Newport '69 - Devonshire Downs, Northridge, California

This festival turned out to be a heavy scene, but the first thing we need to establish here is that it was not held at Newport, it was held in Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley, near LA. Famous for being miles of tract homes set in a really hot valley.

The event was organized by Mark Robinson who was then aged just 25. He was one of the three promoters of the original Newport Pop Festival in 1968 held, again, not in Newport, but in Costa Mesa. The other two promoters of the '68 event were Gary R. Schmidt (age 26) and his father Al Schmidt. There was a brief lawsuit between the two Schmidts and Robinson just prior to the "Newport 69" show, which the Schmidts had declined to be involved in because of the cost of the acts. The lawsuit was over trade names and just before the '69 show, the court ordered that Robinson had to use "not affiliated with the Newport Pop Festival" disclaimers in advertising. Not affiliated with Newport either, for that matter.

Robinson went doolally with the wonga and reportedly spent $282,000 booking bands. That was serious bread in ‘69, man. When you consider that the entire band budget for the '68 show was under $50,000 and yet Robinson paid Jimi Hendrix alone $100,000 for the '69 event, an unheard of at that time for a rock act, it was obvious that he was going to have to pull in a huge crowd if he was going to break even, let alone make any bread.

Held at Devonshire Downs, then a racetrack, now part of Cal State University, from Fri Jun 20, 1969  to Sun Jun 22, 1969. The word went out that this was going to be a A Big One. The 3-day festival scene was coming to a head and being so near to a massive city like Los Angeles and all the associated places that orbit LA, meant there was a lot of groovers who wanted to groove and who were gonna groove, no matter what.

The line-up for the three days was super strong and further guaranteed that this would be a historic moment. 

Friday, June 20, 1969

Ike & Tina Turner, Albert King, Edwin Hawkins Singers, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Joe Cocker, Southwind, Spirit, Don Ellis Orchestra, Taj Mahal, and Jerry Lauderdale.

Saturday, June 21, 1969

Albert Collins, Brenton Wood, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Charity, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eric Burdon and War, Friends of Distinction, Jethro Tull, Lee Michaels, Love, Steppenwolf and Sweetwater.

Sunday, June 22, 1969

Booker T. & the M.G.'s, The Chambers Brothers, The Flock, The Grass Roots, Johnny Winter, Mother Earth, Jimi Hendrix jam with Buddy Miles, Eric Burdon and Mother Earth, Poco, The Byrds, The Rascals and Three Dog Night. Marvin Gaye's appearance was cancelled because he missed his plane

Jerry Hopkins from Rolling Stone was dispatched to see what was going down. This was his report. It makes fascinating but depressing reading. 

“ Once again violence has severely mauled the face of rock, with several hundred persons injured in rioting outside Newport ’69, what probably was, in attendance, the world’s largest pop festival.

Because of this violence, and perhaps as much as $50,000 in damage done to neighborhood homes and businesses, the Los Angeles police commission has launched a full investigation. It could result in new city policies on the granting of concert permits and certainly means there will never be another rock festival held here.

Over 150,000 attended the three-day series of concerts – featuring Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Winter and the Rascals among the 33 acts – and for most of those visiting this suburban Los Angeles community, the only bummer was the festival itself. They were not aware of the bloody violence erupting outside the gates. For them there was only the last logjam of humanity that made the festival like attending a high school reunion in a closet.

The producers of Newport ’69 – also no relation to the folk or jazz festivals in Rhode Island – spent $11,000 on hurricane fencing and it was this fence that hundreds of youngsters stormed, rather than pay the $7 admission cost. Gatecrashers the first two days caused only minor incidents, but early Sunday afternoon all hell broke loose.

As was true in another southern California festival, in Palm Springs Easter week, a small minority of youngsters can be blamed for initiating the trouble, and police can be faulted for reacting too brutally.

The kids threw bottles and rocks and the police randomly slashed out with batons, causing blood to stream freely. (Those injured were as young as 14.) Teenagers swarmed across a nearby shopping center, causing nearly $10,000 in damage to two gas stations, an equal amount of damage to apartment houses, another $1,500 worth of vandalism at a grocery store. While police demonstrated a sure-fire way of halting a kid – approach him at a dead run, grabbing him by the back of the neck, slamming him head first into a parked car; then club him when he’s down.

As all this was happening, thousands of youngsters continued approaching the festival fairgrounds and this, coupled with a roving band of several hundred members of the Street Racers – a bike club hired by the festival as an internal security force – only complicated matters even farther. By mid-evening, about 9 PM Sunday, the gates were opened and those remaining in the area were admitted free. By then, however, an estimated 300 had been injured – 15 cops among them – and another 75 had been placed under arrest, about half of them on charges of assault with a deadly weapon against a police officer. Other charges ranged from drinking in public to possession of drugs.

Next day, the city began to bellow and grunt.

Michael Kohn, police commission president, said this group undoubtedly would present the city council with recommendations for a new ordinance to enforce more rigid controls over concerts and similar events.

City Councilman Robert Wilkinson said extra police and overtime cost to the city was $35,000 “and we haven’t even begun to figure the damage to city property.” Wilkinson represents the Devonshire Downs area, where the festival was held.

And local residents were shouting about the number of young people using their pools and camping overnight in their flower beds.

While the entire area – several blocks in all directions – looked as if ten garbage and trash trucks had collided in the middle of a windstorm.

Even disregarding the violence and vandalism (as impossible as that is), the festival was anything but festive. The producers, Mark Robinson and Paul Schibe of Mark Productions, tried hard, spending thousands of dollars on ground cover and other facilities, but it just wasn’t enough. For a few thousand who were positioned close to the huge stage it might have been the musical trip of the decade, but for the vast majority it was a nightmare.

Traffic to and from the fairgrounds was nearly impenetrable and parking severely limited, forcing thousands to park on distant residential streets. Hundred-foot lines formed outside an insufficient number of stinking, overflowing portable toilets. The sound system was totally inadequate, however good it might have been, with nearly all the 50,000 or so present each day beyond the reach of the speakers. There was also a droning public address system echoing through a nearby strip of temporary psychedelic shops … while overhead there was a constantly circling police helicopter (dubbed “the Blue Fist” from Yellow Submarine by master of ceremonies John Carpenter). Sometimes there were two helicopters, drowning out the likes of Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Visibility was similarly limited. Even those near the 10-foot high stage couldn’t see well because of crowding and the height of the stage itself. For most of those present, the stage was so far away you knew where the acts were only because that’s where most people were facing. Lighting and camera towers obstructed vision more.

Even for those who were close enough to hear and see, some of the acts were bad – including Jimi Hendrix, who provided a listless set, told the audience it was a “teenybopper crowd,” and left to a smattering of applause. The biggest bummer of all was the enormity of the thing. Even though the fairgrounds was the size of a small airfield, the mammoth number of bodies jammed together over much of it and scattered along the perimeter made it look (and feel) like the railroad station scene during the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.

Local high schools and colleges had just closed for the summer and as one observer put it, “Have you noticed the number of babies and small children here? You know why? Because every babysitter in Los Angeles County is here.”

Giant bonfires were built on the astroturf and burlap ground covering, virtually destroying it. The tassled canopies scattered across the fairgrounds were torn down and set aflame. The grandstand at one side of the field was partially dismantled, along with the slatted wood walls of a nearby exhibition building. And everywhere there was a sea of broken Ripple and Gallo bottles. (The first aid tent, manned by the Free Clinic, treated hundreds for cut feet.)

Of course there were good moments – as when Janis Joplin was introduced to thunderous applause the first night and when, on Sunday, Hendrix redeemed himself and returned to jam with Tracy Nelson of Mother Earth, Buddy Miles and the bassist from Janis’s band. Also as when two bands not scheduled to appear (Smoke and Navaho Honey) set up and began to play in an open building adjacent to the psychedelic runway, giving several hundred a place to get it on. The light show, by Glenn McKay’s Head Lights, was dwarfed by the size of things but excellent. The standard hot dog and Pepsi fare offered at such gatherings was happily augmented by Hansen juices and health cookies. And the Ike and Tina Turner Revue knocked ’em dead, as did Joe Cocker, Three Dog Night, and a number of others.

Before the festival was held, Mark Robinson (who had been involved in two other bummers in the summers in 1967 and 1968 in Los Angeles) distributed to the press a “final pre-budget” breakdown, showing he had committed himself to spending $282,000 for the acts.

In name value, it was a quarter-million seemingly well-spent (however exorbitant). Besides those already mentioned, the festival presented Spirit, Steppenwolf, the Chambers Brothers, the Don Ellis Orchestra, the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Southwind, Taj Mahal, Albert Collins, Brenton Wood, Cat Mother, Charity, Eric Burdon, Friends of Distinction, Jethro Tull, Love, Sweetwater, Jerry Lauderdale, the Womb, Booker T. and the MGs, Flock, the Grassroots, Marvin Gaye (who missed his plane – and his gig), the Byrds, and Poco. It was, like the attendance, one of the biggest turnouts yet.

Unfortunately, it probably was this high cost of talent that drove the ticket cost up (to $6 a day in advance, $7 at the gate, $15 in advance for the three days) and beyond the reach of hundreds. Others came to the festival specifically to crash the gates.

The violence started on another front the same day (Friday), when teenagers outside the fence surrounding the backstage area threw rocks at the Don Ellis Orchestra as it was preparing to go on. Ellis began his set saying three of the guys in the band had been injured, one of them hospitalized (Sam Falzone, lead sax), another suffering a broken foot, the third bruises and cuts on his face.

From that point it was downhill, with occasional high points which may have seemed high because the rest was so miserable.

Mark Robinson claimed his costs amounted to more than half a million dollars, closer, in fact to $600,000. He could not be reached for a final gate count, but the festival’s publicist quoted him as saying the gross had passed $750,000 by two o’clock Sunday – seven hours before the gates were opened to everyone. Because of the violence, however, he claims to have lost, not made, $150,000.

A few days before Newport ’69 began, George Wein of the Newport R.I., jazz and folk festival got a court injunction against the producers of the California fete while co-producers of the esthetically disastrous but financially rewarding Newport ’68 festival also laid claim to the name.

There is some 8mm footage of the festival on YouTube if you look it up. The stage appears to be built about 50 foot off the ground and the bands sound like someone is playing a record inside a very thick cardboard box.  

So all in all, this wasn’t the flowering of peace and love and while some undoubtedly got their rocks off, others merely threw rocks. 

Newport Jazz Festival 

Newport Jazz Festival was a long running jazz fest but in July 1969 it opened its doors to hip n groovy rock acts. It became an experiment in fusing jazz, soul and rock music.

Its lineup included, besides jazz, Friday evening appearances by rock groups Jeff Beck, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Ten Years After and Jethro Tull as well as Roland Kirk and Steve Marcus. Saturday's schedule mixed jazz acts such as Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck with others including The Mothers Of Invention, John Mayall and Sly and the Family Stone. James Brown was among those who appeared Sunday afternoon, followed in the evening by Herbie Hancock, B. B. King and Led Zeppelin.

George Wein who ran the show was later to say "the festival was sheer hell - the worst four days of my life....the kids destroyed the event and the experiment was a failure". Aw, poor George. 

24,000 got in with 10,000 outside on the hill. Saturday saw the main gate destroyed and gatecrashers get in to see Sly and the Family Stone. Heavy drinking and general rowdiness invested bad vibes to the whole event.

The promoters were scared of a repeat on the Sunday night when Zep were due to play. They, probably rightly, assumed the huge crowd would tear the fences down in order to see the band who were riding a crest of a new wave of popularity. So Wein announed they wouldn't play, saying Robert Plant was ill, leaving Johnny Winter as the only rock act. This worked well, and diffused the large numbers. However, Zep were not pleased - we can only imagine Peter Grant's reaction to being bumped from the bill like this and they insisted on playing anyway.

It was an unsatisfactory weekend for all with jazz audiences annoyed by the rowdy rockers and the rockers not hip to the jazz groove. No-one would try and mix hard jazz with hard rock again in this era. However, you can find bootlegs of the Mothers set, Jeff Back and Ten Years After too and all are superb. So maybe the music won in the end.

 

 

Atlanta Pop Festival 

The Atlanta Pop Festival was held on the 4th and 5th of July 1969 and pulled in anything from 80,000 - 150,000 people to the Atlanta International Speedway in Georgia.

Despite riots at recent festivals in Denver and Northridge, California the local authorities gave the event their blessing. Wow. That was very unusual. Local newspaper The Atlanta Journal ran an editorial praising the variety and quality of performers and saying "a full music diet is good for a city. Pop music is important and expressive of our times." Right on, baby!

Far out. Dude got their freak on. How enlightened and, like, groovy man. And as if by instant karma, the whole festival ran smoothly and everyone had a great time. See? Don't hassle the hippies and everything will be alright. 

The Friday night was choc full of top-notch blues and jazz bands including Credence Clearwater Revival, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter, The Butterfield Blues Band, Dave Brubeck, Booker T and Blood Sweat and Tears.

The Saturday gig included Led Zeppelin, Janis, Spirit, Joe Cocker, Chicago, Grand Funk Railroad, The Staple Singers and Tommy James and the Shondells.

The festival was organized by Alex Cooley, who later put on the excellent Texas International Pop Festival in Dallas and used the same poster template for it too. 

The thermometer tipped over 100 degrees and the local fire department hosed the gathered rockers down with fire hoses like so much hot cattle. But unlike at other festivals where high temperatures seemed to go hand in hand with violence or demands for a free festival, no such trouble happened in Atlanta.

Photos of the event show a massive, shade-free venue with a tiny stage set in the middle of it. It's about as far away from the giant stages and sound systems we see today as you can imagine.

