'69 Texas International Pop Festival Historical Marker Benefit & Book

[SteveAJones]

Announcing:

From: peace@texaspopfestival.com

Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010

Subject: Texas Pop Festival Book and Historical Marker

It's taken awhile for me to update you, and I apologize for the neglect. I had hoped to have the book ready for publishing in time for the fourtieth anniversary, but health problems got in the way, so I'm making it my goal to do it this year. As you will soon see, I have a special reason for wanting to get it done by the 2010 anniversary.

This fall, I applied for a Texas State Historical Marker to go near the site of the Texas International Pop Festival! Is that cool, or what? And get this, the Denton County Transportation Authority (DCTA) has granted permission to place the marker at their Hebron Station, a depot now under construction for the A-train light rail that will soon be running. Hebron Station is just across the field from where the main stage for the festival stood. The station will provide us with lots of bored foot-traffic just standing around, waiting for a train. That means lots of people reading the plaque. In addition to the official state marker, I hope to purchase a plaque with a reproduction of the great Lance Bragg poster from the festival. As sponsor of the marker, I have to come up with the $1500 for the marker by the beginning of February; then, if we can get the additional plaque, I'll need to pay for that, too.

In order to raise the money, the Flying Pig Roadhouse, in Lake Dallas, has offered to hold a benefit where we will get the door (money paid as cover charge). We've come up with a date, Sunday, January 31, and time, 1:30 - 8:00 p.m. That's the Sunday before the Superbowl. We've got a pretty nice list of bands who have agreed to donate their time for the cause.

We'll also be giving away some door prizes and have a raffle for CDs and other memorabilia, some autographed. In addtion, Furthermore, the Texas Pop Festival hippie bus, will be there for folks to walk through and admire.

Here is a list of the bands and their scheduled playing time (which could change):

1:30 - 2:30 - Piece of My Heart (to do a tribute to Janis Joplin)

3:15 - 4:15 - Soul Sacrifice (Santana tribute band)

4:45 - 6:00 - Swan Song (Led Zeppelin tribute band)

6:30 - 8:00 - Johnny Nitzinger (legendary guitarist)

(Drawings for prizes will be held between sets, and you must be present to win.)

The Flying Pig is located right on the I-35E service road at 5008 E. Stemmons Frwy. (I-35E), Lake Dallas, TX.

Admission is $10 and all proceeds will go toward the historical marker. Anything left after that will go toward the plaque.

If you're not too far away, I really hope you'll come out to see us. I'd love to meet with you and have a chat. If you can't come out, keep in mind that I will accept donations. They can either be sent to me in the form of a check or money order or by Paypal to this email address ( http://mail.texaspop...popfestival.com ). Checks can be made out to Richard Hayner and sent to me at 1112 Bayfield Dr., Denton, TX 76209. But begging for money wasn't my intention of writing. So...

Keep in mind that, besides the http://www.texaspopfestival.com/ website, there's also a MySpace page ( http://www.myspace.c...exaspopfestival ), a Facebook page ( http://www.facebook....al/258156575111 ) and a Yahoo Group ( http://launch.groups...xaspopfestival/ ) dedicated to the festival.

You're invited to join us there.

Once the historical marker has been granted (and I feel really confident it will), it takes several months for them to make it. When it is put up, it's customary to hold a dedication ceremony. Meanwhile, Hebron Station is set to open in August. With all that in mind, I think it would be fantastic if we could have a huge dedication ceremony with live bands and who knows what else on the 41st anniversary. My hope is to get the city of Lewisville and DCTA involved as well as the County and State, which are already involved through their historical commissions. Perhaps it can be a joint marker dedication and grand opening for the station. We'll see, and I'll keep you posted.

This will be great, not only for the memory of the Texas Pop Festival, but for Texas music history. If you know anyone who was at the festival or would be interested, please forward this email to them.

Peace,

Richard Hayner

[LarryD]

With that concert not only being one of the best recorded bootlegs of Led Zeppelin at their zenith, was that not the largest crowd they've ever played before as well?

[SteveAJones]

With that concert not only being one of the best recorded bootlegs of Led Zeppelin at their zenith, was that not the largest crowd they've ever played before as well?

...crowd size was probably eclipsed only by the 1979 Knebworth Festival gigs.

