But months before the start of the two-day festival at historic Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Zacks was worrying about the kind of things that music promoters worry about: weather forecasts, transportation, housing and even what the backstage dressing room signs will look like.

“This is sort of a conceptual thing,” Zacks says of the first inaugural Thing, Aug. 24-25 . “We are planning to make as many things as we can ‘analog.’ We can’t go back in time, but we’re trying to do things like eliminate tacky vinyl signs. We’ve hired a painter to hand-paint everything on wood. We hope that adds up to an environment that is uncommon.”

Thing is also not just about music. There’s a literary stage, dance and film events. If you want a local template, imagine the early Bumbershoots, where literary and art events were on equal billing with music. The name came after Zacks heard a speaker at his daughter’s graduation talk about the early European concept of “Ting,” the root word for “thing,” which is a gathering of the tribes to resolve feuds.

“That spoke to me as a way to address the general upheaval and the daily dread in the world,” he says. What Zacks is attempting to do is remake the very idea of what a music festival is.

Local music fans got it immediately. The Thing Festival is sold out, except for two-day tickets.