Clio's city park has hosted summer concerts since 1987

For a town of a few thousand, Clio punches above its weight on a summer evening. Out at the city park on Rogers Lodge Drive, the Clio Area Amphitheater has been filling lawn chairs with music since 1987 — a real outdoor concert venue in a place better known for the Greek muse it’s named after.

The model is plain and it works: cheap tickets, a casual lawn, and a summer slate of tribute acts that play the hits of George Strait, the Beatles, Creedence, and whoever else the crowd will sing along with. A few dollars at the gate gets you in, and a season pass gets a family through the whole calendar. The amphitheater is run by a volunteer board that meets month to month, the kind of civic machinery that keeps small-town traditions alive long after the founders move on.

It isn’t only concerts. In July 1989 a group called the Clio Cast and Crew staged their first show on this stage — a revival of “The Wizard of Oz” — and went on to mount a long run of yearly summer musicals here. That mix of touring-style tribute nights and home-grown community theater is what gives the place its character: one weekend it’s a band doing Jimmy Buffett, the next it’s local kids in costume.

The point of a venue like this isn’t grandeur. It’s that a town built itself a stage and then kept showing up to it for almost forty years. Bring a chair, a blanket, and bug spray, and you’ll be sitting where Clio has spent its July nights since the Reagan years.