[2 articles] The Forgotten Festival
http://www.houstonpress.com/2009-09-03/music/the-forgotten-festival/ The 1969 Texas International Pop Festival By Chris Gray September 01, 2009 This entire summer, pop culture has been inundated with Woodstock nostalgia. Warner Home Video got the ball rolling back in June with a deluxe DVD edition of Woodstock, featuring the four-hour director's cut of Michael Wadleigh's Oscar-winning 1970 documentary and yards of bonus footage in a box designed to look like a fringe jacket. Rhino Records followed a few weeks later with Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm, a six-disc monster with performances by most of the artists who appeared that rain-soaked August weekend in upstate New York Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the Grateful Dead with stage announcements like Chip Monck's famous "brown acid" remarks. Rolling Stone weighed in with a portfolio of conveniently unearthed "lost" photographs, and The New York Times devoted most of the front page of its August 9 Arts & Leisure section to Jon Pareles's commemorative essay. "It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naiveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed," the paper's chief pop music critic wrote. "Woodstock's young, left-of-center crowd was quickly recognized as a potential army of consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again." Oh, there's more. Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee's based-on-a-true-story comic memoir, Taking Woodstock, opened across the country last weekend, and various books and television remembrances have been popping up for weeks. All this product, literally hundreds of dollars worth, is enough to make an old hippie choke on his or her love beads. But another significant Aquarian anniversary is about to pass with hardly a nostalgic peep from the media this one a lot closer to home. Labor Day weekend 1969, scarcely two weeks after Woodstock, thousands upon thousands of hippies and shorter-haired young people from across the South and Southwest descended on another outdoor musical gathering. This one, held at the Dallas International Motor Speedway a racetrack on the shores of Lake Lewisville in Denton County was the Texas International Pop Festival. Texas Pop's attendance was quite a bit smaller than Woodstock's, an estimated 120,000 to 150,000 compared to anywhere between 300,000 and 500,000. But it was still a lot of folks, perhaps the largest public gathering in the state to date. In Got No Shoes, Got No Blues, an unreleased film about the festival, one onlooker sizes up the masses of people around him the only way he knows how: by comparing it to a football game. Texas Pop's smaller size probably worked to its advantage; the festival was not plagued with the traffic, hygiene and overcrowding problems of Woodstock. There were no fights, and the dozen or two arrests were mostly people trying to sneak in. The fences held, keeping the festival from becoming a free-for-all like in New York. It didn't rain, which made a world of difference, and exactly one person died from heatstroke. Exactly one person was also born at the Speedway that weekend, proving yet again that God has a very interesting sense of humor. But in many other respects, the two festivals could have been identical. Yes, there were plenty of drugs and nudity at both. But, notes Richard Hayter, who runs the Web site www.texaspopfestival.com and is working on a book about the festival, the doctors who showed up expecting to treat a bunch of overdoses all weekend instead wound up mostly patching up people's cut bare feet. Many performers Joplin, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter, Incredible String Band, Ten Years After and Sweetwater barely had a chance to unpack their road cases from Woodstock. Appropriately, Texas Pop swapped the folky strains of Havens, Baez and CSNY for a heavy blues element: B.B. King, Freddie King, James Cotton, Delaney & Bonnie, Sam & Dave and Tony Joe White all played, B.B. King all three days. Texas Pop marked Santana's Lone Star debut, and fell at the end of the first U.S. tour by a band of brash young British blues-rockers Led Zeppelin, who "brought the house down," Hayter says. One more thing Texas Pop had in common with Woodstock was that financially, they were both disasters. The main promoter, Angus Wynne heir to the Six Flags amusement-park empire conceived Texas Pop at the Atlanta International Pop Festival that July and flew up to Woodstock in a Lear jet. He and his partners lost around $100,000 on the festival, a 1985 Dallas Morning News article reported. Probably the most remarkable thing about Texas Pop is that it happened at all. This was Texas in 1969. The narrative of Got No Shoes, Got No Blues juxtaposes images and interviews from the festival with a typical cowboy-hatted, pickup-driving redneck who, as he sips from a can of Pearl, listens to a Dallas radio talk show decrying Texas Pop as an example of "hippie hypocrisy" and moral ruin. A Morning News editorial about the festival spells out the establishment's opinion in no uncertain terms. "Young people assembling to hear music is one thing," it begins. "Young