The program for the event interestingly dealt openly with drugs, stating:

"Atlanta is a generally cool town, with relatively few dope busts. Almost all psychedelics are available with the exception of grass. Prices on lids range from $15 to $20, tabs of acid from $4 to $6, hash at $10 a gram. We have music and be-ins in the park every weekend."

Alex Cooley made $12,000 from the event. A nice wedge in 1969. The fact that it had passed off so successfully was credited with helping the counter-culture flourish in the area. Well it would. We can be together in peace and harmony.

There are a few blogs of people's personal experiences at the festival and most seem to confirm how excellent most of the band were, especially Led Zeppelin, who were sweeping across America at the time, taking the country by storm.

How much anyone could have heard with the primitive PA systems is open to debate but this was certainly one festival fondly remembered by those who attended.

Atlantic City Pop Festival

Held from 1st to 3rd August 1969 in Atlantic City. 110,000 people turned up over 3 days to the Atlantic City racetrack to see a fine, very diverse line-up of bands. It was the first rock fest in the New York/New Jersey/Philly area and as such a really signficant event, even though history doesn't seem to credit it with much cultural heft. Maybe it's because just 40,000 turned up each day and went home at night, slept in their own bed, to return the following day. It was all neat and tidy and not a mass gathering of 400,000 of the best freaks America had to offer, the way Woodstock proved to be.   

Also, being on a racetrack isn't the most romantic of locations really. Hardly shouts counterculture the way being in a natural amphitheatre does. Even so, you paid your money for a ticket to sit in the stands, or you could buy one for the floor - and just roam around the track groovin' baby. If you chose the latter you were lucky as you may have got hosed down by water truck there to literally keep you cool in the hot summer temperatures. 

The first day featured Joni, Aum, the Chambers Brothers, Iron Butterfly, Dr John, Mother Earth, Chicago and Procol Harum. CSNY and the Moody Blues were set to play, but didn't show. The stage was designed by notable physics and geodesic dome dude, Buckminster Fuller. Pictures show a wee thing really, surrounded by an ocean of people.

At $15 for three days of top flight rock music, it was pretty good value. During her set Joni was performing 'Cactus Tree' and sang one verse twice, then stopped and said, "I sang that verse twice, and no-one noticed" But, as crowds who are distracted by themselves tend to do, they ignored her and were not even paying attention enough to realise what she'd said. 

The sound system was in and out a bit and she blamed their lack of attention on that. But even when the PA was fixed, things were not any better, so she left the stage early in tears. Presumably, the crowd didn't even notice that, either! Playing delicate solo acoustic songs to a festival crowd became less and less easy to do as the gigs got bigger. The weekend wasn't without some violence. A couple of thousand people climbed the fences on Saturday night. Getting in free had become a bit of a political statement to some. Security was virtually non-existent, so perhaps it was surprising that more trouble didn't break out. 

Other performers that weekend included regular festival favourites Jefferson Airplane, CCR, Butterfield Blues band, BB King, Janis, Santana (their first east coast appearance and introduced by Janis and Mama Cass), Joe Cocker, Canned Heat and Three Dog Night. Johnny Winter was on the bill but had some unspecified equipment problems so didn't play but Little Richard filled in for him and tore it up. He often played festivals, even though you'd think he was somewhat out of place, the freaks loved his wild performances and he loved their inhibition and predilection to get it on, which doubtless matched his own. And of course, everyone knows his tunes.

CSN had pulled out with Nash claiming he had polyps on his tonsils even though he played Woodstock two weeks later - a case of quick healing polyps, apparently.

None of these sets seems to have been recorded and had official releases, but if you search YouTube you can find Janis's and Chicago's sets. After it was all over, the city fathers and Chambers Of Commerce, who had largely been in favour of the festival seemed to take against the idea of staging another, passing laws to prevent it. Stories in the local papers began to run the usual 'drug orgy' stories  ensured no other festival was held in the New Jersey area in that era.

This was a huge festival but it has somehow avoided going down in rock n roll history as a big deal. It’s most likely because it was overshadowed by the events of a couple of weekends later in upstate New York.

Crowds didn’t storm the site to make it a free festival. No freaky hippie girls got naked and went skinny dipping. No-one dropped flowers from helicopters. No nuns flashed the peace sign. No one died. No groovy babies were born. It didn’t close the Interstate due to people trying to get to the fest. It was not declared a disaster area. And Joni Mitchell didn’t write a song about it. But even so, in many ways this was a more diverse festival even than Woodstock. If it had been filmed and recorded then maybe its legend would have gone down in history. 

 

 

Denver Pop Festival, Mile High Stadium

Held between 27 - 29 June 1969, this festival went down in festival history as one of the most brutal with pitched battles between cops and kids.

The ALF leaders wanted to get festival-goers to join their ranks, one of the first instances of outright politicisation of the counter culture. City leaders didn't like the idea of this at all, and drew up plans to prevent it happening by enticing festival campers to pitch up at the local baseball ground rather than in the park where the demos were to be held. Free transport would take them to the gig.

Ticket prices were $6 per day, or $15 for all three days on 27th to 29th June.

The Denver Pop Festival was promoted by Barry Fey, the leading dude in the area and a man who had put gigs on at Red Rocks and Denver Auditorium. The festival was to be held in Mile High Stadium; it made sense because all the facilities were already there so all Fey had to do was stage the music and take the tickets. That was the theory anyway.

There were high expectations for the Festival; it was commonly called the "First Annual" Denver Pop Festival. The peak attendance was estimated at 50,000, though on Sunday when it was declared a free festival, that number may have been higher.

The line up was headed by Jimi Hendrix, along with CCR, Three Dog Night, Joe Cocker, Poco, Iron Butterfly, Willie Mae 'Big Mama' Thornton, Taj Mahal, Johnny Winter and one of the first appearances by The Mothers Of Invention. Incidentally, Zephyr were also on the bill, a local band featuring a young Tommy Bolin. They turned up unannounced and filled-in when someone didn't show.
Thornton opened the gig on Friday night, followed by The Flock - featuring violinist Jerry Goodman who was to later play with Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Then came Three Dog Night, The Mothers and Iron Butterfly.

Everything seemed cool with only a couple of gate-crashing incidents for the Police to deal with. The music was loud so many ticket-less fans just hung around outside to groove anyway. The ALF passed out literature but there was no hassle. Often not understood many years later is how indifferent a lot of rock crowds were to the political side of things preferring their revolution to be a private one, rather than rising up and taking over. It was a mistake that the authorities made too when they kept banning festivals, scared that hundreds of thousands of crazed dope-smoking revolutionaries would storm the barricades and force respectable people to have sex on the lawn. Maybe, a small part of them, hoped that was true. In truth, most were nice middle-class, well-mannered kids.

The good vibes all changed on Saturday evening. The gig was due to start at 6.30pm. Fans with tickets were let in at 5.30 and while that was happening, a large crowd had gathered at the south end of the stadium. They charged the fence, only to be repelled by Police and security, however several hundred managed to get in. By 7.30pm another large group had gathered by the main gate. Police reinforcements arrived in riot gear which only provoked people more and a hail of bottles and rocks were thrown at the cops, while those who had got in for free began to attack the security from inside the stadium.

When one cop was floored by a wine bottle, the tear gas was brought out and fired at the mob who simply threw the canisters back. In what sounds like a scene from the Simpsons, the prevailing wind then took the gas into the stadium which understandably upset the fans who were at the time watching Johnny Winter. Panic broke out and Barry Fey, under pressure from the Denver Police Chief, opened the gates up and let everyone outside in for free.

Barry was understandably not a happy man, and was angry that the Police hadn't kept control, what the hell were they there for? Now a precedent had been set for Sunday night, and another big crowd gathered, demanding to get in free.

This time, the cops, feeling like they'd been humiliated by a bunch of students and long-haired freaks the previous night, were determined not to give in. Retaliation was in the air. Police dogs surrounded the stadium, an extra platoon of cops in riot gear was deployed, and a thing called a pepper-fog machine was on hand to pump tear gas and skin-burning mace into the air.

This provoked the crowd to throw more rocks, which in turn provoked the police to use the pepper-fog like a machine gun, mowing down their enemy. As kids tried to get away they were billy-clubbed and arrested. Violence was rife on all sides. Who was to blame? It wasn't easy to say; one thing was for sure, no one was innocent. However, many in the alternative community felt that the authorities were simply scared of what they saw as the threat of the counter culture and that the 'straight' town officials just totally over-reacted and panicked.

Fey was under pressure from the cops to open the gates again to stop more trouble and again he gave in. Over 3,000 gate-crashed and caught the end of Hendrix's set. He played Purple Haze and legged it as a wave of gatecrashers poured across the field towards the stage. It was to be the Experience's last ever performance, Noel Redding left right after.

The whole festival was a disaster and city fathers said it would be the first and last festival the city ever put on because it was impossible to control such large scale events. However, only 50,000 (at most) had actually attended at any one time so it was far from a big sprawling festival such as Woodstock which would happen a few weeks later.

However, the idea of containing a festival within a stadium was an idea that was not dead and it would be resurrected in the 70s to greater effect because it offered the chance to regulate and control fans with more sensitive policing.

In hindsight, it's easy to see how and why the authorities got this wrong. Left-wing activists, mixed with a bunch of long-haired kids and freaks looked like revolution to some people; the end of the American way. It wasn't, of course, and it was never going to be - most just wanted to have a good time and get their dose of rock n roll.

No one came out of this one with much honour. The set that Hendrix played - which is of course available as a bootleg - is very, very good though. But it must have been hard to dig it when your eyes are streaming with tear gas!

 

 

Laurel Pop Festival, Baltimore, Maryland

The summer of 69 was dominated in festival history by Woodstock. It casts a long shadow and virtually defines that period of time in rock history. However, while Woodstock became a global event of cultural importance, lots of other festivals happened in USA that summer which, while never registering on the cultural richter scale, were nonetheless superb musical events. Laurel Pop Festival was one such.

Held in Maryland in July 1969, it was attended by 15,000 fans and offered two days of music from some of the biggest bands around at that time. The event ended in controversy as rain-soaked fans built bonfires with wooden folding chairs and refused to leave, as the concert rocked on into the early morning. But, considering some other festivals had attracted shootings, half-naked biker women, and various assaults, this was all relatively tame stuff.

The festival was the brainchild of two Baltimore concert promoters, Elzie Street and James Scott, who teamed up with nationally known music promoter George Wein for The Laurel Pop Festival. Wein was the creator of the legendary Newport Jazz and Pop festivals. Their commitment to Maryland's music scene extended to two other festivals they promoted in 1969, The Morgan State Jazz Festival and The Laurel Jazz Festival.

It was held at the Laurel Race Course. Local media, especially The Baltimore Sun, ran numerous articles reporting on the progress of the festival. "Exciting pop music is coming to Laurel Race Course", started one article in The Sun, which also discussed the acts scheduled to appear. "It is estimated that their combined output of single and LP recordings exceeds 25 million".

A week later, The Sun called the upcoming festival a really mixed bag, which all just goes to prove that there was no lexicon for rock music at the time. Festivals were often reported by straight people as though observing exhibits in a zoo.

The day before the concert, The Laurel News Leader reported that "advance ticket sales have assured the success of the first Laurel Pop Festival that features artists whose names read like a 'Who's Who' in the world of pop music." Yeah, groovy, daddio. Obviously, it wasn't pop music at all but anything which appealed to young people was still called pop. Rock had yet to be a definition widely used in the straight press.

Tickets were on sale at First National Bank, Hutzlers, Montgomery Ward, Bum Steer, the Record Rack, Slack Shack, Empire Music stores and other outlets. The festival ran for two days, Friday and Saturday nights, July 11 and 12. Box seats were $10, and reserved seats ranged from $6.75 to $4.75. 

The first night was kicked off by blues guitarist Buddy Guy, followed by the gospel group the Edwin Hawkins Singers, who were enjoying huge success with their single 'Oh, Happy Day'. The next act was Al Kooper, the ex-lead singer of Blood, Sweat and Tears. Then it was time for Jethro Tull and Johnny Winter. The latter was widely reported as having delivered a blistering set as he often did.

Finishing the first night's set was the headliner, Led Zeppelin, who were in the midst of their first world-wide tour, and had been the opening act for The Who a month earlier at Merriweather Post Pavilion.

The second night's lineup was just as impressive, but the night got off to a bad start. Rain delayed the performances for two hours, which meant the fans waited in a cold downpour. The Guess Who opened up, followed by Savoy Brown, The Mothers Of Invention, Sly and the Family Stone, Ten Years After and headlined by Jeff Beck. That was a killer day's music, if you ask me. It was 10 pm when the Jeff Beck Group, with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, took the stage. They were on their fifth U.S. tour and scheduled to play at Woodstock, but the band broke up shortly after their performance at Laurel and cancelled. 

With only 15,000 present, no riots, no tearing down of fences and demanding the music be free, let alone anything worse, this was a festival which passed off without huge incident. This one was all about the music and every report you can find about the music says it was very, very good indeed.

 

Toronto Rock’N’Roll Revival, Varsity Stadium 

The Toronto Rock and Roll Revival was a one-day fest held on September 13, 1969 at Varsity Stadium, at the University of Toronto, to an audience of over 20,000. The originally listed performers for the festival were local band Whiskey Howl, Bo Diddley, Chicago, Junior Walker and the All Stars, Tony Joe White, Alice Cooper, Chuck Berry, Cat Mother and the All Night News Boys, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Doug Kershaw and The Doors. Kim Fowley was listed as the Master of Ceremonies. Screaming Lord Sutch was later added to the bill, as was the Toronto area band Flapping. 

What no-one going to the gig knew was that John Lennon and Yoko Ono would also perform, along with an all-star band including Eric Clapton. 

The festival was produced by John Brower and Kenny Walker, who had also produced a 2 day festival in June of 1969 at the same place. The Rock and Roll Revival was notable for its almost having been cancelled the week of the show when poor ticket sales prompted the backers George and Thor Eaton of Canadian department store fame to pull out.

