Powder Ridge Rock Festival
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The Powder Ridge Rock Festival was scheduled to be held July 30, August 1 and August 2 1970 at Powder Ridge Ski Resort in Middlefield, Connecticut. Powder Ridge was a fiasco of historic proportions. A legal injunction forced the event to be cancelled, keeping the musicians away; but a crowd of 30,000 attendees[#endnote_nyt31july] arrived anyway, to find no food, no entertainment, no adequate plumbing, and at least seventy drug pushers. William Manchester[#endnote_manchester] wrote: "Powder Ridge was an accident waiting to happen, and it happened." Volunteer doctor William Abruzzi declared a drug "crisis" on 1 August and said "Woodstock was a pale pot scene. This is a heavy hallucinogens scene."[#endnote_nyt2august]
Announcement and preparations
Tickets were sold by mail at a price of $20 for the whole weekend. The announced line-up of musicians was stellar:
- Day 1: Eric Burdon & War, Sly and the Family Stone, Delaney & Bonnie, Fleetwood Mac, Melanie, Mountain, J.F. Murphy and Free Flowing Salt, Allan Nichols, James Taylor
- Day 2: Joe Cocker, Allman Brothers, Cactus, Little Richard, Van Morrison, Rhinoceros, Ten Wheel Drive, Jethro Tull, Tony Williams Lifetime, Zephyr
- Day 3: Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, Bloodrock, Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, Grand Funk Railroad, Richie Havens, John B. Sebastian, Spirit, Ten Years After
Lawsuit
Powder Ridge might have been a legendary hippie music fest had things gone right. In the year following Woodstock, however, things often went wrong for hippie music fests. Thirty of the forty-eight major festivals planned for 1970 were cancelled, usually due to swiftly-materializing local opposition. Powder Ridge, however, made national news because of the arrival of tens of thousands of ticketholders despite the event's cancellation. The New York Times followed its progress in about thirty articles before, during, and after the event.
Middlefield residents, worried about the impact of the crowd on their small town, received an injunction against the festival just days before it began.
When the owner of the ski resort tried to contact the promoters to tell of the injunction, they could not be found. It looked like the event was never going to happen anyway.
Attendees arrive anyway
Local authorities posted warning signs on every highway leading to Middlefield: "Festival Prohibited, turn back".
By 1970, rock festivals were regarded as having a political dimension. Carol Brightman wrote that "Rock shows... such as the Powder Ridge concert... were increasingly being covered by the national media as civil events, one step removed from street demonstrations." The CIA had Powder Ridge, like other rock events, under surveillance, and noted in a July 30 situation report that "hippie-type young people [were] already beginning to assemble in the area."[#endnote_brightman]
Promoters, however, kept hinting that there was still a chance that the concert would be held: "It's a total wait and see thing," a spokesman[#endnote_hartfordadvocate]said and, after all, Woodstock had almost been cancelled too.
Approximately 30,000 people came to the site for the weekend. Most of the musicians, however, did not show up. Only Melanie and a few local bands actually performed during the three-day weekend.
The festival scene
Drugs were openly sold and commonly consumed at the festival. The famed rock doctor William Abruzzi (also at Woodstock) was there to treat bad LSD trips, and said there were more bad trips at Powder Ridge per capita than at any other music festival he'd ever worked. He attributed some of the problems to the barrels of "electric water" that were available for free public consumption; people were invited to drop donations of drugs into these barrels, creating drug cocktails of unknown strength and composition.
William Manchester[#endnote_manchester2] writes:
- One of the more sensational scenes, attested to by several witnesses, occurred in a small wood near some homes. A boy and a girl, both naked and approaching from different directions, met under the trees. On impulse they suddenly embraced. She dropped to her knees, he mounted her from behind, and after he had achieved his climax they parted—apparently without exchanging a word.
- The gentle euphoria—the grins, small smiles, and exchanged "V" signals— of people milling through the muddy fields of Bethel seemed to be missing at Powder Ridge. Instead, last night and this morning, the major pastime here was often shuffling walks along paved roads by grim-faced young men and women who looked remarkably similar to old people moving slowly along the boardwalks of the Rockaways or Atlantic City.
Aftermath
Although the promoters of the festival announced plans to reschedule the event for another location, no such plans ever came through, and no refunds were ever issued to the ticket buyers.
Notes
- ↑ Estimates vary from 15,000 to 50,000. "30,000" is from a New York Times article, July 31, 1970 p. 24
- ↑ William Manchester, 1972, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932-1972, pp. 1212-1213. Bantam Books
- ↑ [Drug peril eases at Powder Ridge], The New York Times, August 2, 1970, p. 58
- ↑ Carol Brightman, 1998, Sweet Chaos : The Grateful Dead's American Adventure; Clarkson Potter, ISBN 051759448X
- ↑ [Plenty of Sex and Drugs, But No Rock ´n´ Roll], 2005 Hartford Advocate article
- ↑ Manchester, op. cit.
- ↑ "Drug peril eases at Powder Ridge", The New York Times, August 2, 1970, p. 58
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