Mommy, Where Do Music Festivals Come From?
Published on February 10th, 2010.
Big news in the last few weeks about the announcement of line-ups for two of the biggest American music festivals: the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival (or “Cah-chella” in the more common hipster dialect) and now the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. And if you’ve ever been to either of these events, you have this undeniable sense that your generation invented this culture–which is true, kind of like how Al Gore invented the internet. Generations X, Y and Z can take all the credit they want for these large-scale gatherings and for developing a space where they have the freedom to be able to pull the trigger on that piercing or henna tattoo, but Generations A through whatever know better. Youngins have been countering culture for years.
What the old-timers weren’t able to do, however, was take a good music festival blueprint and turn it into a reoccurring money-making behemoth like the promoters of today. My theory is that the people that put together things like Monterey Pop in 1967 which attracted over 90,000 attendees, weren’t really in it to put their kids through college and retire in style, but more for getting stoned with Jimi Hendrix. Which is kind of a bummer cos it took Coachella nearly seven years to reach that attendance level.
The exception here would be the Newport Jazz Festival, which began in 1954 and is to this day the longest running American music festival. The kids of the 60s and 70s would all listen to jazz while they did their drugs and made that scene all about them, so much that bands like Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin and The Allman Brothers were on the bills between 1969-1972. Ironically an incident during Dionne Warwick’s performance of “What The World Needs Now Is Love” in where festival crashers tore down fencing and rioting ensued, ended the integration of pop music into that festival.
Led Zeppelin at Newport Jazz 1969
After that, it was hard to make a rock/pop festival really stick in the U.S., despite any amazing attendance and lineup. For instance, Cal Jam in 1974 drew crowds exceeding 200,000 people and featured what I would imagine to be life-changing performances by artists like Earth Wind & Fire, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Only a year before was the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, which drew a record-breaking attendance of over 600,000 people; so many people that a large portion of that crowd wasn’t even able to see the stage. Despite the dedication of fans driving ticket sellouts, these festivals are long gone.
Cal Jam Newspaper Ad
It wasn’t until 1990, when Perry Ferrell as lead architect, devised a farewell festival tour for his band Jane’s Addiction and called it Lollapalooza, that we finally had arrived at what most festival promoters strive to achieve today: a high-profit model built on ticket sales, vendor sales and sponsorship sales. Five years later, its all-ages counterpart, The Vans Warped Tour came along and went global in a very short 3 years, driven by cheap tickets and multiple stages that 100+ bands could perform on at each show.
With that simple equation of money + money + money = money, it became apparent that the festival business was a lucrative one and pretty soon they started sprouting up everywhere. Street Scene in San Diego, Sasquatch in Seattle, Monolith in Colorado, Voodoo in New Orleans, Vegoose in Las Vegas and so on. Man, even I created a festival during SXSW week in Austin, TX called Mess With Texas, what I feel was the first to fuze music with comedy. Now everyone’s doing that.
This comes with a warning however: festival producing is not for the faint of heart. Now that we don’t create music festivals anymore so that everybody can get together and try to love one another right now, the goal of making a profit can sometimes not happen regardless of how much blood, sweat and tears you pour into it. And now more than ever: people are staying home and a hard economy has caused sponsor dollars to dry up.
What does this all mean? Not really quite sure to be honest. I felt it was my duty to give an educated account of how the music festival developed in the U.S. over the years and pay homage to the pioneers. And if you listen carefully, you can hear another one being born right now…
-A
Filled under Music.
Ms Moon on February 10th, 2010
Gosh & Golly-gee, you forgot the biggest of them all. A little get together called “Woodstock”.