Upon hearing this news, Kim Fowley, who was in Toronto early that week with Rodney Bingenheimer to do promotion for the festival, suggested that Brower call Apple Records in London and invite John and Yoko to come over and be the emcees. Fowley correctly surmised that given Lennon's love of the music of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Gene Vincent he would accept the invitation. Lennon however went one better by suggesting that they wouldn't want to come unless they could play. Brower accepted that offer (like he was ever going to say no!) and quickly arranged plane tickets for John and Yoko, Klaus Voormann, Alan White and Eric Clapton along with Beatles road manager Mal Evans and Yoko's assistant Anthony Fawcett.

Media outlets in Toronto, including CHUM radio, refused to believe Brower had secured such stellar names and ticket sales remained low until Detroit promoter and radio personality Russ Gibb nightly broadcast the tape recording of Fawcett reciting the names to Brower for the plane tickets. This caused a last minute stampede into Toronto from Detroit and once wire services reported the entourage had boarded their flight in London CHUM radio went on the air with the news and the stadium sold out during the afternoon of the event.

Also notable was the escort into Toronto for both The Doors and John and Yoko by The Vagabonds motorcycle club, whose 80 members rode 40 in front and 40 in back for John and Yoko's limousine.

It was at this festival that audience members first lit matches and lighters to welcome a performer on stage. Who'd have thought it would becomes such a default thing? Fowley came up with this as a means to ease John Lennon's stage fright. Fowley appeared on stage just before introducing the Plastic Ono Band and had everyone get their matches ready whereupon Lennon and company took the stage to a spectacular show of lights. This has since become a tradition in rock and roll. Brower and Lennon attempted to produce a world peace festival in 1970, but failed to agree on details and were overwhelmed with both political and internecine opposition.

It was at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival that the Alice Cooper chicken incident took place. A chicken was reportedly thrown on stage and thrown back into the audience by Alice; a photo of which was sent by wire around the world. Various reports ranged from Alice biting the chicken's head off before returning it to the crowd, to Alice's own claim that audience members in the front of the crowd tore the poor bird to pieces in a frenzy of rock and roll pandemonium.

An unauthorized Doors recording from the Toronto performance features Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger playing the melody and chorus from The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby in the middle of his guitar solo on Light My Fire. The Doors closed the festival and Morrison begins their song The End by telling the audience he was honoured to be on the same stage as the illustrious musical geniuses who had preceded the group that day.

The Alice Cooper Band was the backing band for Gene Vincent, while a member of Flapping, Ron Marinelli, Danny Taylor, and Hugh Leggat a member of Nucleus, were members of the backing band for Chuck Berry.

In addition, appearances at the festival served to revitalize the careers of certain performers from the 1950s. For example, according to one reviewer, in relation to Little Richard's performance:...he and his extremely tight band proceeded to tear through his classics at breakneck speed. With sweat gushing down his heavily made up face, he jumped on the piano and drove the young crowd crazy, exhorting them to get up and dance to blazing numbers like 'Rip It Up', 'Good Golly Miss Molly', and 'Jenny, Jenny'. By the time he finished racing through the closing notes of his 'Long Tall Sally' finale, he was sopping wet with his shirt torn to shreds by the crowd below. In 30 frenetic minutes Little Richard had just made his comeback.

That being said, did Little Richard really have a comeback? Did he have any hits records in the 70s? No. At least Chuck Berry had 'My Ding-a-ling'.
The Doors, as the headlining act, closed the show. Pennebaker filmed the event and released a documentary in 1971 called Sweet Toronto. Lots of performances from the gig came out officially and unofficially on a series of albums.

Chicago Transit Authority - Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival 1969 - Vol. I
Chuck Berry - Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival 1969 - Vol. II & Vol. III
Alice Cooper - Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival 1969 - Vol. IV
Bo Diddley - Toronto Rock 'n' Roll Revival 1969 - Vol. V
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band - Live Peace in Toronto

The Lennon set went down in history but it is messy and under-rehearsed and Clapton not in good health, but the Alice set is punky and powerful. They were such an awesome garage band back then.

Ultimately, this was a strange event, pulling together old rock n rollers and the new long hairs to only limited success. Lennon's participation gave it a place in rock history, though.  

New Orleans Pop Festival, Labor Day

Happening just two weeks after Woodstock, and held at the Louisiana International Speedway, Prairieville, the New Orleans Pop Festival 1969 is often called Louisiana's Woodstock. But then many festivals around that time were keen to cast themselves in the counterculture glow of the upstate New York zeitgeist.

Promoter Steve Kapelow said they expected 15,000 - 20,000 in light of advance ticket sales, but had prepared for double that. Kapelow explained that their extra preparations were costing more money than was likely necessary, "but we'd rather do that then have the industry suffer another disaster", referring to Woodstock, where attendance was vastly greater than anticipated, and preparations were inadequate.

Kapelow pointed out that he was confident in his attendance projections because the Louisiana population base was much smaller than that of the New York area, that there was also another pop festival in the Dallas area on the same weekend that would compete for attendees, and that destruction from Hurricane Camille, which made its U.S. landfall on July 18 in the Biloxi/Gulfport, Mississippi area would likely reduce attendance from the Gulf Coast.

The stage was built in the straight of the race track on the opposite side of the infield to the grandstand. There was a double wide stage with two separate light and sound systems, making a large jam session with several groups possible and greatly reducing the intermission between performers.

Kapelow and fellow promoter Joe Kaplan had attended several previous pop festivals to get an idea of what sort of preparations were necessary and that work resulted in what was reported as an abundance of food and drink and other supplies. Hundreds of portable toilets and 50-gallon drums of water were scattered around the race track, and limited showers were even available to festival goers. These guys were really trying to cover all the bases.

The festival was originally planned for two days, but a free Saturday evening show was added. Sunday tickets went for $7.00 for advance tickets and $9.50 at the gate, while Monday prices were $8.00 in advance and $10.50 at the gate. Tickets for the entire cost $13.00 in advance and $16.00 at the gate.

Uniformed law enforcement restricted themselves to traffic control in the access roads. Although there were over 100 undercover narcotic officers. Only 37 drug arrests were made, with the focus on the sellers rather than the users. The programme included this warning notice.

"In case you haven't heard, narcotics are prohibited by federal and state law. Additionally, many people have become seriously ill at recent festivals because they purchased bad narcotics - improperly manufactured. We were told that one person died a few weeks ago at Woodstock due to improperly made acid purchased at the festival. Please do not consume narcotics at the festival; but, even more important, DO NOT BUY DRUGS - THEY MAY BE VERY DANGEROUS. Plainclothes detectives will be in the crowd. For your own safety, please avoid the obvious consumption of drugs."

 

Promoters had arranged for several motorcycle clubs to handle internal security, and apparently did a good job (it had to happen once!) Local Sheriff H. M. Waguespack praised the behaviour of the crowd, saying that things were going much better than he had expected. Local towns were under a tight night curfew due to violence resulting from racial incidents because of the recent court-ordered integration of area schools, but the sheriff's office declined to extend the curfew to the festival site.

A medical team hired by the promoters handled a few cases of drug overdoses, but most cases were related to insect bites and cuts incurred by walking on broken glass. Ouch. That'd harsh your buzz, man.

Peak attendance occurred on Sunday when 30-35,000 turned up.

It kicked off on Saturday with lots of local bands. It's A Beautiful Day were the last band on, following Tyrannosaurus Rex. This pattern was followed again on the Sunday with local bands getting things going. But then the big guns really kicked in. IABD played again, followed by Country Joe and the Fish, the Byrds, Canned Heat, Iron Butterfly, Janis and closing with Santana. Now that is as good a line-up as you'd have found anywhere at any festival in 1969 with many of them coming off the back of Woodstock success.

But Monday was red hot too, with more from Santana and IABD and a triple header of Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the day was wrapped up by local gilded splinters walker and general voodoo merchant, Dr John. Gris gris.

Reviews of the music called It's A Beautiful Day one of the outstanding acts of the entire festival and they received calls for the first encore of the day. Canned Heat, was described as another big hit, while others loved Iron Butterfly.

There were no disasters here. No chaos. No half-naked biker chicks shooting guns. 

It was one of the most peaceful festivals. It was definitely good planning that managed to make it relatively incident free. Interesting that the promoters were already learning from previous disasters and the more enlightened ones beginning to provide sufficient facilities to stop the whole site turning into a disaster zone.

The Vancouver Pop Festival

The Vancouver Pop Festival 1969 was a rain-drenched festival held across three days at the Paradise Valley Resort in Squamish, British Columbia, a 90 minute drive north of Vancouver. Held August 22-24th, a week after Woodstock, this was one of those gatherings which began to hammer the nails into the coffin of the counterculture dream.

It was a decent-looking line-up of bands and though it has been claimed that the Grateful Dead didn't perform but Jerry Garcia biographer Blair Jackson disputes this, and speculates the Dead took the gig to move on from their perceived poor performance at the Woodstock festival a week earlier.

MC for the event Terry Mulligan remembers seeing someone banging their head hard against a stage supporting post in time to Little Richard's music, presumably freaked out on some narcs. It doesn't help the mood when someone is furiously hurting themselves. 

Richard then proceeded to anger up the bikers who were supposed to be the security team, causing a near riot. Loads of other bikers gangs showed up for a showdown. Bad vibes all round.

One attendee said "It was like every outlaw motorcycle gang in the Pacific Northwest came to this thing….The bizarre part was when Little Richard came on. All these bikers right up front. …Little Richard was mincing it up big time, and questioning their sexuality while flaunting his. It rained a lot and it was cold."

The promoter expected to sell 30,000 tickets for each day but only sold 15,000 for all three days, so it was far from overcrowded, which some people loved, but generally the vibe was down. But as is the way with a lot of festivals, some reported the weather good and the gig hassle free, others that it was pissing it down and fights broke out all over the place. 

Someone went into town and bought a load of umbrellas and cleaned up selling them. Other reports have a guy rolling and selling joints in tent and doing brisk business. There was almost no police presence

The toilets backed up, people were ripped off, fights broke out and the bands wanted their money, but the promoter Bert Gartner didn't have any money, or not enough, largely because he'd only sold those 15,000 tickets and most of those people had gone by the third day, sick of the bad weather, fighting and sodden conditions.

The promoter managed to leave by helicopter, narrowly avoiding being lynched by the stage crew and sound engineers, none of whom got paid. Sounds like a last chopper out of 'nam, deal.

With a good sound system, the music played was reported to be very good, with the Chambers Brothers and Flying Burrito Brothers excelling. Also interesting to see Love playing their first gigs in Canada. The Guess Who were on fine rocking form and you can even see a clip of Joni playing if you search for it on YouTube. The local paper singled out Alice Cooper for praise and suggested "they were really going places." Yeah, the groovy dude was right.

This whole event lost so much money and was such a sour, horrible experience for many, that it deterred anyone else from putting a similar event in the region for years.

The Chambers Brothers
Chicago
Canned Heat
Alice Cooper
Crome Syrcus ( I think you've spelt that wrongly, lads)
Flying Burrito Brothers
The Grass Roots
Grateful Dead
The Guess Who
Joni Mitchell
Love
Taj Mahal
Brownie McGhee
Merryweather
Motherlode
Poco
The Rascals
Little Richard
Merrilee Rush
Strawberry Alarm Clock
Sonny Terry

Texas International Pop Festival, Lewisville 

The Texas International Pop Festival was held at Lewisville, Texas, on Labour Day weekend, August 30 to September 1, 1969, just a couple of weeks after Woodstock. In the history of 60s and early 70s festivals, it has gone down in history as one of the most significant and important.

The site for the event was a big field just south and west of the newly opened Dallas International Motor Speedway. It's place in history is as one of the best and most successful in terms of vibe and music, if not in terms of making a profit.

A lot of the music played across the weekend has come out over the years both officially and unofficially. The Led Zeppelin bootleg of their set is a classic, with both great sound quality and a tremendous performance. I have the Johnny Winter set too and he is on red hot form. The Ten Years After set is another must-listen.

The festival was the brainchild of Angus G. Wynne III, son of Angus G. Wynne, the founder of the Six Flags Over Texas Amusement Park. Wynne was a concert promoter who had attended the hugely successful Atlanta International Pop Festival on the July Fourth weekend. And like many rich kids who had gone to a festival, he decided to put a festival on near Dallas, and joined with the Atlanta festival's main organizer and generally cool head honcho, Alex Cooley, forming the company Interpop Superfest. 

Bands performing at the festival were: Canned Heat, Chicago Transit Authority, James Cotton, Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, Grand Funk Railroad, Incredible String Band, Janis Joplin, B.B. King, Freddie King, Led Zeppelin, Herbie Mann, Nazz, Rotary Connection, Sam and Dave, Santana, Shiva's Headband, Sly and the Family Stone, Space Opera, Spirit, Sweetwater, Ten Years After, Tony Joe White and Johnny Winter.

North of the festival site was the camp ground on Lewisville Lake, where the local good folk were shocked to see hippies getting naked and no doubt the offended locals lingered just long enough to make sure they were indeed without clothes.

This was what the local Man had feared. Freaky deaky kids left, right and centre, doing weird stuff and generally being far out. That's why they'd tried to stop it happening. It was also why the local paper's editorials had spoken out against the festival too.

By this stage in 1969, putting on a festival always had to fight the same issues. It became almost a cliche for the local council, zoning board, sheriff or whomever to be against it only for the promoters - always far sharper and more clever - to find a way around all the injunctions and protestations.

Even as the festival happened, the Dallas Morning News was getting itself into a proper righteous rage. "Young people assembling to hear music is one thing. Young people assembling in unspeakable costumes, half-naked (only half naked, bubba? We want full naked!), defying proprietary and scorning morality is another.' They headlined the piece "Nausea at Lewisville."

