Wadena Rocks On

(Second of two parts. Part one here.)

Wadena was—and is—a town in Fayette County, Iowa, population about 250. It’s located approximately as far from Dubuque as it is from Waterloo, northeast of one and northwest of the other. Forty years ago this week, it was the flashpoint for a conflict between concert promoters planning a rock festival and local and state officials trying to stop it. On Friday, July 31, 1970, while bands loitered in hotels and fans waited at the site, attorneys argued in front of a judge. Late that afternoon, the festival got grudging permission to go ahead, and the first band, Fuse, hit the stage.

The festival crowd was estimated at 40,000. From Friday night through Sunday night, their every need—for food, drink, souvenirs, and drugs—was met by vendors on the site. And all the while, there was music. News stories appearing in Iowa newspapers that weekend did not usually mention the performers, perhaps believing the names would mean little to their adult readers. And as was the case at other festivals of this type, not all of the publicized acts appeared—the Who didn’t make it to little Wadena, as advertised at the beginning of the week—but the Everly Brothers and Little Richard did, with Little Richard going on at 4AM Saturday morning.  Johnny Winter, Rotary Connection, Buffy Ste. Marie, Mason Proffit, Chicken Shack, Luther Allison, and Albert King also played that weekend.

When the music ended Sunday night, most of the attendees cleared out, with only a few hundred hanging on into Monday. They, too, eventually dispersed, leaving only trash behind.  The general consensus of local residents was that things were not as bad as they could have been. That, too, was part of the pattern from earlier festivals. But so was the post-festival legal retribution.

On Sunday night, Sound Storm, Inc., was slapped with a million-dollar lawsuit by Fayette County, claiming that everything the promoters had done was “illegal from start to finish” and seeking restitution for the county’s expenses as well as damages. The Fayette County attorney noted that there were only a dozen-or-so drug arrests, and he criticized law enforcement officials for “turn[ing] your heads not to make arrests.”  Iowa Governor Robert Ray, who had attended the festival on Saturday and mingled with the kids, joined in the criticism. (Pundits would wonder whether public reaction to the festival would have an impact on Ray’s reelection bid that fall.) Officials of the Fayette County Fair, which had been going on over the weekend, blamed the festival for cutting its gate receipts by 25 to 50 percent. The U.S. Department of Agriculture even got involved, to determine if the festival had violated any federal regulations.

After the jump: The festival aftermath keeps lawyers employed for years.

Storm in Wadena

By the late summer of 1970, rock festivals were busting out all over, and local government officials across the country found themselves playing defense against them. They passed ordinances to make mass gatherings difficult, and they sought court injunctions against those that planned to go forward anyhow. In July, the same promoters who had put on the Sound Storm Festival in Wisconsin during April planned another festival for Galena, Illinois, but when it was stopped by injunction there, they picked Fayette County, Iowa, as their alternate location, specifically the little town of Wadena, population 251. They bought a 220-acre farm from a local family on July 20, and announced the festival for the weekend of July 31 through August 2.

The immediate reaction from officials was familiar to observers of other festivals, such as the one that had been held near Iola, Wisconsin, in June. “I am against the festival and I think it is an underhanded deal,” one Fayette County supervisor said. “They ought to keep the whole damn thing in Chicago.” He added, “We’re going to do everything we can to get the festival stopped.” There was hand-wringing over the bad example an influx of hippies would set for local youth. In defense of the locals, officials of Chicago-based Sound Storm, Inc., had said nothing about a rock festival to the owners of the farm they bought. All they said was something about building a resort, so the residents’ anger about being blindsided was legitimate. Iowa Governor Robert Ray said that local concerns were justified.

Reaction to the reaction, from the promoters, was also familiar: “Some fine citizens still don’t believe that our culture can get it together for a few days in an air of peace and mutual responsibility,” a press release from Sound Storm, Inc., said. “We’ve tried to rid ourselves of the shortcomings of previous music festivals in the Midwest.” They had arranged for fencing, medical care, parking, food, and security at the site, and promised to issue every attendee a garbage bag to carry out what they’d brought in.

