEN 

There’s the entourage, and then there are the stars. Caterers are asked not to pester, tell tales or take photographs, and they respect that — or they don’t get asked back. But a few stories are just too good to keep quiet. There was the time Elvis Costello performed at the State Theatre. LB Kitchen co-owner Lee Farrington got a phone call at 5 p.m. at home that he wanted a piece of salmon by 6:30.

“And he needed it cooked a specific, specific way,” she said. “He didn’t want it fried. He didn’t want it grilled. He wanted it steamed. And then he wanted steamed broccoli, but he wanted it to have a little crunch in it.”

Please tell us you can do this, the State Theatre begged. “You’re damn right, I can,” Farrington replied. She and Bryna Gootkind, her spouse and business partner (and herself a music business alum) ran to the grocery store, then to Harbor Fish, then home again, where Farrington got to work steaming the fish and seasoning it with just olive oil, salt and pepper, as she’d been told. A builder working on their home at the time overheard the whole interaction. “His name was Mike and he is freaking out,” Farrington said. “‘You’re cooking for Elvis Costello right now??! Someone just called you on the phone and asked you to make fish for Elvis Costello??!'” When the fish was ready, Gootkind whisked the meal off to the theater on the couple’s own plates with their own napkins and silverware.

Smith has had a similar late-breaking request, his involving Action Bronson, rapper and star of a TV food show with an unprintable title here. State Theatre had offered Bronson Eventide oysters but never heard back about whether he’d like them. “Now, it’s 3 or 4 in the afternoon and I get the call that ‘Action’s here and he wants to know where the food is. Can you guys do anything?'” Smith jumped into, ahem, action. He and a friend from Slab Pizza raced over to the theater with pizza, oysters and Eventide’s signature brown butter lobster rolls.

“It’s late. The line was around the corner. The show is packed. Normally I’m there at soundcheck. Action’s hanging out, and he’s just scarfing the food,” Smith said. “And now he comes out onto the stage and he’s really loud. He’s running back and forth. And the next thing you know, he chokes up. And he can’t rap. And he runs off to the side of the stage like he’s about to lose it. And he comes back and he goes, ‘Sorry, folks. Sorry, my bad. I just downed some of those dope-ass lobster rolls you’ve got.’ The whole crowd is laughing and then he goes right back into the song.”

Restaurant people often say they stay in a notoriously tough business because making diners happy makes them happy. So imagine the special pleasure they feel feeding a favorite musician. The lead singer from Lake Street Dive loves LB Kitchen’s chocolate chip cookies, so whenever the band plays in Portland, the restaurant puts a cookie basket in her dressing room. Death Cab for Cutie “couldn’t eat enough of our vegan kimchi,” Farrington said. “We ended up taking several more containers over to them, so that was joyful.”

“Oliver Wood. Are you familiar with the Wood Brothers?” Smith asked. “Oh my god! People like that? You walk through the door and they’ve been waiting for you. They’re excited to see you. ‘Arlin, I’m glad you’re here.’ That is pretty special.”

CULTURAL CONTEXT 

Musicians like Costello may have special dietary restrictions, which they adhere to on tour. In other instances, planning meals for performers visiting Maine requires cultural sensitivity.

Hager remembered picking up a nice cheese platter at Whole Foods for a group of Chinese acrobats who were performing at Merrill. Turns out, they didn’t eat cheese. “Can we get some rice?” they asked him.

“A, it was very embarrassing and B, it was a problem because I didn’t have the food that they needed to perform their acrobatic feats,” he said. “I ended up going out to Kon (Asian) Bistro on outer Brighton Avenue because they were willing to put together a meal, a Chinese meal for 20 people, quickly in an hour.”

“I’ve had situations where the artist is coming in at the end of Ramadan,” Petrin followed up. “So you need to think about, OK, what are they going to have for Eid? What is their fast break going to look like?”

And for performers and crew who don’t speak English, you can’t just hand them a menu from a local restaurant or caterer and ask for an order.

No matter where musicians are from, what religion they belong to or what language they speak, Noonan said she follows a simple rule of thumb figuring out what to serve them. “I always try to think they are coming to my house for dinner,” she said. “I want to make sure everybody has what they want.”