DJTees Blog — Rock Festivals

If you wanted a venue for a rock show, where better than a zoo in Dudley, in the west midlands? This was a fundraiser for the World Wildlife Fund. Edgar Broughton Band, Faces, Jeff Dexter, Quintessence, Sam Apple Pie, and T. Rex played. The compere was Jeff Dexter who had popularised The Twist in the early 60s and was the resident DJ at the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden and compered the first Glastonbury.T.Rex were still a duo, hippy acoustic outfit. Sam Apple Pie had a big live following as a blues-rock band which had originally featured Malcolm Morely,...

Wild Wednesday Wed Jun 21, 1972 Sherwood Forest, Davison, Michigan Wild Wednesday jams happened for years, from 1969 - 1974. By 1972 they were indeed pretty wild and were an excuse for local Michigan bands to strut their stuff. This year the bands were Bob Seger, Dennis Coffey, Frijid Pink, Johnny and the Hurricanes, Julia, King Biscuit Boy,SRC, Teegarden and Van Winkle, The Früt, The Rumour, Whiz Kids, Wylie, Mike Quatro Jam Band.The first of those, Bob Seger, was just starting to break in Michigan, though nationwide success was still some years away and was persuaded to play ‘Turn The Page’...

This one day event’s line-up was Boz Scaggs, Cold Blood, Elvin Bishop, Joy of Cooking, Stoneground, The Doobie Brothers, The Chambers Brothers.It was held at the T-Car Speedway which opened in 1964 and closed in 2005. Also known as Tahoe-Carson Speedway, Champion Motor Speedway and Silver State Raceway.Carson City is quite high above sea-level and this show came after a period of drought, so the audience could count themselves unlucky. The show was supposed to start at 12 noon and run until midnight, but with heavy rain mid-day the acts didn't get started until 4 pm.The Chambers Brothers are reported...

Progressive Festival D'Aix En Provence, Sat Aug 01, 1970 - Mon Aug 03, 1970, Saint-Pons, Aix-en-Provence, France. The festival, which took place on the Saint-Pons estate, located ten kilometres west of Aix-en-Provence on the banks of the Arc, brought together approximately 40,000 young people whose average age was around twenty. This French-style "Woodstock", held despite the ban issued by the Bouches-du-Rhône préfecture, had raised many concerns and its initiator, General Clément, himself secretary general of the International Music Festival. He was strongly criticised, starting with the president of the Festival, the CEO of the Casino, who was to castigate "the...

Schaefer Music Festival Thu Jun 15, 1972 - Sat Sep 02, 1972, Wollman Rink, 63 Center Drive, New York City New York 10065The Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park was a recurring music festival held in the summer between 1967 and 1976 at Wollman Rink in New York City's Central Park. It featured a number of notable performances. The sponsorship was taken over by Dr.Pepper in 1977 and the name changed to the Dr.Pepper Central Park Music Festival until the location of the festival was moved to Pier 84 in 1981 and the Wollman Skating Rink ceased being used as...

New York Rock Festival - Fri Aug 02, 1968 - Fri Aug 30, 1968Singer Bowl, Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens, New YorkOrganised by Shelly Finkel and Gary Kurfirst. The Singer Bowl was a multipurpose stadium built for the 1964 New York World's Fair and demolished in 2016. Originally named for the Singer Sewing Company. This was the bill, Big Brother and The Holding Company, Soft Machine, The Chambers Brothers, The Doors, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Rascals, The Vagrants, The Who. A pretty major line-up. 18,000 turned up.The kickoff show included the likes of The Doors and The Who, the...

The Crater was the location of several concerts in the 1960s and 1970s. First held on New Year's Day 1969, and often known as Hawaiian Woodstock, Diamond Head Crater Festivals, sometimes called Sunshine Festivals, were all-day music celebrations attracting up to 75,000 attendees for performances by various local acts and the Grateful Dead, Santana, America, Styx, Journey, War, and Tower of Power.Men and women often walked around naked, some smoking marijuana at noon.And given Hawaii's usual tolerance, only a handful were arrested. What was odd, however, was that the Diamond Head Crater Festivals went on for so many years before...

There were two festivals at the racecourse in 1970. This was the first, less famous one. The festival has largely been forgotten and when remembered at all, has usually been confused with the National Jazz and Blues festival that was held in August the same year. As usual with British festivals, this was less counterculture revolution than hairy weekend pish-up. Reports about headliners Ginger Baker’s Airforce performance varied. Some feeling that they were on top form, others that it was a bunch of average musicians with a mad beat pounder who wouldn’t stop and had to be literally carried away.The...

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...

Held on Sat Aug 28, 1971 - Sun Aug 29, 1971 this was an important European festival, not so much because it pulled a lot of big name bands to play to the 10,000 people who attended each day, the biggest name was probably The Grease Band who had backed Joe Cocker at Woodstock and The Strawbs who had an album on the UK charts at the time, but more because it was to establish Roskilde as an important festival venue. Ever since, the Roskilde Festival has put on a festival in late June/early July and pulled some huge headlining...

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...

What was soon known as a rock festival, didn’t really exist until 1967. There were plenty of jazz and folk gatherings but rock n roll freak-outs really only started happening in early 1967 starting in San Francisco with the Human Be-In and also the Mantra-Rock Dance which was what was known as ‘a counterculture music event’ held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public. It was also...

In 1974, the first California Jam attracted a quarter of a million people and was broadcast on network TV. You still see a lot of footage from that gig - especially of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple. It was a huge success and made everyone serious money. So it was inevitable a second would be held, but surprising that it took four years to happen. By now, the one-day festival was firmly entrenched as the preferred mode for making a festival happen. The counterculture was, by 1978, a distant memory; a tie-dye t-shirt in the wardrobe of life.  Less well-known...

The Mississippi River Festival was a summer outdoor concert series held from 1969-1980 on the campus of Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Illinois. The Festival was notable due to its central midwest location, the natural ambience of its outdoor venue and some of the biggest bands of the day. It wasn’t a festival in the traditional sense, more a headliner and maybe a support act. It began as a partnership promoting regional cooperation in the performing arts. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville invited the St. Louis Symphony to establish residence on campus and to offer a summer season of concerts. To...

The Aachen Open Air Pop Festival was a rock festival held at Hauptstadion in Aachen, West Germany, on 10–12 July 1970. The Hauptstadion is located in the Sport Park Soers in Aachen. It was more usually used for equestrian and show jumping and had a capacity of 40,000. This was an early German rock festival and like many of the era, it drew heavily on the emerging British progressive bands for its line-up of performers. The "Soersfestival", as it is commonly called, was the initiative of three local students: Golo Goldschmitt, Walter Reiff, and Karl-August Hohmann. The gig faced the...