DJTees Blog — Johnny's History Of Rock

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...

You'd have thought, after losing upwards of $5million on the previous year's US Festival, Steve Wosniak would have had enough being a festival promoter, but far from it. Indeed, his thirst to lose even more money was apparently unquenchable. Thus Us Festival 83 was born. It was to be a similar format to the previous one, with a day dedicated to different music genres across each of the 3 days. Held again in San Bernardino, day one was new wave, day two heavy metal and the third day rock. A fourth day of country was held a week later. The...

When they played the Bath Festival of Blues in 1969 , about 12,000 saw Led Zeppelin. By the 1970, the foursome had seen their UK popularity surge, and over 150,000 came to Shepton Mallet on the 27th and 28th of June 1970 for the Bath Festival Of Blues And Progressive Music. And a hell of a lot of that number were there for Led Zep. Bath 1970. Lots of hairy people in a field.  Bath 1970 featured a really terrific line-up of US West coast bands and British music fans jumped at the chance to see them. Sadly, there is...

Held 25-27 July at Gold Creek Park, Woodenville, Washington. It was $6 for one day, $15 for all three. 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.  That's a hot line-up for sure. 70,000 attended across the 3 days and it was promoted by Boyd Grafmyre, who had...

This was, by any standards, a massive festival. For a while it held the world record for the 'largest audience at a pop festival', though who at the Guiness Book Of Records decided that the Allman Brothers, The Band and the Grateful Dead were pop music had clearly had never heard them. 600,000 people turned up at the racetrack in New York to see just three bands play on one day. That was 1 in every 350 Americans at the time! This 'Summer Jam' was not a big cultural event the way Woodstock, Monterey, Sky River or other earlier fests...

The Rolling Stones were booked to play at Knebworth and entered right into the spirit of the 'Knebworth Fair' vibe. Earlier in the summer of 1976, they hired two brave souls to dress up in Harlequin outfits - the symbol of the event - and run onto centre court at Wimbledon on finals day with a banner 'Stones At Knebworth'. Even better, they got two topless girls to do the same at a televised Sussex cricket match. That must have caused some choking on pink gins. 'I say, old boy, are those breasts?' 'I think so, Major. Long time since...

This new quartet of businessmen - Lang, Kornfeld, Roseman and Roberts - were worried. They were worried that they might not get enough people to their festival. Crazy, huh? They genuinely hoped to get a mere 50,000 there and were concerned that might not be be possible because there had been very few big festivals in 1968. No-one was sure in early 69 that the demand was still there for such a thing. So in early 69, they started to advertise it, even though they didn't even have a venue tied down or any bands booked. Ads were placed on...

If you've seen the Woodstock movie, you'll have seen Michael Lang, one of the guys who helped put Woodstock on. A forever hipster riding a horse or a motorbike, with wild hair and one of those beatific smiles that suggests he's permanently stoned. In 1970 he seemed like a new type of business dude who was interested in art more than bread. A man who spoke the language of the alternative community. A man who knew a good vibe from a bad vibe. And, in some ways, that's exactly what he was and continues to be. And we should celebrate...

As volunteers started cleaning up the site, the media swung into gear, quickly painting it as a 'nightmare' in the New York Times. They called the fans 'lemmings' and asked what sort of culture could create such a colossal mess? But the trouble with taking that angle was this: it didn't sell. People felt good about Woodstock, not bad. Monticello's police chief praised the kids as most courteous, considerate and well behaved. The day after festival, the Times softened its stance and praised the communal spirit. Almost overnight, Woodstock became more than just another festival that came and went. It...

As the rain came down and turned the whole site into a quagmire, the dirt that had covered the main electricity cables was washed away, leaving them exposed. Gradually the insulation on those cables got worn away by the ceaseless trudging of the masses. So now there were thousands of wet people set to be fried. Errr...no pressure man, but we need to make that not happen. The dude who was the chief electrician and thus responsible for the whole site not turning into an electric fire got hold of Joel Rosenman and told him that they'd have mass electrocution on their...

The Woodstock festival was due to start on the Friday, but by Thursday of that week, traffic was in gridlock. On the quiet, Lang et al had begun to expect 200,000 to attend because they knew that big fests in 69 were pulling those kinda numbers. Besides, all roads were jammed from midweek onwards, so that was a good indication that a lot of people were heading towards to the festival. But even so, spirits where high. On the Thursday it was already dawning on those stuck in traffic on the New York thru'way that this was clearly A Very...

This was one of those times in rock history where the sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll cliche was really true. From '67 onwards, every time a festival was proposed anywhere in the world, the straight folk panicked, fearing that a bunch of long haired freaks would arrive, get stoned, get naked, start humping in their gardens and create some form of mayhem. Mostly they never did. But at the weirdly named, Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival 1972, that actually all happened, and then some. Maybe by calling it a 'soda pop festival' the promoters aimed to make it...

The first Knebworth festival in 1974 was the UK’s initial major excursion into the very big one-day festival idea that had become so popular in the USA. Up to this point, even the big Isle Of Wight and Bath festivals had been at least as much counterculture gatherings as music festivals, often marked by some flavour of anarchy and shambolic organisation, all of which was part of the charm, of course. The Reading Festival was an annual event but was spread over three days. But by 1974 things were quickly becoming more corporate and the business had worked out how...