31 July — 53rd anniversary of the first day of a legendary rock festival: the one in Powder Ridge, Connecticut, featuring Sly & The Family Stone, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, Janis Joplin, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Jethro Tull, The Allman Brothers… none of whom turned up.
The problem, according to music magazine Crawdaddy was that the organisers had planned it in Connecticut,
a state generally populated by fuddy-duds, buzzkills, and sticks-in-the-mud. No one there over the age of 35 wants anyone under the age of 25 to have any fun at all
On 28 July, you see, Middlefield Superior Court granted local residents a temporary injunction against the organisers, and an appeal was not possible.
So, around 10,000 to 50,000 (depending on your source) people who’d bought $20 tickets ($150+ today)… turned up anyway and made the occasion a memorable one by taking a ton of drugs and shitting in a pond so much it was declared a health hazard.
A measure of the events can be found in two New York Times stories published 24 hours apart. The first, headlined Youths at Powder Ridge Maintain Festival Atmosphere, describes people “talking, turning on, carrying candles, laughing and singing”. The second…
The problem, as explained in William Manchester’s 1,400-page The Glory and The Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972, was that the injunction was issued in time to stop the bands, but not the audience.
Manchester presents what he writes as straight reportage, but the disapproval is palpable (although admittedly ‘voiding and defecating’ in your swimming facility/water source isn’t what you might call a brilliant long-term policy).
“Peddlers roamed through the crowd”, apparently,
hawking marijuana, cocaine, heroin … barbiturates, speed, and LSD. State police arrested seventy pushers leaving the crowd, one of them with $13,000 in his pocket, but most of them got away.
What of the people who didn’t have spare cash to buy drugs, though? Well, this was an equal opportunities sort of festival…
What could possibly go wrong? Well, that’s where the second of those NYT stories comes in:
A physican serving as medical director of the aborted rock music festival near here said early this morning that the drug situation that he had described yesterday as approaching the crisis stage was no longer so serious. The physician, Dr. William Abruzzi, declared early today that “there was no drug crisis tonight.” He said that the number of young persons being treated for “bad drug trips” at the temporary medical facilities had dropped from 50 an hour Friday evening and Saturday to a total of 20 to 30 over four hours late last night and early today.
The good doctor told the NYT: “Woodstock was a pale pot scene. This is a heavy hallucinogens scene.” By this stage, people had had enough
Some responsibility for the debacle has to be laid at the feet of local authorities, who had apparently been ordered “to enforce the injunction by any means necessary”, and took the draconian — one might almost say fascistic — step of… er, putting up some signs
Little wonder that — after shelling out his $20 and hitchhiking for 24 hours — Steve Scarano told the NYT that
he had heard over the car radio about the court injunction prohibiting the festival, but he decided to go anyway ‘to see what it looks like’.
William Manchester quotes John Morthland, then assistant editor of Rolling Stone, saying that “of the forty-eight major festivals slated [for 1970], only eighteen were held”. None, though, managed to be not held quite as spectacularly as Powder Ridge.
Perhaps the most inadvertently eloquent detail in Manchester’s account is his final flourish, designed to shock us at the wanton depravity of it all (rather than, for example, the absolute lack of interest in whether the woman experienced any pleasure):
Anyway, you can read more at any of the links above, and at an archived site about the event, where I got a couple of the images.
