DJTees Blog — Rock Festivals

This was a one day gig held on Saturday July 24, 1971 at Midway Stadium, Saint Paul, Minnesota and was widely acclaimed as a huge success. We have to remember that while such shows were called a ‘festival’ they really weren’t, or at least not in the way we would normally think of a festival - a three-day event held in a field, with no sanitation, but with helicopters dropping flowers onto 100,000 trippy freaks. I suspect ‘fest’ was attached as a kind of branding, the sub text of which was ‘hippie music for hairy freaks ahoy.’ For this show...

The Los Angeles Pop Festival was held at the Los Angeles Sports Arena on December 22 and 23, 1968. It was also called a Christmas Happening, which sounds far more groovy. It hadn't been a busy year in Southern California for festivals really. The Newport Pop Fest had been held in Costa Mesa in August to an audience of over 200,000 but this was a much smaller, low profile affair.  Despite extensive research I can't find out much about the gig. It was one of the earliest to be held in a sports stadium, which was later to become the...

Canada Jam was held at Mosport Park in Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada, about 100 kilometres east of Toronto, on August 26, 1978. The festival was produced by Sandy Feldman and Leonard Stogel, who produced California Jam and California Jam II in 1974 and 1978, down in, confusingly, Ontario, San Bernardino County, Southern California. Those two shows were massive sell-out successes and were filmed for TV too. They’re often cited as the two most lucrative shows of the era. So understandably, they thought they could repeat the trick north of the border. It was sponsored by brewers, Carling O'Keefe, marking just how...

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...

If you’ve ever been to Big Sur, California, it is a very far-out place up in the woods overlooking the Pacific Ocean. So cool is it that me and Dawn once walked past David Crosby coming out of a diner on Pacific Coast Highway, just before the turn off for Big Sur, as he was going in. I didn't want to hassle him, but I wanted to say something, in my dithering, the moment was lost.  It has long since been a bit of a hippie central and this was certainly the case back in 1969 when the Celebration at...

This is significant as a social event, much less so as a musical event.  When John Sinclair, a guiding hand (don’t call him a manager) for the MC5, conceived of an event modeled after the Human Be-In held in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, he wanted to hold a day-long event that would include free food, free drugs, free love, and free music. Yeah, man! And he wanted to have it in Belle Isle Park. So, he and other members of Trans-Love Energies (his organisation/anarcho situationists) started planning. They went down the straight route - unusual for Sinclair - and...

As you’ll know if you’ve been reading a lot of my blogs, Detroit and Michigan in general was quite the state for rock n roll shows and festivals from 68 - 72. The Grande Ballroom scene had been a proving ground for so many bands and really was the counterculture hub for those years, though it closed in 1972. But where there's money there are always hustlers and there was a vibe in freaksville that Michigan had its fair share of dudes looking to exploit rock n roll for a big pay day. In truth, this could be said of...

In January 1972, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Underwood, a 33 year old colonel, going on 103, formerly of the Queen's own Cameron Highlanders and owner of a 47 and a half acre estate in the Kent village of Bishopsbourne announced it was to be the site for the Great Western Festival, to take place over the Whitsun Holiday weekend in May. The locals were severely dischuffed with this turn of events and set about being beastly to our Colonel in what sounds more like the opening of an Agatha Christie story. "A small minority have behaved with viciousness and in an...

The Aachen Open Air Pop Festival was a rock festival held at Hauptstadion in Aachen, 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, 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 problems trying to...

 On Sunday, May 24, 1970, up to 40,000 long hairs, students and freaky deaks arrived at a muddy field at Michigan State University’s Old College Field for a one-day festival that was inevitably later dubbed ‘the mini Woodstock.’ The movie was now playing at local theaters, so everything was viewed through that lens.  The Open Air Celebration, held just three weeks after the Kent State killings which CSNY wrote Ohio about, was a break from weeks of student demos, fear of the draft and general political heaviosity. Classes were ostensibly over, despite no formal action by the administration. "Oh wow,...

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,...