Act 1 Scene 5 - The Festivals as Planned

Act 1 Scene 5 -

The Festivals as Planned

Most of the people at the Jersey Shore went about their business and good times for that 1969 Memorial Day weekend, but back in the city teams of men would be making plans for a series of music festivals set for that August, three months later.

After the 1965 Newport Folk Fest, the 1967 Monterey Pop Fest was the key catalyst for the three big festivals planned for the summer of 1969 – the Atlantic City Pop Festival, Woodstock and Altamont, California.

Newport, then the home of the America’s Cup sailboat regatta and where John F. Kennedy got married, was where the rich and famous took their vacations, so the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals were fairly reserved events, until 1965, when Dylan turned things upside down by plugging in his guitar and “going electric.”

So by 1969 the idea of producing  major popular music festivals had matured to the point where there was major financial backing but little grounded experience, so the producers had to figure it out. The Philadelphia Electric Factory duo of Larry Magid and Jerry Spivak and Jerry’s brothers Herb and Allen knew the concert promotion ropes, and with the Atlantic City Race Track venue, had an enclosed and controlled area where they put on the most organized of the three festivals that summer, one that would precede Woodstock by a few weeks and boasted many of the same acts.

After opening the original Electric Factory in an old tire warehouse at 22^nd and Arch Street on February 2, 1968, they knew most of the acts personally from having previously booked them. Magid had previously worked as a booking agent in New York city and his alcohol free club open to all ages, laid down the anchor for a new hip Philadelphia neighborhood on the west side of center city near the end of Sansom Street, where Danny Davis had his head shop that complimented the Birdcage on the Ocean City boardwalk.

Steve, a 99 Percenter biker in 1965 and his twin brother Elliot had the Guitar Workshop nearby, and it was Steve who produced the program for the first few Philadelphia Folk Festivals.

Just around the corner Rittenhouse Square was the fashionable high rise neighborhood park where the hippies gathered in Philly like they did at Height-Asbury in San Francisco and Greenwich Village in New York City. And it was on one of the higher floors of a skyscraper that overlooked Rittenhouse Square where the WMMR radio DJs could look out their window to see the Square, and where Dave Herman the radio man had convinced the owners and producers to let him play popular 33 1/3 albums for a few hours on Sunday nights during his Marconi Experiment radio show.

Herman’s time slot got so popular with young people that they eventually flipped the Easy Listening Elevator Music programming to the AOR – Album Oriented Rock format the Herman introduced and they kept it even after Herman left the station for WNEW in New York, where he did the same thing in the bigger market.

While Magid and Spivak organized the Atlantic City Pop Fest, the Woodstock promoters, whose posters already promoted the upstate New York Arts and Music Festival, had a hard time convincing the Woodstock town council of the benefits of their project.

Woodstock had already seen a marked increase in the hippie tourists arriving daily in search of Dylan and the answers to the questions he couldn’t and wouldn’t provide, so they certainly weren’t going to permit thousands, tens of thousands, or the estimates of hundreds of thousands of hippies descending on their quaint, little village, so they turned down the promoter’s request for a permit, with the support of most of the locals, including Dylan.

In looking for alternative sites for their festival they approached Max Yasker, a farmer who they promised to compensate handsomely to allow them to build a stage at the base of a huge hill that Yasker had farmed, and got the Bethel, New York town council to approve the deal, with the conditions that they provide the portable toilets and necessary security for the event.

In California the promoters settled on Altamont auto speedway as a controlled arena for their outdoor event, and included many of the acts that would be featured at Atlantic City and Woodstock, but topped them off by booking the Rolling Stones, that weren’t included in either of the other festivals.

While they had more time to organize Altamont, and the Woodstock guys were having trouble building a stage and having a fence built, they printed and sold tickets, but struggled to get the show organized.

Magid and the Spivak brothers were on top of their event, and in the end the Atlantic City Pop Fest was belatedly recognized as probably the best of the three music festivals that summer, but the masses of hundreds of thousands of young kids coming together at one place at the same time created such chaos, especially at Woodstock, and the catastrophe at Altamont would prevent any such large scale festival from taking place again for a long time.

But still in the beginning of the summer planning stages, the chaos and catastrophe still had to play out, and nobody knew what would happen or how it would go, though everyone knew it was going to be big and festive, and the music would be great.

Next: Act 1 Scene 7 - The Girls Go Missing 

That 1969 Memorial Day weekend - as the newspapers reported two coeds missing, another news report was published in the Press of Atlantic City that read:

Study Maps Explosion of Violence – By Jean M. White – Special to the Press and The Washington Post 

WASHINGTON – The 1960s have exploded into one of the most turbulent eras of violence prone American people, a presidential task force reported Thursday.

The multi-million word research study – as long as seven or eight novels – exhaustively surveys “Violence in American: Historical and Comparative Perspectives.”

The authors underscore that Americans have always been a violent and even “rather bloody-minded” people, almost echoing in scholarly observations the “violence-is-as-American as cherry-pie” phrase of Negro militant H. Rap Brown.

But they also point out that recent violence has appeared in several forms “unprecedented” in American history – political assassinations, university unrest, and anti-war protest. The study also notes the recent spiral in the rates of violent crime and the turn toward black aggression in the long conflict between the races.

The research report was released Thursday on the first anniversary of the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. That act led to the appointment of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence.

The historical and comparative analysis of American violence is one of seven task force studies that will form the basis --- …..