 

There was a free stage on the campground, where some bands played after their main stage gig and several bands not playing on the main stage also performed. It was on this stage that Wavy Gravy, head of the Hog Farm Commune, apparently acquired his name, possibly due to his abilities with a packet of Bisto.

The Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey's team of acid-drenched loons, were in charge of the free stage and camping area. While Kesey was neither at the Texas event nor at Woodstock, his right-hand man, Ken Babbs, and his psychedelic bus Furthur were. The Hog Farm provided 'security', a trip tent, and free food. Attendance is estimated between a big 120,000 and 150,000. As with Woodstock, there were no violent crimes reported. There was one death, due to heatstroke, and one birth. 

The Festival was set to begin at 4:00 p.m. each day. Grand Funk Railroad, who were really making a big impression on the festival circuit - and whose 1970 Live album cover featured a photo taken at the Atlanta festival (announced as Grand Funk Railway!) opened all three days and played through the afternoon heat till the 4:00 p.m. opening band. 

BB King played all three nights and told the same jokes and stories, perhaps thinking he had a different 150,000 person crowd for each show.

It didn't rain, it wasn't unbearably hot and food and water didn't run out. This helped the whole event work. 3,000 fried chickens were donated from Minnie Pearl Inc to the Hog Farm. 

The festival was so relatively problem-free that on the final day both the mayor and the city's police chief, Ralph Adams, climbed onstage and congratulated the audience on its good behaviour. 

"You have really shown us older people you know what you are doing", Adams said. 

That was a very magnanimous thing to say and was often mirrored at other festivals. All too often, The Man thought Hippie was going to kick off, but obviously, as we know, hippie only wanted to get high, get a groove on and dig the music,

In the end, the Lewisville festival lost Wynne and his fellow organizers around $100,000. 

Got No Shoes, Got No Blues, a video of some of the musical acts at the festival, is available, as well as reproductions of festival posters and programs. A Texas Historical Marker commemorating the event was erected near the site of the festival in 2010. 

Altamont Festival, Altamont Speedway, Livermore, Northern California

Whether the events at Altamont marked the death of the hippy dream, as is often claimed, is open to debate, but coming in December 1969, at literally the end of the 60s, the symbolism is irresistible, especially happening four months after the high of Woodstock.

When you get many thousands of people in one place, drug them up and have them policed by Hells Angels, it'd be amazing if something bad didn't happen. And something very bad happened at Altamont.

Everyone knows, or thinks they know, about the death of Meredith Hunter at the hands of Hell's Angels during the Rolling Stones set at Altamont Speedway in Northern California.

So many years on, it's almost impossible to fully apportion the blame, to sort out the motives of the people involved. Was it wise to hire the bikers as security? No, it wasn't. Hiring the Angels had been a regular festival occurance for a couple of years to act as an alternative police force. It rarely turned out well. 

A cursory knowledge of other festivals in 1969 alone should have told a story. The bikers caused mayhem everywhere they went. But somehow, they were seen as a kind of more cool version of the cops, even though they said they were would not act as security, were not interested in policing anything and were only interested in drinking beer.

Sam Cutler, the Stones tour manager explained why he took them on. "I was talking with them, because I was interested in the security of my band - everyone's security, for that matter. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. They were the only people who were strong and together. [They had to protect the stage] because it was descending into absolute chaos. Who was going to stop it?"

Sam has a point. As bad as things got, they could've been even worse. 

Was it on the Stones' insistence, or the Grateful Dead's that the Angels were present?  Dead manager Rock Scully said that if the Angels hadn't been on the stage, "that whole crowd could have easily passed out, and rolled down onto the stage. There was no barrier."

The fact is they paid with $500 worth of beer and sat around the stage, as they said they would do, generally looking menacing and hassling people.

Why did 18-year-old Meredith - dressed outrageously in a lime green suit - have a long-barrelled .22 handgun at the concert? After getting pushed from the stage by the Angels, he returned, apparently so high he almost couldn't walk, toting the shooter.

Rock Scully, who could see the audience clearly from the top of a truck by the stage, said of Hunter, "I saw what he was looking at, that he was crazy, he was on drugs, and that he had murderous intent. There was no doubt in my mind that he intended to do terrible harm to Mick or somebody in the Rolling Stones, or somebody on that stage."

Hells Angel Alan Passaro, seeing Hunter drawing the revolver, drew a knife from his belt and charged Hunter from the side, parrying Hunter's pistol with his left hand and stabbing him twice with his right hand, killing him.

In doing this, Passaro almost certainly saved Jagger's life. Now that's something to think about. That's how crazy the scene was. 

The only thing you can really say for certain is that, having stabbed Meredith once, and taken him to the ground, he shouldn't have been stabbed a total of five times (coroner's report) and kicked and beaten to death, which ain't much to say about the end of a kid's life.

The murky legal aftermath saw Passaro cleared on grounds of self-defence; there was talk of a second assailant, scared witnesses, the whole sorry nine. The case was not finally closed until 2005.



The Altamont Speedway Free Concert of December 6th 1969 was set to feature a line-up of Santana; Jefferson Airplane; The Flying Burrito Brothers; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Grateful Dead and the Stones.
The venue was only chosen 48 hours before the event - amazingly slack preparation for an event that 300,000 would attend. And the racetrack was a run-down, bleak place, now appropriately enough, only used for demolition derbies. Facilities were minimal. It should never have happened. A free festival put together in 24 hours was a recipe for disaster and disaster was what they got.

The festival was advertised on local rock radio stations on the Friday and even as early as Friday night people were turning up in their thousands. A lot of them were drinking heavily and whacked out on STP, a combo that is guaranteed to end in tears, even if you're just sitting watching TV, let alone if you're in a desolate speedway track with a gang of angry Hells Angels.

A Saturday dawned, streams of hairy people, looking like refugees from a nuclear war, trudged in lines up to seven miles long to get to the racetrack. By 11am there wasn't a foot of space within 75 yards of the hastily built stage. Chip Monck, who had built the stage at Woodstock and worked for Bill Graham at the Fillmores, was the best stage manager in the business at the time, but with so little time available, the stage he built was only seven feet high and easily climbed by anyone with a mind so to do. It should have been at least 12 feet. He knew it could be a problem. He was right.

In retrospect, other than hiring the Angels, maybe that was the single biggest mistake. Loaded fans surged towards the stage - check out the great Gimme Shelter documentary for footage - and, to be fair to the Angels, they had legitimate concerns about the stage being stormed, over-run. Backstage a man, out of his mind on acid, had run at Jagger shouting 'I'm going to kill you'.

Even during Santana, the first band on, there were already fights breaking out. Of course, the fact that they'd been drinking beer and wine that was spiked with acid didn't exactly help matters.

Second band on were Jefferson Airplane opening with 'We Can Be Together' to try and tone the mood down. But during 'The Other Side Of This Life' fights broke out, pugnacious singer Marty Balin tried to intervene and was promptly knocked unconscious by a biker. Paul Kantner, understandably concerned that one of his singers was sparko, stopped the music and pleaded with the Angels to stop beating people up, only to have the microphone confiscated by one of them.

 

It took ten minutes to clear the stage before Airplane could resume their set. The show must go on. Now everyone was scared that a long gap without music might make the crowd even more restless, so the Flying Burrito Brothers were ready to go as Airplane came off.

It worked. For a while. Their brand of proto country rock soothing jangled nerves. However, the medical tents were over-run with people crazed on bad acid consumed in the spiked wine that was being passed around.

CSNY were up next. Stills was stabbed in the leg by a biker witrh a sharpened spoke.

The Dead refused to follow them on as scheduled, due to the excessive violence and later Robert Hunter wrote 'New Speedway Boogie' for the Workingman's Dead album about the day. But The Stones simply had to play. God knows what would have happened if they hadn't.

They made everyone wait a long, long time before taking the stage, as was their wont in those days. They wanted all the lights out apart from a spot on Mick, it's said that they even had the medical people turn out their torches. The vibe, at least that captured by the film-makers (young George Lucas was one of the cameramen!), is dark and ugly and thrilling.

 

Mick Jagger looks extraordinary, in a satin half-brown, half-black sort of blouse, with these crazy long tasselled arm things, and his skinny little backside wiggling in mustard velvet trousers, alongside these hairy-arsed bikers. He appeals, in vain, throughout the set for calm, sounding like a sort of camp drama teacher who has lost control of the fifth form.

"People! Who's fighting and what for? Why are we fighting?" he pleads. "That guy there (pointing) if he doesn't stop it man, cool it man, or we don't play."

But it's quite clear that the Stones don't have much of a choice: there's no way they could walk off without a riot. The version of 'Sympathy For The Devil', shown in its entirety on Gimme Shelter, is absolutely brilliant. There's a real edge to the playing, like they know they are playing for their lives: it's dark and exciting and urgent. Play or you're dead.

There's also a sense of ridiculousness, too - Jagger strutting, singing and snarling about being this ruthless and terrible Satanic figure, yet surrounded by these brutish blokes who could snap him like a dry twig and look like they wouldn't mind trying, who are, in turn, his only protectors from a surging, drugged-up mob.

At one point, bizarrely, this huge German Shepherd  trots across the stage. A fat, naked woman fights, really physically fights, her way to the front. All the girls are staring at Jagger, captivated, saucer-eyed. Yet they all look so young, really, just kids swooning at their favourite popstar, not some sort of social or political movement, no less naive and star-struck as the kids you saw squealing at Beatles concerts five, six years earlier. Jagger is at once transfixing and ludicrous, set in this heart of darkness.

There's loads of aggro all over the place now and it is not surprising that many people wrongly believe that the murder of Hunter took place during this all-too-fitting perfect cacophony of Satanic groove. But in fact it is during the next song, 'Under My Thumb', that it happened. The band stops, but the full extent of what's happened is not clear, not least because the Hell's Angels have formed a ring around the murderous action.

It's after this that the famous moment between Keith Richards and Angels leader Sonny Barger took place. Keef said they were going off; Barger says he stuck a gun in Keef's side and told him: "Keep fucking playing or you're dead."

Meredith Hunter was not the only fatality that night: two people were run over, one drowned in a drainage ditch. Bad drugs, bad people, poor organization and massive egos added up to a disaster at what was hoped would be 'The Woodstock Of The West'.

Altamont, partly through the fascinating and macabre Gimme Shelter movie, has become totemic for the death of peace and love.The end of the innocence and the prelude to a decade of excess and self indulgence. But that's to ignore the fact that there had been bad festivals before Altamont and great ones after.

Violence and aggression exist throughout society and when you stick 300,000 people in a racetrack and get them wasted on wine and acid, it'd be surprising if there wasn't a few problems. I'm also willing to bet some people had a great time because The Stones were on their kick ass best form; road-hardened and terrified.

Those sort of pronouncements make it seem like this was the day the Sixties was finally over. But, distasteful though it is to say, it's one of the finest Stones performances. Writer Robert Santelli said when the Stones plugged in that day "they set forth an avalanche of power and emotion that, in 1969, was rarely reproduced."

There was a bizarre coda to the whole thing when it emerged that Hell's Angels - in revenge for Mick Jagger blaming them for the violent fiasco of Altamont - plotted to murder him a few months later, by travelling to his Long Island home... on a boat! A severe storm disrupted the mission and saved Mick's bacon. A case of crazy pirate bikers with cutlasses in their teeth and parrots on their hogs: not very pleased to meet you...at least not unless you're Johnny Depp.

Northern California Folk-Rock Festival, San Jose, California 

 

The Northern California Folk-Rock Festival was held at Santa Clara County Fairgrounds in San Jose, California on May 23-25, 1969.

A year earlier, the first festival held here had ended in a drug-fuelled mess with 1000s of people out of their minds on industrial strength PCP. So it was lucky to get the go-ahead for an encore given how the authorities were so anti-freak getting their freak on.

Supposedly the promoter, Bob Blodgett rented the Fairgrounds on false pretences, and then started advertising Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, even though they had neither under contract at the time. Very naughty, though hardly unheard of in these wild west days of festival and rock and roll organisation.

The festival was well attended and without the drug issues of the previous gig, but the city and county made sure there wasn't any further events afterwards.

The Aquarian Family Festival sprung up across town, half-a-mile away, as a counter-weight to this festival, with many hippies feeling that the 2nd annual Northern Californian folk Festival was all about the bread and not about the heads. About 80,000 people are estimated to have attended the two festivals in total.

However, a brilliant array of heavyweights were put onto the bill - whether actually booked or not - and that included the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Santana, Spirit, Chuck Berry, the Steve Miller Band, Muddy Waters, Canned Heat and the Chambers Brothers, whose mind-expanding Time Has Come Today was a new psychedelic epic. It also offered up a chance to see one of the first-ever live shows by a budding super-group, formed from the ashes of England's Yardbirds called Led Zeppelin. 

Led Zeppelin: The Concert File (Dave Lewis and Simon Pallett, Omnibus Press 1997) quotes Peter Grant as saying that Led Zeppelin actually had a gig in Chicago all weekend, so they played Friday afternoon (May 23) and the promoter hired a Lear Jet to fly them to Chicago for their Friday Night show. At this time, their first album had just been released to enormous acclaim. So they were in the Windy City and not anywhere near Northern California. Zeppelin filed a lawsuit against Blodgett who then flew in Hendrix, and paid him $30,000 for a half hour set. 

At the time of this show, Santana was just another popular local band without an album, although their groundbreaking debut album would be released a few months later. It's also significant for one of the earliest gigs country rock innovators Poco ever played. 

It was a riotous weekend in Santa Clara with many thousands of hippies wandering between both shows, the Aquarian Festival being free meant this was easy to do.  Local retailers all cashed in and made a tone of money selling food and drink, and although this meant they had to put up with hippies getting it on in the streets and generally doing what came naturally, hey, it was only for a couple of days and this was your chance to sell off all that brown rice you'd had in the back for years that no-one had wanted to buy.

