Woodstock, the three-day music festival held on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York in August of 1969, is considered a seminal event in rock history, when American youth asserted their individual and collective power to change the world. But Woodstock was by no means the only major rock festival of the day, Monterey Pop and Altamont being two of the more famous counter-cultural gatherings.
I attended two other multi-day concerts, which bookended the Woodstock event as well as the rise of Richard Nixon to Commander in Chief during the Vietnam War. They were the Miami Pop Festival at Gulfstream Park (a horse racing venue) in Hallandale, Florida, and Concert 10 at Pocono International Raceway in the town of Long Pond in eastern Pennsylvania.
The December 1968 Miami Pop Festival was a precursor to Woodstock, which followed eight months later. Both events were produced by Michael Lang. Miami Pop was organized at a racetrack with facilities that could accommodate the 100,000 Floridian residents and students who showed up. Woodstock, which was held in an open field in New York State, proved to be a free-for-all for 400,000 attendees, although technically 186,000 had paid to enter.
Miami Pop featured acts like Iron Butterfly, Canned Heat, and The Grateful Dead, who would soon be able to draw half a million on their own. [Canned Hat and The Dead would play Woodstock too—while Iron Butterfly were stuck at the airport—Ed.] It cost me just $7 a ticket to see acts like Marvin Gaye, Richie Havens, The Boxtops, and Junior Walker & The All Stars. I also was really blown away by a new act, Three Dog Night, as they covered the Otis Redding hit “Try A Little Tenderness.” After Three Dog Night’s set, the lights went out, and when they came back up, a policeman, a businessman, a professor, and a doctor stood on the stage. An ominous beat began, and the policeman launched into a song:
Once the religious, the hunted and weary
Chasing the promise of freedom and hope
Came to this country to build a new vision
In the months to come, many would recognize the song as Steppenwolf’s “Monster,” whose lyrics were inspired by the recent election of Richard Nixon as President of the United States:
Its leaders were supposed to serve the country
But now they won’t pay it no mind’
Cause the people grew fat and got lazy
And now their vote is a meaningless joke
A joke indeed. A few months earlier, on September 16, 1968, presidential candidate Richard Nixon had appeared on the most popular comedy show of the time, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and uttered the show’s popular phrase “Sock it to me.” It was one small step for comedy, but one giant leap in political campaigning; such appearances are now commonplace on Saturday Night Live and other late-night TV shows. Nixon’s was totally out of character for a anticommunist hardliner who was playing the race card by fanning the flames of fear, while promising to restore law and order as riots engulfed American cities in flames following the spring assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King and antiwar Democrat Robert F. Kennedy.
They babble about law and order
But it’s all just an echo of what they’ve been told
Yeah, there’s a monster on the loose
When he was done, John Kay, the lead singer of Steppenwolf, tried to remove the uncooperative police helmet and quipped, “It’s hard to take it off, once you feel its power.” Then, throwing the helmet down on stage, he performed the band’s psychedelic crowd pleasers like “Magic Carpet Ride.” Miami Pop was an amazing gathering, with profound, memorable acts and plenty of parking and bathroom facilities. The only shortcoming was the length of the day, and the fact that the two separate stages forced attendees to pray for Solomon’s wisdom in choosing which performances to watch.
The Miami Pop experience left me craving more. When I was in Nashville in June of 1969, the guy sweeping floors at Monument Records said he heard there was going to be a concert in New York in August, and encouraged me to go. His name was Kris Kristofferson, and within the year many would know his “Me and Bobby McGee.” The song was co-written with Monument’s head, Fred Foster, about a young woman whose name matched the record label’s receptionist’s. “Her husband hates this song,” Fred told me after picking up his guitar and playing it. Interestingly, it was a female singer, Janis Joplin, who would make the tune famous, simply by switching the gender (but not the name) of the song’s main character. It was not among the songs she performed at Woodstock, but it did become her only #1 hit, after her death.
I arrived in New Jersey with my wife from the Summer of Love. (On our 1967 honeymoon we drove across the US to the strange world at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco, and then quickly returned to the normalcy of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which had taken a stand on racial equality while dividing the nation on the Vietnam war). With $12 between us in August 1969, and only one upcoming job, we decided not to go to Woodstock, though one of my high school friends made the TV talk show circuit reveling about the transforming experience.
What my friend did not realize was that the anarchy of Woodstock had convinced many towns to turn down requests for similar concerts. So three years later, when Concert 10 was promoted on radio as ten hours of music in the Poconos for $11 on July 8 and 9, 1972, I (now divorced) jumped at the opportunity to go, and asked a Colombian student studying business at Montclair State College to take the journey with me. Despite her reservations about spending the night beneath the stars and my blanket with someone she barely knew, she agreed to go. We hit a traffic jam four miles from the concert site, and walked the rest of the way. When we arrived at the event, we joined 200,000 others who had come to hear Humble Pie, The Faces (with newcomer Rod Stewart), Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Edgar Winter, Badfinger, Black Sabbath, and Ramatam with April Lawton (whose reputation was that of a female Jimi Hendrix).
The weeklong Democratic National Convention had opened in Miami the day before. At its conclusion, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy introduced South Dakota Senator George McGovern and Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton as the presidential and vice-presidential nominees for the Democratic Party in 1972. This antiwar ticket proved to be ineffective against Nixon’s monster, the Committee to Re-elect the President. CRP (or CREEP, as it became known) was headed by Attorney General John Mitchell, who applied subtle pressure to acquire hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions. Part of CREEP’s team were the “plumbers,” which included the Watergate burglars who had been arrested three weeks before the Pocono concert. The arrest of this seemingly bungling assortment of CIA agents and former Bay of Pigs Invasion volunteers wasn’t taken seriously by voters until after Nixon won all but one state and the District of Columbia (the scene of the crime).
The Pocono concert had been structured to be a commercially successful version of Woodstock. From where we settled, we could hear music in the distance but we couldn’t see the stage, just the backs of hundreds of people and one totally naked guy whose picture I snapped as the definitive shot of the concept “standing out in a crowd.” Within an hour of arriving, I began to feel so sick that I said I had to go. So we trudged back to the car and drove back home. On Monday I was diagnosed as having walking pneumonia (no boogie woogie flu, however), which took me four days to recover from.
The concert, too, was ill-fated and hit with rain. Black Sabbath and Badfinger canceled, and a total of twelve bands never performed. April Lawton and Ramatam (which also included former Iron Butterfly guitarist Mike Pinera and former Jimi Hendrix drummer Mitch Mitchell) never achieved stardom. April died in November 2006. The dream of Woodstock changing the world also went unfulfilled. Instead the echo of “Monster” at Miami Pop continues forty years later:
We don’t know how to mind our own business’
Cause the whole world’s got to be just like us
Now we are fighting a war over there
No matter who’s the winner
We can’t pay the cost
Monster
Words and music by John Kay, Jerry Edmonton, Nick St. Nicholas and Larry Byrom
© Copyright MCA Music (BMI)
All rights for the USA controlled and administered by MCA Corporation of America, Inc
Photos ©1972 David P. Cannon
Before and After Woodstock ©2008 David P. Cannon
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