Wild Wednesday

Wild Wednesday Wed Jun 21, 1972 Sherwood Forest, Davison, Michigan 
Wild Wednesday jams happened for years, from 1969 - 1974. By 1972 they were indeed pretty wild and were an excuse for local Michigan bands to strut their stuff. This year the bands were Bob Seger, Dennis Coffey, Frijid Pink, Johnny and the Hurricanes, Julia, King Biscuit Boy,SRC, Teegarden and Van Winkle, The Früt, The Rumour, Whiz Kids, Wylie, Mike Quatro Jam Band.
The first of those, Bob Seger, was just starting to break in Michigan, though nationwide success was still some years away and was persuaded to play ‘Turn The Page’ which I think was on his new release.
Sherwood Forest functioned as a community centre, dance hall and concert venue for more than 20 years, Don Sherwood ‘s Sherwood Forest in Richfield Township was the happening place in metro Flint in the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, part of a burgeoning Michigan rock ‘n’ roll scene where future stars such as Seger, Alice Cooper and Nugent cut their teeth.
Wayne Price, a punter kept shouting for the song and eventually Seger relented and played it for the first time.
That was the kind of place Sherwood Forest was in the early 1970s. It was too small to attract many of the day’s big names, though some like Blue Oyster Cult did perform there, but big enough to lure some Michigan artists on the verge of breaking nationally.
Sherwood Forest was sort of a bridge between the rock festivals of the late ’60s and amphitheatres like Pine Knob Music Theatre that would become the norm by the late ’70s.
It wasn’t unique, but it was unique to Flint rock fans.
“Quite honestly, there were many venues much like Sherwood Forest ,” Ted Nugent recalled. “The spirit of these gatherings superseded geography and structure. You could play 100 shows a year in Michigan without playing the same place twice, and I personally craved every opportunity.”
He was famous for shooting arrows into the air. One hit an audience member. “I remember hitting a girl in the head with an arrow,” he said. “Instead of suing me, she had me sign the arrow!”
The audiences, he said, were something else. “I remember the energy; I remember the ‘uninhibitedness’ and the atmosphere of unadulterated creativity,” Nugent said.
Question Mark, of “96 Tears” fame, had a new version of the band the Mysterians onstage when they opened for Edgar Winter’s White Trash, which included guitarist Rick Derringer.
“It was the first time I’d seen Derringer since the ’60s, when he toured with the McCoys, and he wouldn’t even speak to me,” Question Mark complained.
But his other memories of the place are more positive. “It was always great. It was just like a party. There was no competition (between the bands) or anything like that,” he said. “Everybody had a lot of fun.”
Though Sherwood Forest is long gone, memories of its indoor and outdoor shows, the festival atmosphere, the pond behind the hill where audiences sat, the bands and the audiences still linger.
Its heyday was in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the rules of rock ‘n’ roll concert promoting were still being written. Sherwood Forest had begun to feature a series of concerts called Wild Wednesdays, Super Sundays and The Big One that were headlined by acts like Nugent, Seger and Cooper.
They were promoted by Pete Cavanaugh, known to thousands of mid-Michigan rock ‘n’ roll fans then as “Peter C” of WTAC radio. He said the Sherwood Forest concerts became a phenomenon because of the context of the times.
“You have to remember that it was only a dozen years from ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to Woodstock,” Cavanaugh said.
Rock concert promotion was a wild frontier.
“We were making it up as we went along,” Cavanaugh said.
The concerts were a great way to promote some of the progressive rock that WTAC played late at night. The station took over sponsorship of the Wild Wednesday promotions – the name is loosely based on a soft drink – in 1969 and within two years they had become major local events.
According to Cavanaugh, there was no master plan to make Sherwood Forest the state Mecca for rock ‘n’ roll. It happened almost by accident.
“I was approached about throwing some groups together for Wild Wednesday and hosting the program,” Cavanaugh said. “A fellow WTAC announcer, Johnny Irons, and I entered into a partnership agreement wherein we would combine efforts and equally share in all proceeds. Working on Wild Wednesday, we lined-up six local groups and co-headliners The Rationals and Bob Seger.
“When the big day came on June 21, (1971) more than 10,000 turned out at Sherwood Forest. Despite threatening clouds, 4,000 plus rockers paid $2 to attend the 8-’til-midnight concert on the Sherwood patio. Despite the fact that we spent a lot of our time telling advertisers what a good investment WTAC was, we were surprised at this kind of turnout.”
In the wake of that success, Cavanaugh and company had several other Wild Wednesday concerts throughout the summer and learned what worked and what didn’t.
First, they decided to book bands that had enjoyed significant local airplay. And they learned that people loved having seven or eight local bands to round out a ticket that usually included two or three bigger names.
One Super Sunday concert featured a number of Flint and Detroit area bands and was headlined by the Bob Seger System, S.R.C. and The Stooges (featuring Iggy Pop). Approximately 4,000 rockers attended, and “this represented our first truly major turnout at Sherwood Forest for a ‘rock ‘n’ roll only’ event,” Cavanaugh said.
