Billy Goes AWOL to Atlantic City Pop

July 1969 – Fort Dix New Jersey

Billy Muller – aka “Buzzy White,” was wrapping up a shooting round with his M1 on Range Road, out of bullets but still in shooting position, when he was approached by three guys he recognized from the base band. The two white guys from Tennessee and black dude from Louisiana came up to him and one of them says, “We heard youse from Atlantic City.”

“Yea, - I’m the Barrack’s concierge,” Billy laughs, as he gets up from the prone position and dusts off his uniform pants. "What do ya wanna know?" 

“Well where the hell is McKee City?” 

“Why? What’s in McKee City you want?"

“We want to see B.B. King, Booker T, Johnny Winter and Little Richard,” they each say a different name.

“Get out!” Billy said, as he took a poster out of the hand of one of the guys and looks at it closely. “Holy Shit! This is fucking amazing,” he says in barrack talk.

Although he didn’t know their names yet, he knew them from the base band, led by drill sergeant Leroy Brown, who enlisted Billy in the band when he saw his Les Paul guitar in his locker. Billy didn’t volunteer for the Army and didn’t volunteer for the base band, but he played, played for each of the units as they were preparing to leave for deployment overseas, mainly to Vietnam, and then they played for those who came back from Vietnam, as they got off the plane. He knew these guys were from the south by the way they talked, and the only thing they had in common with Billy was their mutual love of music, especially the blues.

Later that day, early in the evening, after a shower and change of uniform back at the barracks, the four soldiers sat down at the bar of the Satellite Lounge in Wrightstown, just outside the base. As little lights fluttered above their heads like twinkling stars, Billy cuts a deal before the band started playing and its too loud to talk.

“What’s so secret about McKee City?” the black guy asks, “we can’t find it on the map.”

“It’s a small town just across the bay from Atlantic City, and down the Pike a bit,” Billy explains, “and it’s home of the Atlantic City Race Track, where they race horses, and where the festival will be at.”

At, is one of the local diction, it isn’t where it is – it’s where it’s AT, as they say in South Jersey.

“I’ll tell you what,” Billy says. “If you borrow Sergeant Brown’s car for the weekend, I’ll drive us down there and bring us back Sunday night.”

“We got three day leaves, and tickets,” says one of the white guys, “and you got nothing.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Billy says, “we won’t need no tickets as we’re going in the back door, and when we get back, I’ll get three days in the brig for going AWOL and then they’ll ship us all to Vietnam, and this will be out last hurrah until we come home again.

They agreed, and when Sgt. Brown handed Billy the keys, he didn’t realized Billy was going AWOL and didn’t have a pass like the other guys, but he knew Billy liked going to Kentucky Avenue in Atlantic City as they had talked about it before, and so he asked Billy to stop by the Club Harlem and say hello to Chris Columbo, which Billy agreed to do.

They all piled into the old Plymouth, chipped in for gas, and Billy drove through the back roads of the Jersey Pine barrens, and stoped at Bond’s Halfway House on Route 70 for a cold one, before proceeding across the two lane blacktop past the Hedger House and Buzby’s General Store in Chatsworth to New Gretna and then down Route 9 to the Black Horse Pike.

Instead of following the lines of cars entering the main gate to the Race Track and Clubhouse, Billy turns down a small road that ran along the Race Track fence until he got to a small open gate that led to the barns and horse corrals and pulled up to a small trailer. He gets out and the other three watch him as he knocks on the trailer door and turns around a smiles as if he is up to something.

A teenage girl in tight jeans opens the door with a smile and gives Billy a hug and a kiss as he talks to her softly.

“Sure,” she says, “park right there, and your friends can sleep in the barn and you just jump that fence and walk across the track to get to the stage.”

Just as Billy imagined it would happen. 

The three soldiers put their sleeping bags and back packs in the barn, where they stake out spaces from themselves among some of the empty horse stalls, and then jump the fences and head for the stage as Billy and the girl retreat into the trailer.