The full line up that actually played: AUM, Blues Image, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Canned Heat, Cat Mother, Chuck Berry, Doc Watson, Elvin Bishop, Eric Burdon & The Animals, Jefferson Airplane, Lee Michaels, Lynn County, Muddy Waters, New Lost City Ramblers, Noel Redding, People!, Poco, Santana, Spirit, Steve Miller Band, Sweet Linda Divine, Taj Mahal, The Chambers Brothers, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Loading Zone, The Youngbloods

Had this festival been filmed or recorded, then it would've had an important place in rock n roll history, just as Monterey and Woodstock did, but it wasn't and as such is really only remembered locally. 

The Midwest Rock Festival, Milwaukee 

The Midwest Rock Festival was staged at the racetrack at State Fair Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 25-27, 1969 with a total attendance of about 45,000. It costs $15 for the 3 days. The show had a flatbed trailer as a stage, set on the field in front of the racetrack grandstand. It looks wonderfully down home.

Also down home was the printing of tickets which had no security marking of any sort - well who did back then - as a result freaks just photocopied them at the local Kinkos.  So loads of people attended who hadn't paid but did have tickets. 

Because they didn't have a lot of money upfront, all the advances were paid out of the ticket sales money as it came in. Even so, everyone got paid and the whole event passed off without big hassles.

Led Zeppelin, who played so many festivals that summer, was there Friday night and, by all accounts, played a storming, frantic set. Listening to the bootleg, widely available online, you can hear them tearing through songs like 'Communication Breakdown' as though on speed. Blind Faith played on Saturday. They were on their one and only American tour, of course. Other acts included John Mayall, Kenny Rodgers and the First Edition (booed off the stage when they tried leading off with Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town!) and Buffy Sainte-Marie who was actually the first day headliner above Zeppelin.

The scheduled list of bands was even longer than the number that actually played - Jethro Tull, Jeff Beck and the Bob Seger System were scheduled on Sunday, but rain cancelled many of that day's performances. This festival saw Taste, with Rory Gallagher, make their United States debut.

Tommy Bolin's first band Zephyr also played along with festival stalwarts, Pacific Gas & Electric, SRC and Shag Delaney and Bonnie and Friends were also there, the MC5, Jim Schwall Blues Period and the unimaginatively named Litter.

Bob Reitman, the Milwaukee radio personality who served as emcee for the festival, ranks the weekend - and another Midwest festival later that summer at County Stadium - among the top 10 concerts he's witnessed in his years in Milwaukee.

Part of what made it memorable, he said, was the dramatic weather. There was heavy rain on Sunday. Musicians were playing on a the flatbed truck, and a makeshift plastic cover was put over it to keep the rain off them. During a performance by Joe Cocker, the plastic cover broke and rainwater poured down on him while he sang. But Cocker kept on going.

Johnny Winter was next up and there was real fear he'd get electrocuted, but fortunately, only the music gave everyone a blast. 

The coverage of the festival in newspapers mentioned widespread pot-smoking in the stands, and afterwards a state legislator from West Allis, Robert Huber, took strong exception to that, saying the weekend would make Haight-Ashbury blush. For 3 days in the summer of 69 what made Milwaukee famous was not beer but kick ass rock 'n' roll.

 

Palm Springs Pop Festival, California 

These days Coachella is a big deal, but for 10 years after this 1969 festival, there were no permits issued for anyone wanting to hold out door music events in the Palm Springs area because of the trouble it caused.

Back then, the conservative SoCal desert town was small place of some 20,000 people. The Palm Springs Pop Festival was held in April 1969. On the bill were the likes of Procol Harum, The Doors, Canned Heat, John Mayall, Savoy Brown, Steve Miller, Ike and Tina Turner, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Flying Burritos Brothers, Lee Michael, Moby Grape, Buddy Miles Express, the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. All pretty cool music to listen to in the hot desert. Jeff Beck didn't play because he got into a fight with Rod Stewart at the hotel, as the band fell apart.

Timothy Leary was introduced before Procol came on stage. "Keep it going, smoke it, get it on," he said, giving the peace sign. You can just imagine that, can't you? Buddy Miles drums didn't show up and John Mayall suffered a power cut. But the music is reported as being of superb quality.

The smell of incense and Mexican pot was thick in the air. Students had come from San Diego and Los Angeles en masse, hoping to buy tickets for the two concerts that were sponsored by Los Angeles FM stations as part of the two-day festival. The first concert was held three miles east of Palm Springs in Cathedral City at the Sunair Drive-In. The marquee at the theatre read: Tuesday only Palm Springs Pot Festival from 6 to Midnight.

The day of the event, ticket holders were let in and throngs of others stood outside hoping to get past the gates and into the venue. More than 5,000 concert-goers filled the drive-in. Those who could not get in broke holes in the fences and pushed in to see the bands and revel in the music. This despite the fact that ticket prices were just $4.50 The second night, April 3, at the Palm Springs Angel Baseball Stadium, law enforcement teams kept the peace by securing the stadium after the 3,500 long hairs were let in.

All around the sleepy desert town students and freaks hung out and got it on. There was public nudity and the having of carnal relations in the open air. Mostly it was middle-class college kids looking to get high and get laid. Crowds began forming outside the concert and the crowd, which became a mob and spilled across the street to the service station on the corner of Ramon Road and Sunrise Way. The police formed a line with the owner of the service station, and he shot and killed a 16-year-old male youth in what authorities later deemed self-defence. A 20 year old girl was also shot. This wasn't how it was meant to be.

Rolling Stone reported one festival-goer as saying, "We're the new breed" proclaimed Mike Henderson, 22, of Long Beach. "Sooner or later we're going to take over the country. Then we'll be able to do what we want to do, and we'll have a peaceful planet." That was a lovely sentiment, Mike. Let's hope it comes true one day. A Riverside Press-Enterprise editorial of April 9, 1969, concluded: "The week has gone, but a bad feeling lingers on."

The Palm Springs Pop Festival 1969 turned out to be severely ungroovy.

 

 

Mississippi River Festival 

In 1969, Southern Illinois University initiated the Mississippi River Festival. Though primarily designed as a summer residence for the St Louis Symphony Orchestra (with Walter Susskind the conductor), [a la Tanglewood in Massachusetts featuring the Boston Pop Orchestra] the Mississippi River Festival regularly featured other types of music over its typical two-month, 30 date run. 

So this wasn’t the usual hairy freaks in a field for a three day gig. This was all more respectable and well organised and didn’t involve people called Sky or Sunflower. Flowers were not dropped from helicopters and Wavy Gravy was not in charge of making people feel secure, more’s the pity. 

There was room for 1,900 seated under the canvas tent at the front and another 25,000 in the open air, on the grass.

It attracted some of the cream of the rock, folk and blues fraternity. In 1969 these included Aorta, Arlo Guthrie, Blues Image, Bob Dylan, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Eddie Fisher, Ian and Sylvia, Iron Butterfly, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, The Band, The New Christy Minstrels, Walter Süsskind, Paul Butterfield Blues Band

And it is very significant in the history of rock. It is often assumed that Bob Dylan’s first live appearance after his motorcycle accident in 1966 was at the Isle of Wight Festival in August but in fact, it was at the Mississippi River Festival on 14th July 1969 when he came on stage to play four songs with The Band!

In their 2006 book , The Mississippi River Festival, Amanda Bahr-Evola and Stephen Kerber wrote: “To host the symphony, the university created an outdoor concert venue within a natural amphitheater by installing a large circus tent, a stage and acoustic shell, and a sophisticated sound system. To appeal to the widest possible audience, the university included contemporary popular musicians in the series.

The audacity of the undertaking, the charm of the venue, the popularity of the artists, the excellence of the performances, and the nostalgic memory of warm summer evenings have combined to endow the festival with legendary status among those who attended.”

From the first, the MRF was an artistic success. It drew large audiences from both sides of the Mississippi River and from far beyond the metropolitan St. Louis area. It also generated extensive favorable publicity for SIUE. However, when student unrest in Carbondale led to the resignation of the university president in June 1970, the young MRF abruptly lost its original patron. Financial problems troubled the MRF throughout its lifetime. The festival consistently lost money. The state of Illinois cut back its financial support of the university during the 1970s, and in turn the university was increasingly hard-pressed to sustain the MRF even though The Who, Yes, Chicago, Eagles, and the Grateful Dead shows were heavily attended.

Some shows attracting crowds in excess of 30,000. Jackson Browne appeared as both a support band (for Yes in 1972 and America in 1973) and ultimately, as a lead act in 1977. He also wrote two of his songs for the live Running on Empty album in a nearby Holiday Inn at the intersection of I-270 and Illinois Route 157.

It is estimated that over one million visitors attended MRF over 12 summers

The last shows were in 1980 after an 11-year run but it remains very fondly remembered by all who attended across that decade and has its own bookmark in the History of Rock.

 

 

Bath Festival Of Blues 

Held on Sat Jun 28, 1969, in the centre of Bath, at the Pavilion Recreation Ground, this was pretty much a gathering of the cream of the British blues rock boom. 

It was promoter Freddie Bannister’s first UK rock festival. He’d go on to put on the Knebworth Festivals as well as the better known and much bigger 1970 Bath festival at Shepton Mallet.

Cleverly, they put up two stages to make sure the music kept flowing. I say stages, they were more like wee wooden sheds with a canopy over. Nothing highlights the difference between these modest early shows and the massive affairs to come, more than the nature and size of the stage. Imagine a festival stage at anything other than a church fete being this small today.

Ironically, they didn’t do the two stages in 1970 and that led to long delays as bands changed over. 

It pulled in 12,000 people into the centre of town for the show and they all sat there very respectfully by the look of photos. 

The full line up was:

Babylon, Blodwyn Pig, Champion Jack Dupree, Chicken Shack, Clouds, Deep Blues Band, Fleetwood Mac, Group Therapy, John Mayall, Jon Hiseman's Colosseum, Just Before Dawn, Keef Hartley, Led Zeppelin, Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, Savoy Brown, Taste, Ten Years After, The Liverpool Scene, The Nice

Principal Edwards, Babylon, Group Therapy and Clouds didn’t play due to shortage of time. It does look like a big bill for a one-day gig, so maybe that’s no surprise. Led Zep topped the bill, with Edgar Broughton on before them and TYA third top. Fleetwood Mac, was 10th out of 15 bands to play, but had a good claim in 1969 to be the biggest band in the land and topped most of the 1969 polls as such.

 

 

Toledo Pop Festival 

Held on Sunday, September 14th 1969 just four weeks after Woodstock, Toledo’s hippies ‘n’ hairies got an opportunity to let their freak flag fly at this one day festival at Raceway Park.

It was very much a Michigan-biased line-up of bands, many of whom seemed to play every festival in the rust belt for about 3 years! Alice Cooper, Life, MC5, Rush, Savage Grace, SRC, The Amboy Dukes, The Frost, The Früt, The Pleasure Seekers, The Rationals, The Turtles The Turtles topping the bill was an interesting choice.

They had hit singles and could’ve been sure to pull some fans on the back of that. But Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (Flo & Eddie) were also soon to join the Mothers Of Invention to perform their on-stage freaking to a more receptive audience and I’d imagine their performance here in Toldeo was very freaky and psychedelic as they performed a 20-minute version of Happy Together.

It ran from noon to midnight and the $5.00 admission ($4.25 Advance) was, as ever, good value. It’s interesting that few promoters tried to price gouge these gigs. The emphasis was only on making them affordable and drawing a big crowd, the profit made in the sheer numbers that wanted to come.

 

Amougies Festival, Belgium 

This was one of the first major European festivals and it had a brilliant 5-day line up of acts. Yes, it was called Europe’s Woodstock! 

It was organized by the French label Byg Actuel and sponsored by Actuel, the flagship magazine of underground culture which was owned by Byg. The festival took place in the village of Amougies , Belgium, from October 24-28 , 1969

The Actuel Music Festival of Jazz, Rock and New Music was originally planned to take place at Paris' Les Halles. It would have been the first festival of its kind in Paris, and all advance advertising and performing contracts had been drawn up with Paris as the festival location, as you can see from the poster.

But the Paris cops didn’t like the idea of freaks from all over Europe descending on the city and vetoed the City of Light as the festival site. The police were certainly not discouraged by the various established local promoters, record companies and TV corporations who were not especially eager to see any competitive "happenings" nor wished for new blood to enter the rather closed show-business setup traditional to Paris. 

The authorities really did fear hippies, this can’t be forgotten or ignored, especially in France which had a long history of revolution and of the general public getting up on its hind legs and being rebellious. So they denied permission for events which might attract large groups of young people claiming they’d be violent and stoned. So the organizers, feeling The Frenchie Man was a downer, relocated the gig to a big tent near the Belgian country town of Amougies. 

Over 75,000 people attended during the 5-day festival. Now, 5-day fests are a rarity, in fact I can’t recall another. But it all passed off very peacefully. Frank Zappa played with several bands including Sam Apple Pie, Blossom Toes, Caravan, Pink Floyd, Archie Shepp and Captain Beefheart.

The whole thing was filmed but got nixed by Pink Floyd and couldn’t be shown until the relevant monies were stumped up, which they were never so it remains un-screened officially to this day. Other hits of the festival were Ten Year After on the Friday night who were really tearing it up across Europe and USA by now and gigged almost incessantly. The newly assembled Yes apparently woke people up on Monday afternoon, and Caravan - who had also only just formed - went down well.  The Art Ensemble of Chicago guitarist Joseph Jarman performed naked. Looking at the list of performers, so many bands were less than a year or two old, making the Pretty Things, who had been gigging for 5 or 6 years at that point, positive veterans. Alexis Korner likewise. 