But the event Cavanaugh thinks put the Sherwood Forest on the map was the first indoor show in 1969 at the grand opening of the Sherwood lodge, which had been expanded recently.
Cavanaugh knew exactly what band he wanted – notorious Detroit radical rockers MC5, a loud, crude, rock ‘n’ roll band that preached revolution with a evangelical fervour. Their manager, Davison native John Sinclair, helped found the White Panthers, a radical white complement to the Black Panthers. MC5’s music featured anti-police rhetoric and a frequent use of obscenity.
“Promoting concerts was never about ideology for me, or even about the money. I just loved the music,” Cavanaugh insisted. “It was all about the music. They (MC5) were the best live rock ‘n’ roll band I’d ever seen, bar none. But they were also theatre, and part of the appeal was that this was a band your parents could really hate.”
The local law enforcement wasn’t wild about them, either. Sinclair was a Davison high school graduate and his encounters with the law and his notorious anti-police statements hadn’t earned him any friends in the department.
The promotional effort packed 2,000 bodies into the hall, but also made Davison Township Police Chief Ed Boyce determined to do something about the “cop-hating dopers who were coming onto his turf,” Cavanaugh said.
Cavanaugh said the concert was everything he’d expected, and he was elated with how things were going. He and Pete Flanders, who had just started at WTAC, decided to go down the road to see how a competing concert sponsored by WTRX was going. The empty parking lot at the Knights of Columbus hall gave them the answer.
They returned to Sherwood Forest to see people streaming out of the lodge with police officers from five suburban departments directing people to their cars.
Cavanaugh found out later that Boyce had assembled his force, waited for MC5 to use a certain obscenity, then burst in and declared the concert over for violating a local obscenity ordinance. But it took the police so long to wade through the crowd, that MC5, most of whom had certain illegal substances on them, ducked out the back door, piled into their van and hit the highway – avoiding arrest, but leaving their equipment behind.
After Boyce and Cavanaugh vented their tempers, the two men got together to work out a practical arrangement. The Davison Township Police Department would provide officers for security – paid for by Cavanaugh – and it would be written into all artists’ contracts that no one would use a certain four-letter word in the future.
The incident helped give Sherwood Forest a notorious enough reputation to make it the cool place to be among rebellious-minded teenagers. And despite the fact that it led to better security arrangements with the local police and got them involved in a positive way, that reputation also sowed the seeds of trouble with neighbours and an ambitious county sheriff.
So, why would a venue that regularly attracted more than 10,000 fans to outdoor concerts and crowds of 2,000 for indoor shows cease operations?
Cavanaugh lists two reasons: The controversy surrounding Sherwood Forest ; and the changing nature of the rock ‘n’ roll business.
It was Sherwood himself who pulled the plug on Wild Wednesday. “We did catch some flak. We were accused of things,” he said. “I just felt, do I want to get jumped on and spend all my time at the courthouse? Not especially.”
The concerts generated complaints from neighbours who didn’t like the traffic or the noise. The most vocal of these, according to Flint Journal reports at the time, was orchard owner George Masters, whose property was adjacent to Sherwood ‘s.
Among the more sensational charges Masters made were that he found used hypodermic needles in his mailbox, and that truckloads of beer were being delivered on concert nights, despite the fact that Sherwood did not have a liquor licence.
Masters downplays the stories now, which he called wild rumours
Cavanaugh suspects these rumours, and others that involved open sexual activity, were fallout from Woodstock and an active rumour mill.
“I’m pretty sure I would have noticed naked women running around,” he laughed.
Cavanaugh admitted that the rock counterculture was at a low point by 1973. Some nationally reported incidents of violence at other venues and young people’s switch from marijuana to hard drugs made concert promoters a little uneasy
Later in the 70s, artists fees were soaring, agencies were snapping up the big acts and demanding higher guarantees. And many of the Sherwood Forest mainstays were starting to get known nationally.
“Bob Seger was now playing regularly throughout all of the Midwest and had developed a strong following in Florida and Texas. Ted Nugent was appearing throughout the entire country. Alice Cooper and Frijid Pink were international,” Cavanaugh said. “I was grabbing occasional dates on new national talent by spotting them early and booking them far in advance before the rest of the world caught on. Other than that, rock ‘n’ roll had become quite corporate.”
The last Wild Wednesday was June 26, 1974. During that concert, someone called in a report of an overdose at the concert, and the ambulance was involved in a traffic accident in which two people were killed.
“The story was not that an opponent of the shows or even a prankster was responsible for the deaths,” Cavanaugh recounted bitterly, “but that Wild Wednesday had killed two people. That was kind of the last straw. We all just went on to other things.”
Sherwood pulled the plug himself.
The troubles clouded other activities there. “It just was too much hassle,” said Sherwood . “We could be having a birthday party for a 12-year-old and here comes the police responding to a complaint.”
Six years later, he sold the property and moved to the Mackinaw City area.
New owners tried adding life to Sherwood Forest with a dinner theatre in the lodge, but the building was destroyed by fire in 1989, and the site was virtually abandoned.

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