DJTees Blog — Rock Festivals

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...

In 1972, promoter Alex Cooley, who had produced the second Atlanta Pop Festival two years previously, came up with a novel idea. With local authorities, the cops and just about everyone else making it harder and harder to put festivals on, why not go somewhere where The Man wasn't going to, like, bum you out, dude. Somewhere where legal hassles would be minimal. Hey, how about Puerto Rico? Cool idea, yeah? Well, actually no.  Veja Baja is on the north coast of the island on 420 acres of countryside right by sandy beaches and Cooley rented it for the Mar-Y-Sol...

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...

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...

The Celebration of Life, held in 24 - 27 June 1971, brought well over 60,000 freaks and hairies and hippies to the banks of the Atchafalaya River at the Cypress Pointe Plantation in McCrea, Louisiana. But what should’ve been groovy dream turned to dark nightmare, struck by various plagues of biblical proportions.  The plantation is situated between the fast-moving river and an inland, earthen levee which protects the residential community and farmland nearby. The festival promoters leased the 500-acre soybean plantation for $20,000 in June 1971 after being evicted from two previous sites. The stage was erected in the soybean...

The Festival for Peace was an all day concert event produced at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York on August 6, 1970. There was another in Philadelphia a few days later It was the second event of a series planned to raise funds for anti-war political candidates in the early 1970s. The first, the Winter Festival for Peace, took place in Madison Square Garden in January and had been a huge success. The date selected for the Summer event was the 25th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The gig was scheduled for 10:00 AM – 10:00 PM...

Held between Fri Jun 19, 1970 - Sun Jun 21, 1970 in Mantorop, Sweden, The Festival of the Midnight Sun , also known as the Mantorp Festival was such a flop that it became known as "The biggest fiasco in Swedish pop history". Surely it can’t have been that bad?  The promoters, inspired like many were by being at Woodstock, booked a huge racetrack for the 3-day festival, then booked a huge list of acts, or at least they said they did. Whether they did actually book all of them is open to doubt.   The event required 50-60,000 Swedish freaks...

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 second Atlanta International Pop Festival was held in a soybean field (great for vegans!) adjacent to the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia, from July 3–5, 1970, although it did not finish until after dawn on the 6th. It was the only successor to the first Atlanta Pop Festival, which had been held the previous summer near Hampton, Georgia. The event was promoted by Alex Cooley, who had helped organize the '69 Atlanta festival as well as the '69 Texas International Pop Festival, and two years later would promote the Mar Y Sol Pop Festival in Puerto Rico from...

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...

By 1968 the whole world knew that San Francisco was Freak Central. Bus tours would patrol the streets, treating the long-haired weirdoes like some sort of zoo exhibit. Long time residents will tell you that the age of hippy idealism had already peaked, probably in early '66, to early '67. However, while this may be culturally true, the fact was a lot of SF bands were just getting their wings and creating wonderful music. So this festival in Alameda Fairgrounds in Pleasanton brought together some great bands for a superb 2 days of music on 26th and 27th October 1968....

Wadena Festival 1970. They called it Iowa's Woodstock. Of course they did. Every state seemed to call its 1970 festival its Woodstock. It wasn't. This festival was initially supposed to be held in Galena, Illinois, but an injunction against Sound Storm Enterprises Inc of Chicago, sponsor of the festival, put a stop to that. As per usual, The Man didn't want no hippies getting their groove on, but $89,000 had already been invested in this gig so the search was on for somewhere else. Once again, The Man underestimated The Freaks. The Wadena Development Co. bought a 220-acre farm two...

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 European festivals, 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 usual...

In the run up to this festival, talk was that it was gonna be the Quebec equivalent of Woodstock. But then there was nothing exceptional in that, pretty much every festival for a year after Woodstock painted itself in that way, understandably enough. Organized by Productions Woods, brothers Filiatrault Lahaie and Claude Lahaie and Ziggy Wiseman it was held between Fri Jul 31, 1970 - Sun Aug 02, 1970 it was an absolute stone cold disaster.  From the outset, the Ministry of Justice of Quebec assured that the Sûreté du Québec would not intervene on the site of the festival...

This was huge. In 1982, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak hatched an ambitious and very expensive musical plan and committed a sizeable chunk of his sizeable fortune to a musical event, billed as the biggest thing since Woodstock, Wozniak staged a three-day concert in the mountains of San Bernardino County, in Southern California, that featured some of the day's biggest names in music. The "Us Festival" kicked off under scorching conditions on September 3, 1982. Steve Wosniak wearing unpleasant, possibly dangerous trousers at Us Festival 1983 with Stevie Nicks, who's had a perm. Lovely. Wozniak, then 32 and on leave from...