Promoters also announced their list of prospective performers, which featured a mix of superstars and lesser-known acts, as well as local and regional bands. Among those mentioned in news coverage leading up to the event: the Who, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, REO Speedwagon, Poco, Tim Hardin, Buffy Ste. Marie, the Guess Who, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Rotary Connection, the Chambers Brothers, Mason Proffit, Ian and Sylvia, the Youngbloods, and Oz.

After the jump: Both sides bring on the lawyers.

Dev and Jeem

This wasn’t the post I intended to put up here today, although it’s one I knew I’d have to write eventually.

It was the fall of 1986. I’d been in Macomb, Illinois, for three years, the last year on the morning show. Now I wanted out, to get to a bigger city, to climb another rung on the ladder, back when I still thought I was a major-market air talent on the rise. Sometime in November I saw an ad in Radio and Records from KRVR in Davenport, Iowa, a “soft AC” looking for an afternoon guy. Davenport was part of the Quad Cities, a market of about 300,000. That’s what I’m talking about, I thought, so I cobbled together my package and sent it off.

It wasn’t long before I got invited up for an interview. It was at that point that I learned “soft AC” meant “elevator music” and “afternoons” meant 2 to 9PM (!), voicetracked. But an interview was an interview, and so I hopped in the car and drove two hours up the road to Davenport to meet with the program director, Dave Whiskeyman. In a job interview, I can usually tell within a few minutes whether I’ve got a legitimate shot at the gig, or if it’s just a courtesy. Dave and I hit it off so well, bantering easily with one another right from the start, that I felt very good about my chances to get the job, and I didn’t worry about the elevator-music part. So it wasn’t a great surprise when they made me an offer. A couple of weeks before Christmas–December 9, 1986, if I’m recalling correctly—I gave my notice to the folks at WKAI.

My first day at KRVR was January 5, 1987. Dave and I worked closely together for the next two-plus years. For a period of months, we did a promotion for a local realtor that required us to broadcast short reports from two or three open houses over a weekday noon hour. We both lived on the Iowa side of the Quad Cities, but most of the remotes were on the Illinois side, so we frequently found ourselves hopelessly lost, wandering like Flying Dutchmen through the wilds of East Moline or some damn place, in those days before cell phones, trying to figure out how the hell to get where we were supposed to be. But we weren’t just boss and employee, we were friends, too. We drank beer together and shared scandalous tales of people each of us had known. One day, for reasons lost to history, we started fooling around with accents while working in the production room, and forever after I referred to him as “Dev” and he referred to me as “Jeem.” His was the first CD player I ever heard, and I can still see us standing there in his music room listening to it, and my being astounded at the clarity of the sound. Working together wasn’t without its frictions—he was the still the boss, and I think I made his job harder sometimes simply as a function of being the person I was then.

Dave left the station at the end of 1989; I followed not long afterward. He went into the video-production business, although in recent years he was drawn back into radio, working part-time at a couple of stations and happy to be there, just as I am. We had lost touch by the turn of the millennium, although we regained it over the last couple of years thanks to Facebook. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the spring; I wanted to get back down to the Quad Cities to see him one more time, and almost made it last month before circumstances intervened. I thought about going down yesterday, my last day off for a while, and I should have. Dave passed this early this morning. If I’m doing the arithmetic correctly, he was 57. He leaves behind a family, and I know that of the things that mattered to him the most in life, they were first.

This post would probably be more interesting to you if I could remember better stories about Dave. Perhaps in the days to come, I’ll be reminded of a few by some of our mutual friends and colleagues. But a central fact about this blog is one I warned you about in the very first post six years ago: Sometimes it will be so personal that I’m the only one who’ll get it. If this is one of those times, so be it: So long, Dev. Everybody get out of here—there’s a lobster loose.

Back to the Gardens Everywhere

(Edited to modify a link.)

As I have noted here before, 1970 was America’s rock festival summer—kids wanted to frolic in the sun (or the rain, or the mud) for a weekend like the Woodstock Nation had, and promoters in all corners of the country were ready to take advantage of their desire. The first festivals, such as Sound Storm, brought a third player into the mix—state and local officials, who feared that festivals would cause a general breakdown of law and order in their communities, or an environmental or public-health catastrophe. So by summer’s height, rare was the festival that wasn’t preceded by a great deal of legal jousting. And often, once the music stopped and the garbage was picked up, the action moved back to courts and government hearing rooms, as after the Iola People’s Fair.