With its unique mix of nascent rock and progressive bands with free jazz honk-honk-beard-gong-gong-bangers this was a really special festival and a successful one artistically. Whether anyone made any money was never really the point. This was a true underground festival about moving the art form forward and doing something new and revolutionary. And in that, it succeeded completely. 

Kalamazoo Rock Revival, Michigan

Held at Kalamazoo County Fairgrounds on Lake Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan on Sunday Jun 08, 1969, this was one of many Michigan one-day festivals, held all over the state from 1968-1972. 

A lot of these gigs featured the same roster of bands, all of whom were just getting off the ground. The line-up here was All The Lonely People, Brownsville Station, Plain Brown Wrapper, Savage Grace, Smoke, The Frost, The Rationals, The Red, White and Blues Band, Bob Seger System

Obviously, the most famous band to emerge from this scene was Bob Seger, who just wouldn’t quit and eventually made it big after many years of touring, but The Frost released three albums and your money would’ve been on them from Alpena, Michigan to break out nationally in 1969, but in 1970, Dick Wagner got a call from Alice Cooper and jumped ship. That ended The Frost. 

Savage Grace released two albums in 1970 and 1971 but then faded from the scene. Brownsville Station, who broke out of the state, released their first album in 1970 and had a good career throughout the 1970s.

Essener Pop & Blues Festival, West Germany

There were two festivals in Essen at the Gruga Halle in 1969 and 1970. This first one was an important one, especially in West Germany where it was one of the first really big three-day shows. And if you look at the bill, you can see just what an amazing collection of bands was booked to play.

Aynsley Dunbar's Retaliation, Champion Jack Dupree, Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac, Free, Keef Hartley, Muddy Waters, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Taste, The Nice, The Pretty Things, Yes, Spooky Tooth, Warm Dust, Steamhammer, Hardin & York, Amon Duul II, Alexis Korner,

The Gruga Halle was approved for 8,000 visitors and on the first two days up to 9,000 got in, but on the final day, when Pink Floyd and Deep Purple, among others, performed, the hall was completely overcrowded with at least 13,000 visitors. 

Bands played outside, in front of the hall through the night for about 1,000 heads who had not been able to get a ticket.

The guy who put the shows on in both years was called Konrad Mallison and he’d come into a lot of money when his father died. He was a long hair and had gone to Bath in the west of England to see the festival held there in 1969 (and in 70 too) and was inspired to put on something similar at home.

“Due to the early death of my father I had inherited so much money that I was able to pre-finance the 1st festival from 09-11 October 1969. The other 2 festivals in April and October 1970 and a spectacular CCR concert on April 12, 1970 I was able to finance from the profits.”

“When we arrived in London from Bath, I visited the Marquee Club in Wardour Street the same evening. I had heard that all the major bands play there. After a show in the evening I went backstage and asked a band manager if he knew how or through whom I could engage well-known British bands for a festival in Germany. By chance I had already found the right manager backstage. He invited me to come to his agency the very next day to discuss everything. After the visit to the agency it was clear that the engagement of bands was no problem, not even of absolute top bands.”

So he went home, booked the hall and returned to London and promptly signed up pretty much every significant blues and rock band in the UK with a few exceptions such as Led Zeppelin. 

“I also succeeded in getting the WDR television station interested in the festival and signed a contract for recording rights worth DM 40,000. This amount covered almost the entire fees of the bands.” 

“After Deep Purple’s performance it turned out that the band didn’t have a manager with them who is normally responsible for logistics. They had to perform the next day in the evening at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, didn’t know their way around, didn’t have a hotel in Amsterdam and didn’t know how to get to Amsterdam with the roadies and equipment. I spontaneously agreed to take care of the transfer and logistics.

So I drove with the band in my Mercedes 220S from Essen to Amsterdam, followed by the roadies in the truck with the equipment. Early in the morning I looked for a hotel for the band in Amsterdam, where we stayed in several double rooms, completely exhausted. I shared one of the double rooms with drummer Ian Paice. In the course of the day. I brought the band to their venue in the Concertgebouw after lunch. Everything went perfectly, harmoniously and in the best mood between me and the band members.”

Later Konrad said of those shows that “everyone was excited and turned on by the Flower Power, underground music, musical HAIR, but also by the Woodstock Festival, which had taken place two months before. There was an extremely loving and peaceful atmosphere in the GrugaHalle. Everyone loved the music and were united by that.”

 

Camden Borough Fringe Festival 

Held on Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead Heath, London initially in 1968, where Jefferson Airplane and Fairport Convention played in the rain. But in 1969 with the promoters a bit more worldwise booked three days of shows across 3 weeks in May and invited some heavy hitters of the emerging British psychedelic Head scene. 

9th May Pink Floyd, Roy Harper, The Pretty Things, Pete Brown's Battered Ornaments & Jody Grind.

18th May Procol Harum, Soft Machine, Third Ear Band , Yes & Blossom Toes.

30th May Fleetwood Mac. Taste, Edgar Broughton, Duster Bennett.

“At the all nighters refreshments will be available and lighting provided. All the groups will be playing free and there will be no charge for admission.”

Interestingly, the first and third shows were scheduled to run from 10pm to 3am, which is the only instance I can think of where an outdoor show started so late, allowing plenty of drinkers to turn up to see what all the freaky hippies are up to, which is what people did on the final show, causing some degree of mayhem with the peaceniks just wanting to groove to the sounds. The middle show was on a Sunday though, and back in ‘69 you couldn’t do much on a Sunday other than stare at the fire and wait for it to be over. So that was a 2pm to 8pm show. The stage was actually the park’s bandstand, photos show bands with their equipment stuffed on there and everyone cramped up trying to find a space to play. But that was the improvised spirit of the age and none the worse for it.

Bull Frog Lake Rock, Oregon

This festival was a 3-day event held on  Fri Jul 04, 1969 - Sun Jul 06, 1969 on private land at Bullfrog Lake Trailer Park about 20 miles south of Portland, Oregon. The bands that played were headlined by Jefferson Airplane but also included Ace of Cups, Family Tree, Jimmy Holden Trio, Jugerknot, Mixed Blood, Portland Electric Zoo Band, The Sons of Champlin.

Unusually for a 3-day festival, held a month before Woodstock, which must have had a lot of publicity locally, and is likely to have been subjected to the usual injunctions and uptight local townsfolk, very little has been written about it. In fact, that line-up of bands doesn’t seem enough for a 3-day fest.

And yet it must’ve been a success because they put another on the following year. 

However, the good news is that someone took some 8mm movie footage and it reveals a lot of young hippie people without an ounce of body fat on them, grooving in the sun and generally getting it on. It looks very peaceful and bucolic. 

 

 

 

Toronto Pop Festival

This festival was held at Toronto's Varsity Stadium from noon to midnight on June 21 and 22, 1969 and is not to be confused with the show later in the year where John Lennon's ‘Live Peace In Toronto” was recorded, though that was put on by the same people. This was, in effect, a dry run for that show. Tickets were $6 a day or $10 for both days.

At the time Toronto was very much in the throes of the emerging flower children hippie culture which probably explains why there were ads for the festival which offered to exchange tickets for actual bread. 

Business manager Ken Walker, along with 22-year-old John Brower, who was described as the festival's "producer and talent scout" were the people behind the show. "We plan on doing this as an annual event," he said. "We are thinking right now of maybe doing an event in the fall."

That event would be the Rock 'n' Roll Revival in September 1969 and featured that famous performance by John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band. 

The line-up across the two days was Al Kooper, Blood, Sweet and Tears, Carla Thomas and The Bar Kays, Chuck Berry, Dr. John the Night Tripper, Elephant's Memory, Eric Andersen, Johnny Winter, José Feliciano, Motherlode, Nucleus, Procol Harum, Robert Charlebois, Ronnie Hawkins, Rotary Connection, Slim Harpo, Sly and the Family Stone, SRC, Steppenwolf, The Band, The Bonzo Dog Band (didn’t show)The Edwin Starr Band, The Stone Soul Children, The Velvet Underground, Tiny Tim. Alice Cooper wasn’t scheduled to play but did. It’s funny how Chuck Berry played so many of these festivals, cranking out the old hits for the hippies. 

A very strong bill indeed and splendidly eclectic, as festival bills always tended to be before we were all so keen on categorizing music by genres. Sly Stone topped the first day and Steppenwolf the second. Johnny Winter played on Friday and by Sunday was back in California for another show, which does sound a tad exhausting. 

 

 

Mount Clemens Pop Festival 

Held on August 3, 1969, The Mount Clemens Pop Festival was the creation of promoter David Dubay. This event was held at Sportsman’s Park near New Haven, Michigan. This was a full-day event that started at noon and ran through to midnight. 

The full line up was:

Alice Cooper, Cat Mother, Charlie Latimer, Country Joe & The Fish, Frijid Pink, John Mayall, Mainline, MC5, Muddy Waters, Owen Love, Rush (not the Canuck prog trio), Savage Grace, T-Bone Walker, Ted Lucas, The All Night Newsboys, The Attack, The McCoys, The Pleasure Seekers, The Red, White and Blues Band, The Stooges, The Up, Eric Burdon (replaced by Country Joe & the Fish), Früit of the Loom, John Lee Hooker(was a no show).

The Pleasure Seekers were the Quatro family’s band, notionally led by Mike but also featuring Patti who would go on to be in Fanny and Suzi who was England-bound four years later under the wing of Mickie Most.

The MC5 headlined, this being near their Detroit Grande Ballroom stomping ground. This was a fertile period for Michigan bands like Alice, the Stooges, MC5, Amboy Dukes(originally from Chicago but based in Detroit), Frijid Pink, The Frost, Rare Earth, SRC. They all played a lot of festivals and shows around the state 68 - 71.

Many bands were locally popular but never recorded anything, others got contracts but never broke nationwide. SRC are a good example of that. They released 3 albums from 1969 - 71 and pretty much any festival bill you can find in that era, they appeared at, but wider recognition always escaped them. 

This was one of many one-day multi-act shows held in and around Detroit and Michigan in the late 60s Indeed, there's a good claim to say that this was the birthplace of one of what become a major strand of rock music in the 70s - the garage rock/punk sound of the Stooges, which would go on to be so influential and still is today.  

 

 

The First Annual Detroit Rock & Roll Revival, Detroit, Michigan State Fairgrounds 

This was one of Michigan’s biggest festival shows at the time with over 35 bands treading the boards over two days. The rock scene in Detroit orbited around the famous Grande Ballroom, home to the MC and The Stooges as well as the James Gang, Ted’s Amboy Dukes and many more. To ensure the gig got a good crowd, they shut the Ballroom that weekend. 

Produced by Russ Gibb who ran the Ballroom and would be the man behind several other festivals in the area, it was largely regarded as a huge success. Chuck Berry was the national headliner on the Friday but everyone had come to see local boys, the MC5 along with Johnny Winter, who was playing up a storm all summer long. 

This show marked his first appearance in Michigan but he was tearing it up at what seemed like every festival that summer of 1969. It was also significant for it being one of Grand Funk Railroad’s first shows after forming out of a band called Pack. They played on the Saturday afternoon and received $1250 for the pleasure - which isn’t bad money for 45 minutes work! 

After the show Russ Gibb held a private party and jam session at the Ballroom for “the press, participants and 'other beautiful people' of the Detroit Rock and Roll Revival”. 

Gary Grimshaw’s beautiful poster advertising the event was really striking, evolving out of and influenced by the west coast tradition of Kelly & Mouse and Rick Griffin which he'd seen in San Francisco while skipping town to avoid jail time for a bust (which he eventually beat in court) He did a lot of Ballroom posters and worked on underground press publications for many years. He's grown up with a couple of the MC5 guys and was very much an important cog in the Michgian counterculture wheel. 

The complete band line up was a who’s who of late 60s Michigan rock n roll. Brownsville Station, Caste, Chuck Berry, David Peel and The Lower East Side, Dr. John the Night Tripper, Dutch Elm, Grand Funk Railroad, Johnny Winter, Lyman Woodard, MC5, Plain Brown Wrapper, Savage Grace, Sky, SRC, Sun Ra, Teegarden and Van Winkle, The Amboy Dukes, The Frost, The Gold Brothers, The James Gang, The New York Rock and Roll Ensemble, The Rationals, The Red, White and Blues Band, The Stooges, The Third Power, The Up, Train, Wilson Mower, Pursuit, The Bonzo Dog Band.

 

Miami Rock Festival

This stands out in the history of rock and roll and of the counterculture for one reason: it was the last festival of the 60s. There had been 43 festivals in USA in 1969 and as the year drew to an end this was held over 3 days from Sat Dec 27, 1969 - Mon Dec 29, 1969 Homestead-Miami Speedway, Homestead, Florida. The bill boasted some of the performers from Woodstock.

The full bill was B.B. King, Biff Rose, Canned Heat, Cold Blood, Crow, Grateful Dead, Hugh Masekela, Johnny Winter, Motherlode, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Santana, Smith, Sweetwater, The Amboy Dukes, The Band, The Turtles, Tony Joe White, Vanilla Fudge

Photos of the gig show a more sparse crowd than everyone had been expecting and of a stage that looks precariously high. 

Years later, looking back, The Miami Herald reported “It drew thousands of young people determined to have fun and avoid paying admission, if they could. It wasn’t in Miami. It took place at the Miami-Hollywood Speedway, then 15 long miles west of Hollywood, but now a housing development in the middle of Pembroke Pines. Fans were searched by police, lashed by cold winds and encouraged to turn on to God by Billy Graham. Graham said he appreciated the respectful welcome he got, but police made at least 47 arrests and one young man died in a fall from a spotlight tower.”

Other reports comment on the sheer amount of dope being smoked, someone who worked at the festival commented on The Woodstock Whisperer that Bob Hite of Canned Heat had given them all mescaline. Although this was the last stop on the wild ride that had been the 1960s and 1969 especially, it has slipped through the cracks of history somewhat as a half-remembered three day dope haze. 