[SteveAJones]

Texas Pop Festival drew thousands in Lewisville, 40 years ago

By DAN EAKIN, Lewisville Leader Staff Writer

Published: Friday, August 28, 2009

Some say as many as a quarter of a million people attended the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York in August 1969, 40 years ago. Two weeks later, a crowd estimated to be anywhere between 120,000 and 150,000 attended the Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville.

Newcomers to Lewisville may not be aware that between Aug. 30 and Sept. 1, 1969, some of the world's most famous pop stars came to this city and were joined by multiplied thousands of people, mostly young people, who came from all over for the spectacular event.

People slept in tents, in cars, under the stars or wherever they could, long before many of the nice hotels now in South Lewisville had been built. They slept at the speedway, at the lake, and even on streets in front of businesses.

Names of the performers at the three-day event were like a line-up of "Who's Who in Pop Music" at the end of the 1960s.

Among them were Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, B.B. King, Chicago, Spirit, Canned Heat, Rotary Connection, Sweetwater, Incredible String Band, James Cotton, Johnny Winter, Herbie Mann and many others.

According to various sources, the idea for the festival came from Angus G. Wynne III, son of Angus G. Wynne, founder of Six Flags Over Texas.

Many of the hippies who came to the event camped out at Lewisville Lake and reportedly skinny-dipped in broad daylight, passing around bars of the floating Ivory Soap.

Some of the old-timers or long-timers of Lewisville remember the event.

Eric Ferris, Lewisville director of community development, said, "I remember all of the young people that were camped out with their tents in Lake Park and at the International Speed Way. The speedway was located in the area of what is now in the Lakepointe/Waters Ridge area. Also, I remember that the grocery store, which was located in Huffines Plaza, was very crowded with concert attendees."

The official concerts took place in the vicinity of where Bankston Honda and the Main Event Bowling Alley are now located, although some unofficial singing and playing also took place at Lake Park.

Carol Crumpton, adult services librarian at the Lewisville Public Library, was a student at North Texas State University at the time. She and her boyfriend attended and decided to spend the night at Lake Park.

"When we drove up to a spot, I said, oooo, we can't park here. What's that smell?"

"Mary Jane," her boyfriend replied, referring to the slang for marijuana.

"Drugs were flowing everywhere," she said. "And there were so many people, we could hardly walk."

She said the festival planners "were not expecting near the crowd they drew." Maybe several hundred, or even a few thousand, but certainly not more than 100,000.

Drugs were so prevalent at the event that many in the future would refer to it as the "pot" festival, rather than the pop festival.

A headline at the top of page one of the Sept. 2, 1969 Lewisville Leader read boldly:

'Pot' Festival Ends, Citizens Sigh In Relief.

The unbylined story had little to nothing to say about the music or the famous performers who were there.

The first few paragraphs read:

"Lewisville and area residents heaved a massive sigh of relief and went back to the business of every day living as thousands of hippies and other asserted visitors packed their bedrolls and pot and prepared to leave for wherever they came from.

"A baby was born, a man died of heat exhaustion and hundreds of people smoked pot, opium, marijuana and you-name-it during the three-day nightmare the city just survived.

"A three-year-old girl was released from Parkland Hospital Monday after swallowing LSD Sunday. She was in fair condition, but the extent of brain damage is unknown.

"A man nearly died after swallowing his tongue while his doped-up friends watched him passively. He was propped up against a tree with blood running from his ears. Fire Marshal Ike Bradburry pulled the man's tongue out with a spoon and saved his life.

"Hippies came and camped out all over Lewisville, in front of businesses and a couple in front of the police station.

"They went swimming in the nude. Skinny dipping used to be at night, but they did it in broad daylight and local authorities turned their backs.

"The deafening sounds roared in the festival field, the east end of the Dallas International Motor Speedway, until all hours….until 1:30 Sunday morning. The visitors sat entranced – either by the music or the narcotics which had been freely sold, bartered or given away.

'Traffic came to almost a standstill for miles on I-35E."

There had been some talk of another Texas Pop Festival in Lewisville this year, to commemorate the one in 1969.

Many local residents would just as soon not.

