1970: The Beginning of the End
The first wave of rock festivals peaked and cratered within the span of about four months. Attracting nearly 400,000 youths over three days in August 1969, the three days of Woodstock in August 1969 seemed to fulfill the era-defining promise of a burgeoning festival scene that began in earnest with San Francisco’s Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival in 1967. In those two years, more than two-dozen festivals popped up at racetracks, parks, and farms around America. With copious amount of literal sex, drugs, and rock and roll, the festivals became emblematic of late-’60s counterculture, but their power would only extend as far as the decade itself.
Held in December 1969, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival confirmed the worst fears of festival skeptics. Spurred on by violent fans and even more violent Hell’s Angels who’d been hired to work security, the festival’s defining moment wasn’t the music, but the brutal stabbing death of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old student from Berkeley who’d returned to the stage (allegedly armed with a .22 revolver) after a previous altercation with the Angels.
Captured in full color by the camera crew of The Rolling Stones, Hunter’s murder, and the madness that surrounded it, helped turn music festivals from curiosity into full-fledged public nuisance. Thus, though the urge to host festivals didn’t end with Altamont, the ease of organizing did. Throughout 1970, festival promoters faced vigorous legal and community opposition to their proposed festivals. Usually, the festivals lost; in an April article about the ultimately successful community resistance to the proposed May Day Festival in Carbondale, IL, reporter J. Anthony Lukas noted that “resistance developed quickly” and cited examples of festivals already thwarted by tactics ranging from the arrest of organizers in Florida to threats of injunction by county officials in Virginia.
As the year went on, similar scenes played out all over the country; in August alone, legal challenges forced the cancellation of festivals in Boston, Iowa, Philadelphia, and upstate New York, where thousands of fans were denied entry into Canada by customs officials for a festival held near Toronto “because they could not produce enough money to support themselves during their stay.” Oklahoma’s resistance was the most extreme; there, Governor Dewey Bartlett mobilized 300 National Guard members to enforce a court-ordered festival ban at Arbuckle Mountain, adding that “Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t think drugs, nudity, free love, and lawlessness are needed to have a good time over the weekend.”