The Atlantic City Pop Festival – Day One has begun.

The Atlantic City Pop Festival - August 1969

The Atlantic City Pop Festival – August 2-3-4 1969

The posters started appearing in head shops and record stores early in the summer – one for the Atlantic City Pop Fest and the other for the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair.

AC looked good, but Woodstock had the mythological flair about it – at least among those who followed the Hawks from Tony Marts to go with Dylan and ended up in Woodstock, the classic Bohemian artist, writers and music community in upstate New York.

With the face of a girl with a face painted in stripes, the Atlantic City Fest poster announced a great lineup: Iron Butterfly, Procol Harum, Booker T. & the M.G.s, Joni Mitchel, Chicago, Santana, Johnny Winter, Jefferson Airplane, Credence Clearwater Revival, Lighthouse, Crazy World of Arthur Brown (“Fire!”), B.B. King, Butterfield Blues Band, Tim Buckley, The Byrds, Hugh Masekela, American Dream, Janis Joplin, Canned Heat, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Sir Douglas Quintet, 3 Dog Night, Buddy Rich Big Band and Little Richard.

With a bird sitting on a guitar, the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair – boasted many of the same bands – but also included a few others – Melanie, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Sly and the Family Stone, John Sebastian, Sha-na-na, Sweetwater, Canned Heat, Credence Clearwater Revival, the Greatful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, The Who, Country Joe and the Fish, The Band, Jeff Beck, Blood-Sweat and Tears, Joe Cocker, Crosby Stills and Nash, Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Ten Years After and Johnny Winter.

The Band is what jumps out at you, as they followed Dylan to Woodstock and lived there, and they were Dylan’s band so he would certainly be there too, or so people thought, and that’s what added the additional mythology to Woodstock.

You could buy tickets to both festivals at most any record store or head shops – AC tickets went for $6 a day or $15 for three day pass, while Woodstock was $6.50 a day or $18 for all three days.

Two weeks before Woodstock became a household name in the late summer of 1969, 110,000 people converged on the Atlantic City Racetrack for the Atlantic City Pop Festival.

While Woodstock became a major cultural phenomenon, media event and movie, the Atlantic City Pop Festival was a musical experience of a lifetime for those who were there.

"It was the first time something of that magnitude hit the Jersey Shore, and nothing like it has happened since," says Robin Young, one of the many who paid $15 for a ticket for the three day affair.

As one of the first major shows, and by far the largest at that time, produced by the Electric Factory, the A.C. Pop Fest had its roots in the 22nd and Arch Street, the psychedelic former tire warehouse in center city Philadelphia, where many of the new bands of that era performed.

Larry Magid, along with his partners Herb and Alan Spivak, opened the Electric Factory the previous February, and introduced the Philadelphia audience to many of the West Coast groups that were then in the vanguard of the cultural revolution that was sweeping the country. San Francisco has its Haight Ashbury, New York has Greenwich Village and Philadelphia has Rittenhouse Square, where all the hippies would congregate to protest the war in Vietnam, play guitars and throw frisbees.

Around the corner on Sanson Street was the Apple Head Shop, owned by Dan and Pam Davis, who also owned the Birdcage Head Shop on the boardwalk in Ocean City. They sold posters, incense, pipes and jewelry, while around the corner, the Electric Factory brought in the music that attracted an increasing larger crowd of the psychedelic generation.

Magid and the Spivak brothers opened their club on February 2nd, 1968 with the Chamber Brothers, whose song, "Time Has Come Today," with its cowbell rhythm, was on the pop charts.

"Music is something you can rally around," Larry Magid said twenty years later, noting that for the most part, the bands booked for the Atlantic City Pop Festival had previously played the Electric Factory. "Chicago, then known as the Chicago Transit Authority, still played the Electric factory, but by that time, we had started doing shows at the Spectrum."

