The Music City Maryland Association Presents The Vortex Fall Fest!
Join us on Saturday, September 27th, 2025, from 10:00am to 9:30 PM at The Vortex at CAA Park for an unforgettable day of music, art, food, and fun!
Featuring:
MAIN STAGE:
SIDE STAGE:
SET TIMES:
MAIN STAGE
SIDE STAGE
We are thrilled to welcome the Soundcheck Rock Academy back to the Vortex! There will be several bands performing on the side stage in between the bands on the main stage throughout the day.
THE LINEUP:
Important Information:
Celebrate Catonsville’s first 12-acre outdoor music and event venue, a space designed for live entertainment and community gatherings. Explore local shops and restaurants within walking distance, and kick off your day at one of Catonsville’s finest taverns or eateries.
Come and enjoy our presentation of The Vortex Fall Fest!
Thank you,
Music City Maryland Association
Why pay a $20 general admission cover charge at the door when you can get advanced general admission tickets for just $10 with no ticket fees?
Why is there a difference in price between buying tickets in advance vs. at the door? When planning festivals it is always an advantage to have an idea of what the attendance will look like for several reasons. How many staff do we need on hand, how many beverages and supplies will we need, and how many people do we need to prepare parking for? And it keeps the lines moving at the front gate much quicker when most of the people have their tickets and do not need to purchase.  These are all just a few examples of why purchasing a ticket in advance helps the organizers of these events. Advanced tickets for this event will only be available until midnight on September 26th. Get them today!
THE SAMPLES:
37 years after starting his full fledged music career with The Samples, Sean Kelly continues to delight fans with music that transcends genres, age and shatters the rules of the established music industry. Throughout his career, Sean has been the driving influence of 20 albums and over 1 million records sold.
Sean started playing guitar at age 16 listening to Neil Young, Rolling Stones and Jackson Browne. Those influences mixed with his own poignant and timeless lyrics, a unique and striking voice and a mind for melodies led to songs like Little Silver Ring, Feel Us Shaking and Wild River. For many fans, these aren’t new songs or old songs, but anthems to their lives that represent the first time they met their wife or the joys of their times at college.
Sean’s journeys across America have taken place in rental cars, tour buses and pickup trucks that would have literally taken him to the moon and back over the last quarter of a century. There is a lot of music in store from Sean Kelly and The Samples.
More info at https://thesamples.com/
THE GLENMONT POPES:
The Glenmont Popes, named after his childhood neighborhood in Montgomery County and one of his favorite movies, The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984) with Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts.
“Popes are the people you go to,” explains Henry, the band’s front man. “It’s a slick thing.”
It’s hard to say what came first: the musician or the baker. He learned to bake cakes and bread as a teen from his grandmother and great-aunt, while visiting the family farm in Minnesota. But Henry also remembers being enamored early on with a 25-cent slice of apple pie at a local diner.
“I’ve always been a pie guy since I was a little kid,” he sums up. He also found he could impress the girls with his homemade pies, recalling a Christmas past when he made a flaky offering (lard was his secret ingredient then) for a former young love, culling a recipe from a book called Pies and Tarts.
More importantly, Henry began to realize the bonding aspect of the baked dish. “Pie lets people talk to each other,” he says. “It encourages conversation.”
But music also beckoned, leading him to tour the U.S. with an eight-to-10-member “low-echelon” band. “I wanted to be a musician,” he says. “If you’re a musician, you’re a musician.” Life on the road didn’t always pay the bills, though, especially with a wife and young children. Henry found that selling pies gave him the extra income he needed. “I make pies, so I can pay for my rock-and-roll habit,” he says.
More info at https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/fooddrink/meet-baltimores-pie-guy-rodney-henry/
SKRIBE:
Garage folk from the land of pleasant living.
Skribe plays an oil can called a canjo-zookie. It’s an eight-string guitar with a biting, blues-y rasp. Skribe’s got the voice (and the old-school Cadillac) to match. Accompanying himself on the suitcase-kick and hi-hat, Skribe’s “M.I.Y.” is a barn-burning roots number.
More info at https://www.youtube.com/c/SKRIBEstudios/featured
CATONSVILLE HIGH SCHOOL STEEL BAND:
Percussionist Jim Wharton, who grew up in Catonsville and had graduated from Catonsville High School in the class of 1969, was enjoying a summer trip to Ocean City in 1989 after his second year as chair of the music department. One evening, while dining with his wife, he heard the most beguiling music emanating from the back deck of the restaurant. It was the Baltimore Trinidad and Tobago Steel Band. It was the first time Wharton had heard live steel band music, and he was rapt. He had seen and heard a steel band before on the Ed Sullivan show, but never live. (Years later he would realize that the second act on that show after the headlining Pan Trinibago Allstars— “This little band with a bunch of white kids playing”—were some of the earliest American students of steel pan originator Elie Manette, Andy and Jeff Narell, sons of a New York City social worker who had learned how steel drums were defusing gang warfare in Trinidad and brought Manette to New York to address gang problems through music. Andy Narell is one of the most famous jazz pannists today, having worked with a long list of world- class musicians, from Aretha Franklin to Taj Mahal. Both Manette and Narell would have direct contacts with the CHS steel band project; but that is getting ahead of the story.) In Ocean City, “I was just mesmerized. I had no idea what the instruments even looked like,” he relates. The arranger for the group was named “Tosca”—all steel band arrangers have nicknames—who showed Wharton the instruments, and immediately recognized a fellow musician. Tosca struck a deal with Wharton: “If you help me arrange orchestral music for steel drums, I’ll teach you about calypso.” Such were the happenstance beginnings of what would become one of the hallmark musical groups at the center of music culture in Catonsville.
More info at https://www.catonsvilleartsdistrict.org/catonsville-highschool-steel-band
BOOK A ROOM
BOOK A CAMPSITE
THE VORTEX MAP:
Special thanks to our Sponsors:
http://www.thomasequadefoundation.org
https://caayouthsports.sportngin.com/caa-park
http://www.ElectriciansInBaltimore.com
https://www.candlelightfuneralhome.com/
https://checkerspotbrewing.com/
https://www.brightviewseniorliving.com/
https://www.century-bonding.com/
https://fromthegroundupcontractors.com/
https://www.verticalconnection.com/
https://catonsvillebicycles.com/
https://www.remax.com/real-estate-agents/karen-gatzke-catonsville-md/102163233
https://soundcheckrockacademy.com/
https://www.realtylandscaping.com/
https://kristenleister.glossgenius.com/