 

 

Pacific Pop Festival, Stockton, CA 

This was a typical one-day festival put on by the University of the Pacific, whose home was in Stockton in Northern California.

Held at Pacific Memorial Stadium which was a 28,000-seat outdoor multi-purpose stadium, built in 1950 and which put on a few festivals back in the day before closing its doors in 1988. 

It hosted the Stockton Rock Festival later in 1969 headlined by the Byrds, because this show on May 10 had been so successful.

The bill was drawn from San Franciscan bands all of whom were on Fillmore promoter Bill Graham’s talent agency books. 

Santana headlined, supported by Cold Blood, the Sons of Champlin, Elvin Bishop, Sanpaku - a 7-piece jazz-rock band from Sacramento, and Country Weather, a psychedelic band from ‘Frisco who were always around but never got a record deal. 

This was where the rock and roll business as we later knew had its seeds. Those with an eye for the main chance saw as early at late 68/early 69 that if you wanted to make bread more than you wanted to make revolution then this was the way to do it. Not as romantic or politically charged of course, but plenty good rock n roll all the same.

 

 

Gold Rush Festival, Amador, California 

Held at Lake Amador, Amador, California on Oct 04, 1969 it was a very bucolic frolic for 40,000 and it’s roster of bands was very much drawn from the San Francisco hippie community, Amador being northeast of Stockton and southeast of Sacramento out in lovely rolling hill country. 

The bill had a bluesy slant to it: 

Al Wilson, Albert Collins, Bo Diddley, Cold Blood, Country Weather, Daybreak, Ike & Tina Turner, John Fahey, Kaleidoscope, Linn County, Santana, Southwind, Taj Mahal, The Sons of Champlin

A journalist from the Sacramento Bee in 1969 reported that the air was hazy with marijuana smoke that was mixed with the dust kicked up by thousands of sandal-wearing youths.

“40,000 people jammed the banks of Lake Amador to sunbathe, drink wine, smoke marijuana and listen to an all-star roster of musicians at the Gold Rush Rock Music Festival. Since the crowd was peaceful, Amador County sheriff’s deputies chose to ignore the drug use and skinny-dipping.”

If only more officials and cops had adopted this tactic during the festival era, everybody would’ve had a much nicer time. Stoners getting naked on a hot day and going for a swim was never a threat to anyone or anything and it beggars belief that anyone ever thought any different.  

Recollections of the day are fond and warm. James Hackworth was 22 years old when he and his wife and two kids ventured to Lake Amador for the weekend of music and recalls the camaraderie and good time they had.

“I remember looking over a sea of people and everyone was really happy and full of enthusiasm. The music was the catalyst that drew us together. It really was a time of believing in love and peace for humanity.”

Robert Strand promoted. He and his family were the financial backers. Strand was the manager of Country Weather, one of the bands that appeared and a regular on the local circuit. He describes the event as a perfect combination of location, music, stage, PA, and weather.

This was the event Altamont should have been, top notch line up, pretty well organized, and a happy crowd. People were getting tired later in the show when Bo Diddley did his set. Bit by bit people started standing up, a wave swept up the hill and soon the whole place was energized. Sons Of Champlin rocked their set, then Santana took over. Earlier in the day Cold Blood had delivered a terrific performance..

All the bands did. "It was a show to remember, what a 60s rock fest was all about.”

 

Ann Arbor Blues Festival, University Of Michigan 

Though not as widely celebrated as other music festivals of its era, the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival is hailed by many blues purists, acolytes and ardent fans as being just as significant as Woodstock. Held on Fri Aug 01, 1969 - Sun Aug 03, 1969 at the University of Michigan

It was the first North American blues festival, where blues was the main attraction, particularly modern electric blues. Musicians at the festival included Clifton Chenier, Son House, J. B. Hutto, B.B. King, Freddie King, Magic Sam, Sam Lay, Jimmy "Fast Fingers" Dawkins, Otis Rush, Charlie Musselwhite, Roosevelt Sykes, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, Big Mama Thornton, Junior Wells, and Howlin' Wolf. An album containing various performances was released in 2019.

The Ann Arbor Blues Festival was created and organized by a group of University of Michigan students led by Cary Gordon, a native of suburban Detroit, and John Fishel, who grew up in Cleveland and had transferred to Michigan from Tulane University. The festival was sponsored first by the university with help later from the Canterbury House, an Episcopal group which owned a folk club in Ann Arbor.

To educate themselves more about the blues, Fishel and other students took a field trip to Chicago. They met Bob Koester, owner of the Jazz Record Mart and Delmark Records, a blues record label in the basement of his record store. Koester directed them to bars and clubs where they could hear blues musicians, in addition to giving them names, addresses, and phone numbers. Back at school, the blues committee wanted to promote the upcoming festival with a rehearsal concert to introduce students to the blues. The Luther Allison Trio performed at the Michigan Union Ballroom in the spring before the festival was to take place.

This is an important show and is a good illustration of how universities played an important role in the history of music in the USA. So often they were the place where the leading edge of the progressive and hippies movements found a place to play.

This show, along with high profile shows at the Fillmore’s West & East, seems to have played an important part in how the blues broke out of its core black audience and gained mass appeal. Bonnie Raitt has spoken of it as the blues Woodstock which really put gas under the commercial growth of blues music and opened it up to people who had never seen or heard of such artists before. 

It led to a regular Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in the 70s and intermittently ever since. 

 

 

The Big Sur Folk Festival

If you’ve ever been to Big Sur, California, it is a very far-out place up in the woods overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It has long since been a bit of a hippie central and this was certainly the case back in 1969 when the Celebration at Big Sur festival was held over two days on 13th and 14th September, just a month after Woodstock.

If you’ve ever seen the movie 'Celebration At Big Sur' you’ll know it was a small affair but really gives us a flavour of the times.

About 15,000 attended, paying $4 each. There was no gate, presumably because gates are uncool. Unusually though, the gate, despite not existing, was respected and those without tickets listened to the music from outside of the perimeter. Whereas people had tore down fences at many festival in the late 60s and demanded free music, here that wasn’t the case. 

For some reason all the band played on the far side of a swimming pool with the ocean behind them. It looks quite chilly actually - as it can be up there. The music was notable especially for Joni doing an as yet unrecorded version of Woodstock, and CSNY being filmed with Neil Young for the first time.  It is their music which dominates the soundtrack as they play superb versions of 'Down By The River', '4 + 20', 'Sea Of Madness' and other classics. 

 

Joan Baez is there too, breaking wine glasses with her trademark warble. The Incredible String Band played too; a long way from Edinburgh for Mike Heron. Delaney & Bonnie were there too. Judy Collins and Mama Cass were also on hand.

The funniest part of the movie is a contretemps between Stephen Stills and a heckler which ends in a brief physical confrontation. For all it’s a hippie gig, it looks like every Friday night barroom brawl, albeit one by a swimming pool, halfway up a mountain, in front of the ocean.

There is the obligatory nude freaking out by men with beards, footage of roads being jammed up with traffic and yes, John Sebastian turns up stoned out of his gourd. 

You can watch most of the movie in various sections on YouTube and it’s a lovely thing. In comparison to today’s well-organised, policing, sponsored, marketed and merchandised festivals, it looks shambolic and all the better for that.

 

 

Saugatuck Pop Festival. Potawatomi Beach, Saugatuck, Michigan 

This was the second Saugatuck Pop Festival and was held on July 4-5, 1969 in the same spot as the first the previous year, next to Potawatomi Beach, but because the ‘69 Festival was projected to be two or three times larger, the adjacent property owned by Pauline Nichols, was secured with last years Manifold property to accommodate the larger festival.

It was an all-star lineup of Michigan bands, most of whom had only been in existence for 18 - 24 months at most. Big Mama Thornton (didn’t show), Brownsville Station, Früt of the Loom, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Procol Harum, Rotary Connection, Savage Grace, SRC, The Amboy Dukes, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, The Frost, The Red, White and Blues Band, The Stooges, Bob Seger System.

Alice Cooper also played but wasn’t on the original schedule. Later, Alice remembered this gig. “We were too intense for L.A., so we said, the first place we play where we get a standing ovation, we're going to stay there. We played the Saugatuck Pop Festival with Iggy and the MC5, and I said, 'This is our audience right here!' Where L.A. didn't get it, Detroit totally got it." Procol Harum headlined the first day of music.

Arthur Brown closed the show and set his head on fire as per usual, climbing all over the scaffolding as he did so. His drummer was, of course, Carl Palmer who would be back touring the USA with ELP in the near future. A lot had gone to see Rotary Connection. They were an interesting psychedelic soul band who had backed Muddy Waters on his seminal Electric Mud album as well as The Howlin’ Wolf album of 1969 and featured Minnie ‘Loving You’ Riperton. By this time they’d had three charting albums, two of which had made the top 40 and they apparently got lots of airplay in and around Michigan. They eventually split up in 1971 but produced some really far-out stuff in their time.

The wonderful posters were designed by famous Michigan’s primo psychedelic graphics dude, Carl Lundgren. These were the days when Saugatuck was nationally known for the number of people it drew in the summer as a touristy sort of place. So adding in 15,000 of hairy rocker and hippies did make the place somewhat overcrowded.

Thousands camped in the woods and dunes around Goshorn Lake and Lake Michigan at the site of the Pop Festival. Police reported that over 1,000 cars were parked along Blue Star Highway leading to the festival. The entire town of Saugatuck was closed with State Police manning roadblocks at both Highway 31 entrances.

Cars were parked, and in many cases double-parked, on both sides of every street. The only cars allowed to move were police, fire and ambulance vehicles. Cars were parked from Oval Beach all the way into Saugatuck in every possible space. The town of Saugatuck was completely closed. Bunch o' freaks! as Arlo Guthrie might’ve put it.

After the Festival an injunction was filed by the Saugatuck township, against the owners of the properties; the Nichols and the Manifolds, stating that the festival violated land use laws and that the kids, “engaged in numerous objectionable, illegal and immoral acts.”

 

 

Mid Winter Pop Festival. Blythe, California 

There is a genuine mystery about this festival. It’s another for the ‘it never happened’ file and in that, no so unusual. As we know, The Man was always trying to fend off the freaks with legislation, sometimes successfully, mostly not. But the Mid Winter Pop Festival doesn’t fall into that category. 

Blythe is a wee town on the border between California and Arizona, right out in the desert. Basically head east from Palm Desert on the 10 and you end up there. I love that road, it’s so elemental and wild out there. You feel so tiny and transient compared to all that old nature.

And, as any snowbird who vacations in Palm Springs knows, the desert is lovely and warm in the winter and although it can be cold at night, it’d be perfect festival weather for late December. 

With a strong bill it was bound to attract interest. 

Brooklyn Bridge, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Iron Butterfly, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Johnny Winter, Neil Diamond, Vanilla Fudge, Young Rascals

However, that isn’t enough bands for a three day fest, nowhere near enough. And that is where the mystery starts. The poster doesn’t even say where the gig was to be, just broadly referring to ‘Blythe vicinity.’ However, no applications for a festival were made in the area and no preparations were being made. No other words, no-one looking like Chip Monck with an army of longhairs armed with wood and nail guns had turned up anywhere near Blythe to put up a stage even a week or two before.

The San Bernardino Sun newspaper reported Riverside County Administrative Officer Robert T. Anderson said "The Blythe vicinity could mean a location in Riverside County, Imperial County to the South or in Arizona across the Colorado River," But no public agency in either Riverside or Imperial counties has authorized any pop festival in either county, he added. 

So what was going on? One of the ticket agencies listed in an advertisement in an underground newspaper said it stopped selling tickets after it was notified the festival was moved from a 100,000-acre Blythe ranch to an as yet undisclosed location. The ad, signed by Mid-Winter Pops Festival, Inc, New Orleans, promised, "Watch next week’s ad for location 'funkiest spot in America.”

But at that point, the trail goes cold. There was no further announcement and no Blythe festival or inheritor of that title seems to have happened. Now whether it was a scam all along, or a good idea that fell through, who really knows? However, the lack of bands on the bill, whether they were ever actually booked or not, I think is the clue. Other fests that had to be called off had a massive roster in place because you need about 30 bands for a 3-day show, Blythe had just nine. 

Advertising bands that were not confirmed bookings was a common scam, we saw it at the Northern California Folk Festival when Led Zeppelin were said to be on their way but hadn’t been signed up. Sometimes this was wilful deceit, more often it was a failure of procedure and logistics. 

But it wouldn’t be a surprise if someone advertised a festival, took money for tickets and then simply disappeared. It was easy to do in those analogue days. 

So Blythe never saw an influx of hippies and rockers and the desert kept on being quiet, wild and magnificent.

 

 

Cleveland Pop Festival 

Three bands played Tim Buckley headlined, supported by Iron Butterfly, Blood Sweat And Tears. It was held indoors at the 3,000 capacity Cleveland Public Hall on April 18, 1969. Tickets $5.50 in advance $6.50 on the door.

Now, the fact that it was christened a ‘festival’ shows, I think, how the word was becoming even in 1969 as a kind of dog whistle for rock fans, freaks and hippies. This would normally have just been ‘a concert’ but calling it a ‘pop festival’ somehow invested a more hip credibility. 

It was put on by local radio station WIXY 1260 a small AM radio station that was for a brief period really important in the emerging Cleveland music scene. Staffed by on-air personalities and with savvy programming and groundbreaking promotions it would become synonymous with 1960s pop culture. A Midwest juggernaut, WIXY aired everything from surf and Motown to country and the British Invasion. Crossing cultural and generational lines in one of the hottest radio markets in the country, it regularly took in more than fifty percent of the Greater Cleveland audience!

They promoted the show along with Belkin Productions who were to become a Cleveland institution. Jules and Mike Belkin became synonymous with Cleveland and rock 'n' roll shows.