The A.C. Pop Fest however, was the biggest show they had attempted, and they did it right. The acts matched up and were equal to if not better than Woodstock, and the festival itself was much better organized.

The AC Pop Fest stage, designed by Buckminister Fuller, was round and rotated, so they could break down the last act and set up the equipment for the next one while another act performed, and things ran pretty smooth.

Whereas Woodstock was overwhelmed with a flood of counter-culture campers who crashed the gate, threw a party, left a mess for others to clean up, and lost money, at least until the movie came out, the Atlantic City Pop Festival went off without a hitch.

"They had a nice dream for Woodstock," says Magid, "they certainly had the place. People knew Woodstock at the time as the place where Bob Dylan lived. But they forgot to do the most important thing until it was too late - put the gate up. They sold too many tickets. Maybe if they were able to control their ticket sales they would have been able to control it."

On the other hand says Magid, "We had a good show, and I think it was successful mainly because it was a controlled environment at the race track, rather than an open field in the country."

Like Woodstock, which actually took place on Max Yasker's farm near Monticello, in Bethel, New York, local Mays Landing officials tried to ban a gathering of such undesirable elements.

Woodstock itself is still much the same small artists' colony it was 20 years ago, with local residents fighting attempts to hold similar large scale festivals.

From his Electric Factory office in Philadelphia, where he still runs the company that promotes concerts, Larry Magid said, "Any time you have a large influx of people, the township has to be concerned, and rightfully so. People around the country at the time weren't exactly thrilled with kids with long hair. But we thought we attracted a lot of people. We brought additional revenue to the area. We filled a lot of campgrounds and motels. And we ran an orderly show. Any problems we did have, we were able to contend with them quickly."

"We had a birth, we didn't have any deaths," says Magid, "and we had a good mix of progressive bands that were just beginning to get popular radio airplay, so we didn't have just kids, and sold tickets to people of all ages."

"For Dan Fogel, a Margate musician, it was a family outing. "My parents even went dressed up as hippies," Fogel recalls, "with my mom dressed like an Indian and dad as a cowboy. That's as far as hje got with the hippie thing."

"That was a big year for me," says Robin Young, of Ocean City. "It was the year I made the beach patrol and became a lifeguard. It was also the convergence of a lot of things - the anti-war movement, the psychedelic era, and the music."

"The thing that stands out the most in my mind," recalls Somers Point bartender Jonas Alexy, " is the guy I saw with a crewcut and military jacket with 'Cong Killer' written across his back."

Some people confuse the Atlantic City Pop Festival with another Electric Factory show with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young/Santana concert held at the same location a few years later. And for many, the good times of that period blend into one memory bank where it’s difficult to recall many details. To put all of this in the right time frame, the Atlantic City Pop Fest was held on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, August 1st, 2nd and 3rd, 1969. The Vietnam war was raging, the ghettos were burning, Richard Nixon was president and man had just landed on the moon.

The counter-culture movement rallied around music, and it was the music that was the attraction. "It was the first time that people in this area were hooked up with the West Coast music scene," contents Robin Young. The Byrds, with their "Eight Miles High," "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Turn, Turn, Turn," were there along with the Jefferson Airplane, the Chambers Brothers and Janis Joplin, rounding out the West Coast coningent.

There was also "B.B. King," already familiar to the Atlantic City audience, Dr. John, Iron Butterfly ("In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida"), Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Three Dog Night, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Rare Earth, Booker T. and the MGs.

Procol Harum played their classic, "Whiter Shade of Pale," Canned Heat did "Goin' Up the Country," and Author Brown sang a rousing version of his one hit wonder, "Fire,.....I get you to burn!," which was then a hit on the pop charts and radio.

The only problem anyone noticed was with Joni Mitchel, who followed a heavy act and when she felt, after one song, that nobody was listening to her, she complained and walked off the stage, not to return. Then when she couldn’t get to Woodstock because the highway was closed, she appeared on the Dick Cavitt TV show and sang a popular hit song, “Woodstock.”

