DJTees Blog — Rock Festivals

The idea, so commonplace now, of putting on gigs to raise money for local causes really got going in the late 60s. This one held in San Francisco at California Hall on Polk Street (long a gathering place for people who didn’t fit the mainstream) was a benefit for Haight-Ashbury Karmic Ball Fund and the Church of ONE. Far out man. Who doesn’t love a Karmic Ball? The Haight-Ashbury Karmic Bail Fund provided financial bail assistance primarily for those arrested under the marijuana and LSD possession laws. How cool. They’d send someone with a fistful of green to spring you...

This was a week-long festival that took place in March 1970 at the Roundhouse in London which was a regular gig for counterculture bands, and as the 70s went on, would be host to thousands of gigs by pretty much every touring band that ever trod the boards. It was billed as “Seven Nights of Celebration” and as you can see, it was a wild affair! People stood around and smoked and everything. It was a collaboration between regular performers at what were called the Sunday Implosion gigs and The Living Theatre, a radical experimental theatre company, indeed the oldest radical...

For some reason, the early 70s saw festivals in the UK played out on bleak hillsides and rain-lashed moorlands. It was as if the upstanding straight folk had banished the patchouli-drenched hoards to the most punishing extremes of society, as some sort of penance merely for liking the Groundhogs. The Buxton Festivals of 1973 and 1974 have gone down in British rock history as legendary in this respect. People like this turned up and had themselves a real good time, despite the environment resembling a post-nuclear apocalypse. The bill was Canned Heat, Chuck Berry, Nazareth, Edgar Broughton Band, The Groundhogs,...

Abilene lies 180 miles west of Dallas out on the I20, out in the hot heart of the Lone Star State. It was where Mason ‘Classical Gas’ Williams was born and on Sunday May 2nd, 1971 it held its first rock festival. Well, I say festival but in reality it was a one-day outdoor gig. The line-up was a handful of local rock bands plus CSNY were due to play as headliners.  Photos show that this was no more than a small wooden platform erected as a stage and placed in a field. To say the least, they kept things...

Whilst almost totally unknown, this is an important UK show in the history of rock because this was pretty much the first one-day rock fest in this country. And what a stellar line-up it was too.  Cream, Geno Washington, Pink Floyd, Sounds Force Five, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Move, Zoot Money Held on bank holiday Monday May 29, 1967 at the Tulip Bulb Auction Hall, Spalding, Lincolnshire which is basically a massive metal shed. Towards the end of 1966, Grantham promoter, former footballer Brian Thompson, set about booking Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band and The Move. Their...

This is a mysterious festival. Due to be held Sat Jun 10 - Sun Jun 11, 1967, did it actually take place? No-one is quite sure. The only evidence that it was scheduled to happen is the lovely poster made for the event by Joe Gomez. There are no reports of it happening and no reports of it being cancelled.  This was at the time Ali was becoming a counter culture hero for resisting the draft as a conscientious objector. It was due to be held at Hunters Point in SF at a time when most such benefit gigs were held...

The Monterey International Pop Music Festival was a three-day concert event held June 16 to June 18, 1967 at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. Crowd estimates for the festival ranged from 50,000-90,000 people, who congregated in and around the festival grounds. The fairgrounds' performance arena, where the music took place, normally had a capacity of 7,000, but it was estimated that 8,500 jammed into it for Saturday night's show. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction...

1985. Deep Purple are back - and so is rock at Knebworth. 1980 had seen Santana and the Beach Boys play at the Hertfordshire pile, then came two years of jazz / blues - including Ella, BB and Dizzy - before a couple of years of the Christian Greenbelt Festival including, erm, Cliff Richard. Fortunately, in 1985, normal service was resumed. Paul Loasby, who had promoted the Donington Monsters Of Rock in 1980 (Rainbow, Priest, Scorpions) was among the organisers of the 1985 event. In some ways, it was more of a Deep Purple gig than a festival as such:...

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. But really, it was all far less prosaic than that. 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, man, something very bad happened at Altamont. Everyone knows, or thinks they know, about the death...

This was the very first Knebworth - a one day festival on the grounds of a stately home. From 1974 to 1980 were its glory days, each show was always a stellar line-up and 1974 was no exception.   However, this was still 1974 and that meant, in UK especially, what we might call 'facilities' were basic. The toilets were, in fact, a massive long stinking trench over which scaffolding had been built and planks with holes in put across the top. Possibly apocryphal tales of people falling into the trench abounded every year at Knebwoth. Having seen the trench in...

Held on Sat Jul 24, 1971 at Tupholme Manor Park, about 15 miles east of Lincoln, UK, this was a kind of all-star one-day Woodstock of folk music.  The full bill for the day was an extraordinary UK-USA gathering of talent headlined by James Taylor.  Also on the bill: Tom Paxton, Buffy Sainte-Marie, The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Sandy Denny, Steeleye Span, Ralph McTell, Dave Swarbrick & Martin Carthy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Dion, Tim Hardin, The Byrds. The Byrds, then in their post Gram, and very interesting ‘Untitled’ and ‘Byrdmaniax’ phase,  played an electric set but everyone else...

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,...