Near Middlefield, Connecticut, a festival scheduled for the Powder Ridge Ski Area was stopped by injunction only a couple of days before its scheduled start on Thursday, July 30, 1970. It was going to be a monster, starring several Woodstock veterans and a rumored appearance by Led Zeppelin. After local residents got the festival stopped, signs were posted on the roads to the site saying “festival prohibited,” but no matter—between 30,000 and 50,000 people showed up anyhow. Scheduled bands that had made it to the site could not perform under pain of arrest, although Melanie eventually did. Most of the music that weekend was provided by the attendees themselves, either on instruments they had brought or through stereo systems and car radios, amidst a blizzard of drug use that made Woodstock veterans blanch.

On the very same weekend half-a-continent away, several days of court hearings left fans, bands, promoters, and public officials hanging until the very last minute on Friday to learn whether a festival scheduled for the Iowa hamlet of Wadena that weekend would be allowed to proceed. On Thursday and Friday of this week, we’ll tell the story of the Wadena Rock Festival, so be sure to stop back for that.

This week is also the anniversary of the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, a massive 1973 show held at a racetrack in western New York featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band, and the Band. I can remember hearing about that one when it happened—the news coverage it received was on-par with Woodstock four years earlier, but the difference was that in 1973, I was paying attention. But where Woodstock was a quintessential event of the 1960s, Watkins Glen was much more of the 1970s—it was a weekend’s diversion for 600,000, and not an event that galvanized a generation. You can read more about Watkins Glen in my post at WNEW.com.

More Recommended Reading: I’m pleased to see that Kevin, a longtime friend of this blog, has started posting again at his site, Got the Fever, after a life-enforced hiatus. Few bloggers write about their music with as much passion as Kevin does, so we’d all best get back in the habit of heading over to his place regularly. Also recommended: At Popdose, Rob Smith pays tribute to REO Speedwagon’s “Keep on Loving You,” and 30 Days Out goes searching for Robert Johnson.

Turn Back Now

We missed the Green County Fair again this year, back in my home town. Every year, we talk about going, but we rarely make it. We’ve been back only a couple of times since we moved home to Wisconsin a decade ago, and I think I know the reason why: When I was a kid growing up on a dairy farm four miles from town, the fair was the highlight of the summer. Today, to my citified self, it feels a bit like an anachronism.

Whenever we do get back there, one of my favorite things to do at the fair is to wander through the cattle barns, which was where I spent my fairs as a kid. How many of today’s kids, now so deeply involved in agriculture, a field that was likely to break your heart 35 years ago and is many more times likely to do so today, will pursue city careers after high school or college and never look back? Many, if not most. Yet there’s something charming about the decorated barns, the carefully named animals, and the kids, some undoubtedly the children of my own 4-H contemporaries, lounging in the hay beside their animals, secure in the feeling that this is where they’ll always want to be.

To walk through the Exhibition Hall and to look at the various photography, gardening, and woodworking projects is to remember my own attempts at such projects, and to remember how, after the fair was over, those projects seemed like fallen leaves that had outlived their useful purpose. I wonder how many of these projects lead today’s kids to lifelong hobbies, and how many become junk in the back of the closet, just another “thing I was into for a while when I was a kid”?

Almost everything that seems eternal and unchanging to the young does indeed change, but then again, certain things about the Green County Fair do appear timeless. The faded signs on the old Stock Pavilion still say “The Show Window of Southern Wisconsin,” although the pavilion is no longer where kids such as I was meet their moments of terror in the show ring. Kids still stay overnight in the barns. The Monroe VFW and Monticello Music Parents food stands have been in the same spots for as long as I can remember, which means 40 years at least. On the midway, the biggest changes are the fashions kids wear and the price of ride tickets. There will always be a tractor pull, a demolition derby, cream puffs, the beer garden, and deep-fried cheese curds. Through over 150 years of constant change, from the Industrial Revolution to the Digital Age, Green County’s rural folk have gathered every summer to celebrate who and what they are. It’s an admirable purpose and a worthy occasion, and its worth is not affected one damn bit by city-slicker pretensions.