Woodstock was billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” Atlantic City had 29 top flight acts, and Magid claims that, "while their show developed into that, it was both good and bad for them. It became unmanageable for the people that were running it, yet it was good because of what it became. Perhaps we gave them a little push."

The 110,000 attendance figure is also a little bit misleading. While Woodstock attracted over a half-million (500,000) people, the A.C. Pop Fest had between 30,000 and 40,000 people each day for three days, with many of the same people returning for each day. They were swimming nude in the Horse Shoe motel pool on the Pike, and when the motels and campgrounds were full they pitched tents in the woods behind the track.

Bill Muller of Ocean City was in boot camp at Fort Dix at the time. "Some guys from down south in my unit got leaves for the weekend and went looking for somebody who knew how to get to McKee City," Muller recalls. "I told them I would show them where it was if they would take me along, so I went AWOL. I took them right to the back stretch instead of to the front gate. We hopped the fence and enjoyed the weekend before going to Nam."

Young remembers that the only big problem he saw was when Hugh Masekela came on and played some soft quiet music after another band had just stirred the crowd into a frenzy with some dancing in lines up and down the isles. "One guy was so hot and sweaty he decided to take a dip in the infield lake," Young recalls, "and before long all the people were running towards the lake, pushing and shoving, and I think some people got hurt." The only known casualty.”

As far as concert security goes, Magid says, "Rock n' Roll is just like any other industry - it matures. You develop different systems to meet different problems. Hopefully there will be even better ways to do things. We'd like to make the audience more comfortable."

Between sets many people mingled among the flea market booths that were set up in the Club House. At the time many people drank cheap wine, like Boone's Farm, out of brown suede flasks. Another guy says, "Me and my buddy didn't see too much of the music, we were really busy trying to score with the hippie chicks."

Dan and Pam Davis, who ran the head shops on Sansom street and the Ocean City Boardwalk, set up a table concession at the track and sold posters and trinkets to the audience. "That was some show," Dan said, reflecting on the Pop Fest. "I'm still into it today, on tour with the Greatful Dead - riding around the country from concert to concert in a mobile home, selling things in the parking lot before and after the shows." Pam says that "Turquoise is making a comeback, but crystals are the big thing now."

"We had one other show there, the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Santana. But it is very expensive to have a show at the track. It's hard to work around the horse race meets, and sometimes in this business, it's not possible to do that. Artists compete for dates or go to the place where they'll do the best. We were happy with the two shows wed did there, but now we have JFK and the Vet, which are less expensive and bigger."

The Atlantic City Pop Festival, it seems, was a once in a lifetime occurrence.

I caught the last show on the last night and will never forget it. Having graduated from high school that spring, and getting ready for college, I worked all weekend making pizza at Mack & Manco's on the Ocean City (NJ) boardwalk. My peers were persuasive in convincing me to go along with them after work Sunday night to try to catch the last few acts.

The gates were open and people were starting to leave, but as we made our way towards the stage, through the throngs of people, I could see Little Richard swinging a fur coat around his head while singing, "Good Golly, Miss Molly!" It was starting to drizzle, but the place was going wild. Everyone was dancing, their arms flailing when Little Richard took his fur coat and flung it into the crowd.

When he broke into "Tutti Frutti," I suddenly realized what rock n' roll was all about. I looked at my buddies and we all knew the answer to the question we had been asking all week, "Are we going to Woodstock?"

The Atlantic City Pop Fest may not be as famous as Woodstock, but it was a better concert, a more organized show, and changed the lives of a lot of people.

"It was the right place at the right time," says Larry Magid. "It was the timing as much as anything, right smack in the middle of that whole era. It was a good experience for many, and when that movement kept getting bigger and more popular and was not just for the moment, not just a fad, the festival became part of our history and folklore."