people assembling in unspeakable costumes, half-naked, barefooted, defying propriety and scorning morality is another. Who and where are their parents? Where do these young people get the money to loaf around the country in their smelly regalia? "The great majority of youngsters in this area are at home where they ought to be, mowing yards, working part-time jobs and preparing for useful lives," the editors conclude. "In the meantime, the lewd and loose in Lewisville will swing and sway. They are to be pitied." The Texas Pop Festival may have occurred in Woodstock's shadow, and may not be getting nearly the amount of retrospective hosannas, but it hasn't wilted. Hayter runs an active Texas Pop Yahoo! discussion group; lately there's been talk on there of some sort of reunion event. He compares the festival's relative lack of anniversary attention to Farrah Fawcett dying the same day as Michael Jackson, but he and others who were there don't need a bunch of CDs, DVDs and articles to remind them of that weekend, because that weekend has never left them. "I get a lot of mail and e-mail from people who went," he says. "A lot of people say that festival changed their lives that from that weekend on, they completely did an about-face. I've talked to a lot of people who were in the service, and had either just got out or were on leave or whatever, and it just completely changed their outlook. I think that's the biggest thing." -- [email protected] -------- Hippies flocked to Lewisville for music festival 40 years ago http://www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/localnews/news8/stories/wfaa090901_mo_pops.13cbf7ed3.html September 2, 2009 By GARY REAVES LEWISVILLE - Two weeks after Woodstock, there were three more days of peace, love and music, and it all took place in Lewisville. As the 1969 Texas International Pop Festival neared, some in the media predicted a Texas-sized hippie invasion. In fact, one radio station announced it was just that. "It's all outdoors," the radio station announced. "Neither rain nor hail nor public opinion deters the savage attack on ear drums, public morals, private morality or just plain decency." Still, 120,000 or more flocked to Lewisville for the Texas International Pop Festival, which drew an eclectic mix of musicians that included the blazing horns of Chicago, the blues of B.B. King and the country-rock of Tony Joe White, who sang his now classic hit "Polk Salad Annie." Never released video footagecaptured the whole show, which was so huge that the headliners, Janis Joplin and Led Zeppelin, didn't get on until the wee hours of the morning. The festival was planned in just 40 days by a then long-haired local producer Angus Wynne III. "When you hear the words peace and love you kind of smirk a little," he said. "But it worked that way." Wynne's long locks are long gone, but the memories live on. "I didn't know how much risk it was until I went up to Woodstock and realized the chance for massive failure," he said. Initially, Woodstock's producers lost millions. Wynne vowed his festival would be run better. "People who were there lacked for nothing," he said. "We had plenty of everything - restrooms, water, all kinds of facilities." Thousands camped along Lake Lewisville, but the concert itself was on a race track parking lot off Interstate 35, which is now Hebron Parkway in Lewisville. Back then, Gary Nichols, who now works for News 8, was 18. "It was covered with people, and most of them were hippies," he recalled while standing on the concert grounds. Nichols covered the event for the Richland High School paper. He met Janis Joplin as she stepped off a helicopter. "Just her and the pilot standing there," he said. "She looked lost. So, I said 'Nice dress'. She said 'Do you like it? I designed it myself.'" She was thirsty, so Nichols bought her a soda. "Then, a girl walked up to her very shyly and said 'Aren't you Janis Joplin?'" he said. "And she said, 'Yeah.' The girl said 'Wow, you look just like a regular chick,' and Janis said 'that's cause I am just a regular chick.'" At least, until she hit the stage. Predictions of mayhem never came true. The biggest conflict was between skinny dipping hippies in the lake and locals gawking from boats. Wavy Gravy, from the California-based commune Hog Farm, grabbed a megaphone to tell the naked hippies, "If you want to turn on it's cool; just wear some pants." There were lots of drugs, but the police chief reported only made a handful of arrests. "As orderly as you've been, you've showed the elders something they needed to be shown a long, long time," he said from the stage. Today, there is no hint of the history at the site. But, down in Hillsboro, there is plenty at the new Texas Musicians Museum. "What's surprising to me is how unknown it is," said Tom Kreason, the museum's founder and curator. "The Texas festival was overshadowed by Woodstock in 1969 and on every anniversary since." But, as the fading clippings in Wynne's scrapbook show, it was a week when the whole world looked towards Lewisville for what some may call the greatest rock 'n' roll show in Texas history. -- E-mail [email protected] . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