[SteveAJones]

The Forgotten Festival

The 1969 Texas International Pop Festival

By Chris Gray

Houston Press / September 01, 2009

Details: New Jack Hippies and many more celebrate Woodstock's 40th, 4 p.m. Friday, September 4 and Saturday, September 5, at Dan Electro's Guitar Bar, 1031 e. 24th st., 713-862-8707 or www.danelectrosguitarbar.com

Subject: 1969 Texas International Pop Festival

This entire summer, pop culture has been inundated with Woodstock nostalgia. Warner Home Video got the ball rolling back in June with a deluxe DVD edition of Woodstock, featuring the four-hour director's cut of Michael Wadleigh's Oscar-winning 1970 documentary and yards of bonus footage in a box designed to look like a fringe jacket.

Rhino Records followed a few weeks later with Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm, a six-disc monster with performances by most of the artists who appeared that rain-soaked August weekend in upstate New York Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Grateful Dead with stage announcements like Chip Monck's famous "brown acid" remarks.

Rolling Stone weighed in with a portfolio of conveniently unearthed "lost" photographs, and The New York Times devoted most of the front page of its August 9 Arts & Leisure section to Jon Pareles's commemorative essay.

"It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naiveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed," the paper's chief pop music critic wrote. "Woodstock's young, left-of-center crowd was quickly recognized as a potential army of consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again."

Oh, there's more. Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee's based-on-a-true-story comic memoir, Taking Woodstock, opened across the country last weekend, and various books and television remembrances have been popping up for weeks.

All this product, literally hundreds of dollars worth, is enough to make an old hippie choke on his or her love beads. But another significant Aquarian anniversary is about to pass with hardly a nostalgic peep from the media this one a lot closer to home.

Labor Day weekend 1969, scarcely two weeks after Woodstock, thousands upon thousands of hippies and shorter-haired young people from across the South and Southwest descended on another outdoor musical gathering. This one, held at the Dallas International Motor Speedway a racetrack on the shores of Lake Lewisville in Denton County was the Texas International Pop Festival.

Texas Pop's attendance was quite a bit smaller than Woodstock's, an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 compared to anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000. But it was still a lot of folks, perhaps the largest public gathering in the state to date. In Got No Shoes, Got No Blues, an unreleased film about the festival, one onlooker sizes up the masses of people around him the only way he knows how: by comparing it to a football game.

Texas Pop's smaller size probably worked to its advantage; the festival was not plagued with the traffic, hygiene and overcrowding problems of Woodstock. There were no fights, and the dozen or two arrests were mostly people trying to sneak in. The fences held, keeping the festival from becoming a free-for-all like in New York.

It didn't rain, which made a world of difference, and exactly one person died from heatstroke. Exactly one person was also born at the Speedway that weekend, proving yet again that God has a very interesting sense of humor.

But in many other respects, the two festivals could have been identical. Yes, there were plenty of drugs and nudity at both. But, notes Richard Hayter, who runs the Web site www.texaspopfestival.com and is working on a book about the festival, the doctors who showed up expecting to treat a bunch of overdoses all weekend instead wound up mostly patching up people's cut bare feet.

Many performers Joplin, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter, Incredible String Band, Ten Years After and Sweetwater barely had a chance to unpack their road cases from Woodstock. Appropriately, Texas Pop swapped the folky strains of Havens, Baez and CSNY for a heavy blues element: B.B. King, Freddie King, James Cotton, Delaney & Bonnie, Sam & Dave and Tony Joe White all played, B.B. King all three days. Texas Pop marked Santana's Lone Star debut, and fell at the end of the first U.S. tour by a band of brash young British blues-rockers Led Zeppelin, who "brought the house down," Hayter says.

One more thing Texas Pop had in common with Woodstock was that financially, they were both disasters. The main promoter, Angus Wynne heir to the Six Flags amusement-park empire and his partners, one of whom had produced that summer's Atlanta International Pop Festival, lost around $100,000 on the Texas festival, a 1985 Dallas Morning News article reported.

Probably the most remarkable thing about Texas Pop is that it happened at all. This was Texas in 1969. The narrative of Got No Shoes, Got No Blues juxtaposes images and interviews from the festival with a typical cowboy-hatted, pickup-driving redneck who, as he sips from a can of Pearl, listens to a Dallas radio talk show decrying Texas Pop as an example of "hippie hypocrisy" and moral ruin. A Morning News editorial about the festival spells out the establishment's opinion in no uncertain terms.