Next year, I need to get over myself and go home for it.

There’s only one song on my Desert Island list that falls in time with one of those early 70s fair weeks. It’s by the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose, which by 1972 was actually a quartet: the Cornelius Brothers, Eddie and Carter, and Sisters Rose and Billie Jo; the latter had joined up after the group’s first hit, “Treat Her Like a Lady.” “Too Late to Turn Back Now” was at its chart peak during fair week in 1972—sweet singalong soul that represents the absolute textbook definition of a Desert Island song: Without “Too Late to Turn Back Now” in it, my life would be unrecognizable to me.

Top 5: Monster Bomb Flash

July is dragging. Here in Wisconsin, it’s hot, and when it’s not hot, it’s raining. I think this is what people mean when they talk about the dog days of summer. As for me, I’m low on ideas and short on inspiration, and I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish. The other day I started skipping around the archives at ARSA and found some worthwhile nuggets of trivia to get us into the weekend. Let’s take five of them and call it a post.

WCUE, Akron, OH, July 22, 1978: At Number 28, up from 31, it’s “AM” by Steely Dan. That’s not a typo. I recall reading someplace that a few AM stations, not wanting to promote the competing band, edited in an “a” from some other Donald Fagen vocal to change “FM” to “AM.” If you know more about this, hit us up in the comments and help a brother out.

WBBM-FM, Chicago, July 21, 1973: “Monster Mash” hits Number One. Bobby “Boris” Pickett, who originally recorded the song in 1962, claimed that a radio DJ somewhere in the Midwest played the record on his show one night as an oldie and the phones went berserk. The jock suggested to a friend at a record label that “Monster Mash” was ripe for re-release, and it became not merely the Top 40 rage of the summer of 1973, but one of the decade’s quintessentially weird musical moments. You could understand “Monster Mash” becoming a Top-Ten hit once more if it were in October. But for an obvious Halloween hit to strike in July is just odd.

WRIT, Milwaukee, July 24, 1959: But not unprecedentedly odd. Debuting at Number 34 on this chart (three weeks before it first bubbled under in Billboard) is “The Mummy” by Bob McFadden and Dor. McFadden was a voiceover artist, later to become famous for providing the voice of Milton the Monster on the mid-60s kids’ show, and the voice of Franken Berry in cereal commercials. Dor was future doggerel poet Rod McKuen. According to Wikipedia, McKuen claimed that Bill Haley and the Comets were the band backing him and McFadden on “The Mummy,” but “this has not been confirmed.” I’m guessing it’s not Haley and the Comets on “The Mummy.” They would have been a well-known commodity in 1959, albeit a few years removed from their greatest success. If they’d appeared on “The Mummy,” they likely wouldn’t have done so anonymously. A Comet or two, maybe, but not all of ‘em.

B97, New Orleans, July 22, 1980: “Bomb Iran” by Vince Vance and the Valiants moves to Number 5 from Number 10. Vance and the Valiants were a popular New Orleans party band, and they claim that “Bomb Iran” was the most requested song in the country during the summer of 1980. It’s a dashed-off parody of “Barbara Ann” that’s not especially funny, although its popularity during that frustrated, hostage-crisis summer was understandable. The group’s website also calls it a “number-one hit,” which it might have been in a market or two, although this is the song’s only appearance at ARSA. It bubbled under the Hot 100, spending three straight weeks at Number 101 in November 1980.

WRKO, Boston, July 20, 1979: “Hey St. Peter” by Flash and the Pan moves to Number 14 from Number 17, becoming a modest hit in the States two years after its first appearance in Australia. I got an e-mail the other day from longtime reader Miles, who wrote of landing one of the singles on his “most wanted” list recently, and what a rush it is to snare what he calls “a long-lost tune from your past.” Indeed it is, and it’s what I felt when I landed a copy of “Hey St. Peter” a few years back after going nearly 25 years without hearing it.

How about it, crate-diggers and music obsessives? In the comments, tell us about a favorite find of yours.