Belkin Productions, their concert promotion company, booked it's first show on Feb. 5, 1966, at Cleveland's Music Hall, featuring The Four Freshman and The New Christy Minstrels. Since then, just about every significant concert in Cleveland,  Northeast Ohio and much of the Midwest has been a Belkin Production. In the 70s they put on the famous World Series of Rock concerts held at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. 

Mike Belkin was also band manager for the James Gang and the Michael Stanley Band.

History seems not to have recorded any details of this gig. Buckley headlining over the heavy Iron Butterfly and the jazz-rock parp of BS&T seems an odd mix but then, these were eclectic days of open minds and hearts. And also of lovely posters.

 

 

Sky River Rock Festival II, Tenino, Washington 

The second Sky RiverFestival was held on from Sat Aug 30, 1969 - Mon Sep 01, 1969 at Rainier Hereford Ranch, Tenino, Washington.

The promoters said Sky River II was meant to “combat racism, hatred, violence, and poverty”. For most of the month preceding the festival, it looked as if the event would never take place. Under intense pressure from a local leader of the John Birch Society, police, conservatives, and the Catholic Archdiocese, virtually every county in the area passed laws prohibiting or severely restricting rock festivals. Specifically, the suits called out the impact of noise on cows. The irony of this is that the first Sky River festival in 1968 was a really successful, peaceful affair. Even so, the good folk of the area still feared sex, drugs and rock n roll and thought there would be naked freaks getting their Communist groove on in their back garden and they did not want to see anybody doing that.

A site in Enumclaw, 30 miles southeast of Seattle in King County, was offered and then withdrawn, and the producer John Chambless scrambled to find an alternative.

He ended up with a strange locale: the Rainier Hereford Ranch, a stretch of dry grassland dimpled with miniature hillocks near Tenino, south of Olympia. This’ll do for rock n roll, he thought and he was right. 

But the Tenino Chamber of Commerce and several adjacent property owners obtained an injunction blocking a Thurston County permit to host the festival. No freaks allowed was the message. An estimated 25,000 people attended over three days, but the festival still lost money, but then, for the Sky River promoters, making money was never their first inspiration. Pamela Davis, who went to the festival remembers going back to the ranch after the festival with a few friends to help clean up. They built picnic tables and a fire pit, then invited the local law enforcement and their families out for a barbecue to thank them for handling the crowd so well. 

 

Performing at the festival are Anonymous Artists of America, Black Snake, Blue Bird, Cleanliness & Godliness Skiffle Band, Collectors, Congress of Wonders, James Cotton, Country Weather, Country Joe and the Fish, Crome Syrcus, Crow, Dovetail, Floating Bridge, Flying Burrito Brothers, Frumious Bandersnatch, Grapefruit, Guitar Shorty, Buddy Guy, Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, Dr. Humbead's New Tranquility String Band, Juggernaut, Kaleidoscope, Los Flamencos de Santa Lucia, Fred McDowell, Steve Miller, New Lost City Ramblers, Pacific Gas & Electric, Peter, Terry Reid, Mike Russo, Sons of Champlin, Mark Spoelstra, Alice Stuart, Yellowstone, Youngbloods, and Elyse Weinberg.

 

 

Big Rock Pow-Wow, West Hollywood, Florida

Big Rock Pow-Wow '69 took place on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, May 23, 24, and 25, 1969, at the Hollywood Seminole Indian Reservation in West Hollywood, Florida.

Other artists who performed at the festival included Grateful Dead, Johnny Winter, Sweetwater, Joe South, Aum, NRBQ, Rhinoceros, Muddy Waters, and the Youngbloods.

A band called Sun Country played as NRBQ. They were started by brothers Lee & Stephen Tiger, sons of Buffalo Tiger, a chief of the Floridian Miccosukee Tribe. As teens they gigged in Miami garage bands including the Renegades and a brief incarnation of NRBQ which was how they were listed at this festival.The brothers formed Sun Country in 1968. They toured the West Coast in 1969, playing venues including the famed Whisky-a-Go-Go and opening for acts including Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention. They were signed to Bernard Stollman's ESP label, Sun Country and issued its self-titled record in 1969. It flopped and they barely made it into the 70s. NRBQ went on to many different incarnations.

At the end of the Saturday night concert, Timothy Leary spoke from the stage. The Dead's set from this festival was released as Road Trips Vol. 4 No.1 and is well-documented all over the internet. Their set was largely that which was released that year on Live/Dead

While being often listed as a major Florida rock festival, The Dead aside, there is little documentation of the event which rather suggests it all went off without many of the problems that dogged so many late 60s festivals.

 

 

Thunderbird Peace Festival, British Columbia, Canada 

This festival is one that belongs in the ‘It never happened’ file. However, unlike many that languish there, this one had real scale and ambition. Booked to happen on Sat Sep 06, 1969 - Sun Sep 07, 1969 on the Capilano Indian Reserve, North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, the Thunderbird Peace Festival was set to be a really high profile affair. If it had happened it would have had a genuine claim to have been Canada’s Woodstock. 

The lineup for the show was Class A rock and psychedelic bands. Jimi Hendrix, Steppenwolf, The Steve Miller Blues Band, Country Joe & the Fish, The Youngbloods, James Cotton Blues Band, Buddy Miles Express, Collectors, Pacific Gas & Electric, Southwind, Fields, The Band, John Mayall, Taj Mahal, Sly & the Family Stone, Spirit, Albert Collins, Sweetwater, and Crow. 

To get Jimi on board was always a real status symbol for any festival and a guarantee of ticket sales. 

Artist Bob Masse, who was already famous for his psychedelic posters was contracted to draw the poster, so you knew Libra Promotions were serious about putting this gig on. 

With a date 3 weeks after Woodstock, all seemed set fair for them to catch the winds of change and be part of counterculture legend.

However, while all the bands, unlike in some other scamola situations, had certainly been booked and had agreed to play, when it came time to put down deposits to secure the bands and also to build the infrastructure, there just wasn’t enough money. Whether this was because of poor ticket sales - which seems unlikely - or whether the $5 advance fee was just too low to pay the fees of some of the biggest bands of the day - isn’t clear. JImi had got $18,000 for playing Woodstock, The Band $7500, Sly & The Family Stone $7,000 and Country Joe & The Fish $2500. So there’s over $35,000 for a start - they needed to shift 7,000 tickets just to cover those fees. 

If you didn’t have wealthy backers, as was the case at Woodstock, then you probably needed to sell at least 30,000 tickets upfront just to give you the working capital to book and pay everyone. A lot of bands would want their money upfront and you needed cash to pay all the labour hired to build stages and rent a PA. 

Maybe the location just couldn’t pull the numbers needed but anyway, the event was cancelled. A big case of what could’ve been. 

 

Seattle Pop Festival, Woodenville, Washington 

The Seattle Pop Festival was held 25-27 July at Gold Creek Park, Woodenville, Washington. It was $6 for one day, $15 for all three. 

70,000 attended and it was promoted by Boyd Grafmyre, who had previously worked with the New American Community at the successful and highly groovy not-for-profit Sky River Festival in '68, also in Washington.

This was one of the first not to use any regular or off-duty Police officers as security. He brought in 150 youth volunteers from Seattle's Head Start programme. Well at least he didn't get the Hells Angels in! They were ticket collectors, maintenance and security.

The whole weekend ran so smoothly that Grafmyre grossed over $300,000 in return for $200,000 spent. This hugely profitable success proved that if you did it right, festivals could make you a lot of money and it was something well noted by other promoters. It would lead to the massive growth in the rock industry more broadly. 

Chick Dawsey, who owned Gold Greek, was pleasantly surprised by the nature of the fans who turned up.

"I disagree with their movement 100 per cent," he said. "But some of us adults better get the hell closer to them. They respond very much to kindness, we older people better learn this. If they need a drink of water we, the establishment, should go out and offer it."

Of the bands that played, naturally Zep were brilliant as the soundboard bootleg that has been available for decades proves. Santana, who were to be a big hit at Woodstock the following month, were also widely acclaimed.

While there were problems with sanitary issues and water supplies, this was still a well-run, peaceful, very cool festival. Not bad for $15 certainly

Bands playing included Chuck Berry, Black Snake, Tim Buckley, The Byrds, Chicago Transit Authority, Albert Collins, Crome Syrcus, Bo Diddley, The Doors, Floating Bridge, The Flock, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Guess Who, It's A Beautiful Day, Led Zeppelin, Charles Lloyd, Lonnie Mack, Lee Michaels, Murray Roman, Santana, Spirit, Ten Years After, Ike & Tina Turner, Vanilla Fudge and the Youngbloods. 

 

 

Palm Beach Music And Art Festival, Florida

The event was both the first and the last held in Palm Beach. It drew 40,000 people to the 149-acre Palm Beach International Speedway.

As was typical; local officials worried about health, sanitation and traffic, who were mortified by images of drugs and sex they'd seen three months earlier at Woodstock.

Local opposition was immediate from Florida's Republican governor, Claude Kirk, and rumour had it that President Nixon's cronies were at work behind the scenes doing whatever they could to disrupt it. They didn't want no hippies in their county doin' that stuff that they do, so, again, as per usual, they denied a permit to promoter David Rupp, who'd bought the track at foreclosure.

As was also often the case - the hippie promoter was smarter than The Man. He got around the lack of permit somehow but gained a new obstacle: Sheriff William Heidtman, who I imagine looked like one of the prison warders in Cool Hand Luke.

The sheriff set up surveillance cameras and positioned 150 deputies around the clock at nearby Pratt & Whitney to keep an eye on all the goddamn freaks arriving. He vowed to make life miserable for the free-loving, pot-smoking, anti-establishment youngsters who were coming to the Palm Beach Pop Festival. He threatened to herd alligators toward the crowd, gathered on a grassy field at the Palm Beach International Raceway. And he promised to dig out fire ant colonies and relocate them at the venue. 

Wow, he sounds like a bundle of laughs. Getting 'gators to eat hippies doesn't sound legal to me. 

The opposition from the authorities were overcome but there was no getting over the weather. Chilling rain fell and temperatures dropped into the 40s and in a repeat of so many late 60s festival disasters, vendors ran short of food and many of the 300 portable toilets were dismantled for firewood, hopefully not while they were being used.

Musically, the Palm Beach Pop Festival boasted a host of A-listers. The Rolling Stones performed there the day after a Madison Square Garden gig immortalized on the group's live album Get Yer Ya Yas Out. Aside from the notorious Altamont gig a month later, it was the Stones' only U.S. festival appearance that year.

Other bands included the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Spirit, the Byrds, Grand Funk Railroad, Iron Butterfly, Country Joe & the Fish, Chicago Transit Authority, the Chambers Brothers, Vanilla Fudge, King Crimson, Sly & the Family Stone, and the Moody Blues. It was an absolutely brilliant line-up of bands.

Area leaders feared the hordes of hippies and itinerant outsiders would create a catastrophe and poison the minds of the local youth, not realising that the local youth were already hip to the scene. Ironically, it took an underground people's minister from Los Angeles named the Rev. Arthur Blessitt, who made the trek at the behest of the promoter, to assuage the evangelicals who were freaking out about these Godless kids.

Photographer Ken Davidoff says It had rained for about a week, leaving it very swampy on the edge of the Everglades. On the first day, late in the afternoon, just as Iron Butterfly hit the stage with 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,' a strong cold front moved in, sending torrents of rain from the sky. The temperatures plummeted down to near freezing. The local newspaper called it 'Woodstock South.'

Funny how Woodstock was, even just a few months later, the brand that everyone used as a shorthand description for a festival.

Joplin slagged off Heidtman and Gov. Claude Kirk on stage and sang while drinking from a bottle of Southern Comfort. 

The Rolling Stones, paid $100,000, went on at 4am on Monday and played a short set for the few hardy souls still there.

Some weird stats were released to local newspapers after the event. There were 130 drug overdoses, 14 eye injuries, 42 intestinal disorders, 1,700 headaches and minor cuts, 1,000 reported conversions to Christianity, 130 drug arrests, and one death, of a poor teenager struck by a truck. Promoter Rupp lost $300,000 to $500,000, "all the cash I had and all that I'd borrowed."

In 1999, Heidtman who would die at 91 in 2007 dismissed as myths reports he planted alligators in canals and red ants in the fields, saying Florida always supplies plenty. But he did unapologetically say, "If I had it to do over again, I'd try to stop it." 

 

1st International Pop Event, Antwerp, Belgium 

Held on Sat Jun 21, 1969 at  Sporthal Arena, Antwerp in Belgium, while marketed as an international pop event, it was really a pretty much a Belgium-British affair featuring some of the best British blues and jazz boom bands, along with a few Belgium bands and Paul Revere from USA. 

Chicken Shack, Colosseum, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, Davy Jr. and Guess Who, Fleetwood Mac, Freedom, J. J. Band, Joe Hicks, Paul Revere and The Raiders, Procol Harum, Roland and The Blues Workshop, The Nice, The Pebbles, The Tremeloes, Tomahawk Blues Band, Wallace Collection, Yes

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich couldn't play because their van broke down in Ostend. 

Chicken Shack, The Tremeloes and Procol Harum didn't play. The rather brilliant Colosseum was added to the line-up.

6,000 packed into the hall with 500 turned away. The Nice, Yes and Colosseum were widely reported as the biggest hits of the day. Keith Emerson got busy sticking knives into his Hammond and generally mistreating it to the shock of those who hadn't seen them play before.

The show over-ran by two hours, ending at half past midnight instead of 10.30pm meaning some people missed the last couple of hours as they had to get the train back to France - many had crossed the border for the gig - and thus missed headliners Fleetwood Mac.  

These early European shows in the late 60s were an important launchpad for many British bands and allowed them to expand into their nearest markets.