"Young people assembling to hear music is one thing," it begins. "Young people assembling in unspeakable costumes, half-naked, barefooted, defying propriety and scorning morality is another. Who and where are their parents? Where do these young people get the money to loaf around the country in their smelly regalia?

[eternal light]

A headline at the top of page one of the Sept. 2, 1969 Lewisville Leader read boldly:

'Pot' Festival Ends, Citizens Sigh In Relief.

Sure glad that's over.

[SteveAJones]

40 Years After

Historical pop culture with Rick Campbell

Extensive feature on the 1969 Texas International Pop Festival with photos:

http://blogs.chron.c...s_to_texas.html

[eternal light]

Rhino Records followed a few weeks later with Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm, a six-disc monster with performances by most of the artists who appeared that rain-soaked August weekend in upstate New York — Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Grateful Dead — with stage announcements like Chip Monck's famous "brown acid" remarks.

I have heard that the brown acid was pretty poisonous and consisted mainly of what they called angel dust then, which was a strong animal tranquilizer or something of that nature. I would not recommend taking it ever.

[The Rover]

Although not listed on this flyer, new band from Flint, Michigan, GRAND FUNK RAILROAD, opened all three days and played thru the afternoon heat till the 4:00 PM opening band. They had just gotten a record contract with Capitol Records after a wildly successful performance at the Atlanta Pop Festival on July 4, 1969.

From The Handbook of Texas Online

With a budget of only $120,000, the promoters booked twenty-six of the biggest names in blues, rock-and-roll, and psychedelic rock. Janis Joplin, Sam and Dave, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Canned Heat, the Grass Roots, B. B. King, Chicago Transit Authority, Tony Joe White, Spirit, Johnny Winter, Sweetwater, Ten Years After, Freddie King, and a virtually unknown British band, Led Zeppelin, all performed during the three-day festival. The musical acts were not paid much to perform; Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin were paid the most—$10,000 each. Some major groups that wanted to perform could not get in to play. A band from Michigan, Grand Funk Railroad, was allowed to perform only after the members agreed to play free and pay their own expenses.

The festival was extensively advertised through radio and newspaper and was promoted at Woodstock. Consequently, music enthusiasts from all over the United States, and from numerous foreign countries, poured into Lewisville to pay the admission fee of $6.50 a day. Although the promoters anticipated a crowd of over 200,000, actual attendance for the three days was more like 120,000.

[LarryD]

...crowd size was probably eclipsed only by the 1979 Knebworth Festival gigs.

That one slipped my mind! Thanks for the headsup. According to the official website of Knebworth House, the 1979 Knebworth Festival involved

the largest stage ever constructed, 570 loo seats, 750 feet of urinals and the biggest rock band in the world. Led Zeppelin played their last ever concerts at Knebworth, and it was the end of an era for the Knebworth shows. Both concerts overran, noise complaints were received from 7 miles away. The rubbish team struggled to cope with clearing the arena between the shows. The Police believed that 200,000 people had turned up each night.

These were amongst the largest crowds Led Zeppelin had ever performed to.

There were many Dazed and Confused times in proximity of the Lake Dallas Pot Festival site back in the day. Party At The Spillway!!! Richard Linklater would've been proud! I seem to have read that there was at least one member here who was just a 'hitchhike' away but couldn't make it! Hmmmm...

[The Rover]

...crowd size was probably eclipsed only by the 1979 Knebworth Festival gigs.

After The '69 Pop Festival, and before the '79 Knebworth shows ....

Was the 1970 Bath Festival .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_Festival_of_Blues_and_Progressive_Music

The Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music was a music festival held at the Bath and West Showground in Shepton Mallet, Somerset, England on 27–28 June 1970.

Bath was the brainchild of promoter Freddy Bannister and his wife Wendy Bannister , who had held the smaller Bath Festival Of Blues within Bath itself in 1969. The 1970 show attracted a significantly larger crowd of 150,000.

Led Zeppelin accepted an offer from Bannister to headline the festival at a fee of ₤20,000. They took the stage at about 8:30 pm, as the sun was setting. The band's performance is widely considered by music critics, and members of Led Zeppelin itself, as being one of the most important of their career, representing a turning point in terms of the amount of recognition they received in Britain (until that point their on-stage success and popularity had largely been borne out on numerous United States concert tours). At Bath the band played for three hours and performed five encores.