DJTees Blog

This festival was held between Thursday Jul 16, 1970 and Sat Jul 18, 1970. It was a remarkable gig which ended up inspiring one of the era's great southern rock songs.  The bill was headlined by the Allman Brothers Band and also featured Big Brother, Radar, Peace Core, Wet Willie, Johnny Jenkins, Tony Joe White, Hampton Grease Band, Donnydale, Catfish Freedom, Sundown, Chakra, Hot Rain, Kallabash, Warm Stone Blind, Captain John's Fishmarket. Ah yes, the CJF, whatever became of them?   Naturally it became known as “South’s Woodstock” (everyone had their own Woodstock for a year or two) was launched at...

Ohio’s student population was a hotbed of political activism in the late 60s into the early 70s. Fired up by the Kent State killings in 1970 (inspiring CSNY’s ‘Ohio’) the University put on a lot of shows for touring rock bands.  This was a two-day show held on Fri Apr 27, 1973 and Sat Apr 28, 1973 at the Convocation Center in Athens, itself very much a place of alternative living and general left-field faroutedness. The Convo Center was a new circular ‘UFO-style’ building, of which many were built in 1960s and early 70s America. It opened in December 1968...

Held on August 3, 1969, The Mount Clemens Pop Festival was the creation of promoter David Dubay. This event was held at Sportsman’s Park near New Haven, Michigan. This was a full-day event that started at noon and ran through to midnight.  The full line up was: Alice Cooper, Cat Mother, Charlie Latimer, Country Joe & The Fish, Frijid Pink, John Mayall, Mainline, MC5, Muddy Waters, Owen Love, Rush (not the Canuck prog trio), Savage Grace, T-Bone Walker, Ted Lucas, The All Night Newsboys, The Attack, The McCoys, The Pleasure Seekers, The Red, White and Blues Band, The Stooges, The...

The 1975 Florida Jam was held at the old Tampa Fairgrounds / Plant Field and was hosted by Sid Clark & Marquee Promotions. Plant Field was the first major athletic stadium in Tampa. It was originally built by Henry B. Plant, owner of the Tampa Bay Hotel and Railroad Tycoon, in 1899 next to the University of Tampa as an area to provide various activities for his guests. Plant Field drew Tampa residents and visitors to see baseball games, horse racing, car racing, entertainers and politicians.The stadium hosted the first professional football and first spring training games in Tampa. With...

This one can be filed in the ‘great festivals that never happened’ drawer. Promised on the posters to be a bucolic-sounding "6 Days of Harmony, Music, Workshops & Symposiums, Camp Fire Shows & Concerts”' to be held at Wallpack Center, New Jersey, a lovely small town in a very rural farming area. A year on from Woodstock the counterculture vibe was heavy in the air. The war between The Man and The Freaks was being fought everywhere from Kent State to DC. Vietnam protests were frequent and widespread. Into this frenetic culture and political situation came this 6-day proposition for...

This was one of Michigan’s biggest festival shows at the time with over 35 bands treading the boards over two days. The rock scene in Detroit orbited around the famous Grande Ballroom, home to the MC and The Stooges as well as the James Gang, Ted’s Amboy Dukes and many more. To ensure the gig got a good crowd, they shut the Ballroom that weekend. Clever move.  Produced by Russ Gibb who ran the Ballroom and would be the man behind several other festivals in the area, it was largely regarded as a huge success by which I mean, no-one...

Held at Hughes Stadium, 3835 Freeport Blvd, Sacramento on Sunday October 15th 1967. The line-up for this one-day festival was Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Hamilton Streetcar, The Hour Glass, Jefferson Airplane, New Breed, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Spirit, Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Sunshine Company Because 1967’s Summer of Love became so associated with San Francisco, it’d be easy to assume the freaky and the deaky had not leaked out into the rest of the state just yet. But this wouldn’t be true. The focus was on the Haight Ashbury groovers, yes, but people were getting wide and experimenting with...

Held between Saturday May 30, 1970 and Mon Jun 01, 1970 at Thunderbird Beach, Thunderbird Place, Denham Springs Louisiana 70726. Confusingly, it’s not actually a beach. Looking at it today, it looks like some sort of camping leisure area, so I assume that’s what it was back in 1970 when promoter Jim Brown put the gig together. Obviously, what I like to call the Pleasant Valley Sunday types, were not too pleased with this, fearing the usual things: drugs, nudity and public grooving by freaks. Brown had gotten threatening phone calls from local residents and the city tried to shut...

Held in the Garden Auditorium of the Pacific National Exhibition grounds from July 29-31, 1966, the Trips Festival was a multimedia event spearheaded by artist Sam Perry, a pioneer of psychedelic light shows — which may explain why the event was promoted as a multimedia sensorium of music, film, slides, and moving liquid utilizing over fifty projectors and 25,000 square feet of screen. Performers included Big Brother and the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin), the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Daily Flash, and poet Michael McClure.  Perry was interested in the ability of such a psychedelic gig to transform...

A lot of festivals, especially in the early days, were some shade of chaotic but by hook and usually by crook, the freaks managed to put something on for the assembled crowd. But at Mexico’s first rock festival of the era, this was very much not the case. It had all seemed fine until a few days before it was due to be held in the Bullring on 13 October 1968. Maybe the fact so many bulls had been slaughtered there was bad ju ju. The festival was slated to feature the Animals, Iron Butterfly, Patchwork Security Blanket (great name!),...

This stands out in the history of rock and roll and of the counterculture for one reason: it was the last festival of the 60s. There had been 43 festivals in USA in 1969 and as the year drew to an end this was held over 3 days from Sat Dec 27, 1969 - Mon Dec 29, 1969 Homestead-Miami Speedway, Homestead, Florida. The bill boasted some of the performers from Woodstock. I’m interested in Crow being on this bill. I’ve just bought one of their albums and didn’t know anything about them but it turns out they were a Minneapolis...

This was a typical one-day festival put on by the University of the Pacific, whose home was in Stockton in Northern California, not the one on Teesside where I grew up! Held at Pacific Memorial Stadium which was a 28,000-seat outdoor multi-purpose stadium, built in 1950 and which put on a few festivals back in the day before closing its doors in 1988.  It hosted the Stockton Rock Festival later in 1969 headlined by the Byrds, because this show on May 10 had been so successful, by which I mean, made the University a lot of money.  The bill was...

Now, here we have a festival that registered high on the Severely Groovy scale and low on the Hassle From The Man chart. Ideal. Held at Lake Amador, Amador, California on Oct 04, 1969 it was a very bucolic frolic for 40,000 and it’s roster of bands was very much drawn from the San Francisco hippie community, Amador being northeast of Stockton and southeast of Sacramento out in lovely rolling hill country.  The bill had a bluesy slant to it:  Al Wilson (of Canned Heat, I presume), Albert Collins, Bo Diddley, Cold Blood, Country Weather, Daybreak, Ike & Tina Turner,...

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...