DJTees Blog — Johnny's History Of Rock

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...

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...

The Trips Festival happened on January 21-23 1966, a time when LSD was still legal. Up to about 18 ‘Acid Tests’ - a term coined by author and Merry Prankster, Ken Kesey - took place from late ‘65 to the Fall of ‘66, initially at Kesey’s ranch. But the most famous was the Trips Festival at Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco. Ramon Sender, a composer and artist, co-produced it with Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand. It was a three-day event that, with the help of The Merry Pranksters - a far out group of freaks and outsiders who toured the...

The Amazing Kornyfone Record Label was one of the major bootleg operations in the 1970s. Working out of Southern California (though records were often pressed in Holland), it was set up by Ken Douglas who had been one half of the Trade Mark of Quality label with Dub Taylor. When they split up their partnership, at first Ken released recordings on his own ‘Smoking Pig’ version of Trade Mark Of Quality, before establishing Kornyfone in 1973. From 1974 to 1976 he released over 100 titles, many of them with fantastic artwork by William Stout, who also did work for TMOQ...

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...