Dan Davis - The Bull Island Rock Festival: the experience had by me and others at 1972s Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival

2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-09833-427-7 eBook 978-1-09833-428-4

To be a member of such a crowd...is not much

to be far removed from solitude: the freedom of

everyone is assured by the freedom to which

everyone else lays claim.

-Remy de Gourmont

Im afraid concerts spoil people for everyday life.

-L.M. Montgomery

To my wife Deb , for putting up with having to hear me tell tales of the festival, and for her help and patience as I worked on this project.

Foreword

This is the story of my experiences and the experiences of others at what was officially called The Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival and later the Labor Day Soda Pop Festival, but was better known as The Bull Island Rock Festival. The official name was probably used to downplay the actual intent of the festival promoters, (they had done this before when putting on the Ice Cream Social and Freedom Fest in Evansville, Indiana two months earlier, which was better known as the Bosse Field Festival and it had done very well). Secondly, Bull Island was not an island at all, but sort of a peninsula that jutted into Indiana from the Wabash River, and was actually a part of Illinois (more about that later). The Bull Island Rock Festival attracted somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 people, the actual count being hard to pin down since so many people got in free and werent counted. It has since been described as the Woodstock on the Wabash. It has also been called the worst festival in history due to over half of the scheduled bands canceling (including some of the biggest named bands), sanitation problems, drug abuse, scarcity of food and water, and the deaths of two people.

If some of this story differs from how others that attended this festival recall it, I apologize. Ive tried to remember my experience there, but the festival occurred almost 50 years ago, and the memory of it has faded quite a bit (for one reason or another!). So, Ive added many comments that have been placed on various social media sources by people that had been at the festival. Im hoping that it will give the different perspectives of many of the attendees, instead of just my limited memory of my time there (and several of those other attendees have done a better job of expressing their views than I have!). Ive also used many on-line publications, blogs, and libraries to get background information and to show what others have expressed during their exposure to this Midwestern Woodstock wanna-be. Ive tried to get the correct day and order of appearance of the music groups that performed there. There are some Bull Island set lists on the internet that Ive used to put the bands in order, but when I researched each individual band tour history that is listed online, there were discrepancies. So, Ive arranged them by best-guess with the information available, and if anyone remembers a certain band appearing on a different day than Ive listed, Im sorry. And lastly, I tried not to dwell too much on the drug use that was at Bull Island. Yes, it was there, and it was widespread, so it had to be mentioned, but for me and many others, we were there for the music and the adventure. The drugs were just a sideshow.

Chapter

I had only graduated from High School the year before and had just turned 19 and I felt like I was going to be missing out on another Woodstock-type event.

I had been working on a bricking crew, carrying the bricks and mortar to the brick masons on their scaffolding (what they call a hod carrier) and living in a small house in Zionsville, Indiana with a couple of friends, when a friend told me that he had been listening to WLS (a radio station out of Chicago) and they had just announced that a big music festival was being organized in Chandler, which was a town in Southwest Indiana. I was determined not to miss this one. I had already missed out on a rock festival that had taken place 2 months earlier in Evansville, Indiana that everyone called The Bosse Field Festival. It had been highly successful, attracting about 30,000 music fans and had featured the likes of Ike & Tina Turner, Edgar Winter, Dr. John, Black Oak Arkansas, Spirit, John Lee Hooker, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and others. Now I was determined to find a way to this next one.

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair had become a legend to me. I had been too young to attend it, but I had studied everything there was to know about it. I had purchased and listened to both the Woodstock and Woodstock 2 albums until I had almost worn them out, and I had watched the Woodstock documentary film several times. Just the idea that I couldnt have attended it when some of my very favorite artists had performed, like Santana, Janis Joplin, Mountain, The Who, 10 Years After, and of course, Jimi Hendrix, ate at me because I couldnt be there due to my young age at the time, so I absolutely had to find a way to get to this new festival. I needed to find out more about it, how to get to it, and most of all, find a friend who was willing to go with me.

*

Bob Alexander and Tom Duncan were the two men that had put on the successful Freedom Festival and Ice Cream Social in early July of 1972 in Evansville. Alexander had previously been in a business relationship with Roy Orbison, and had been a concert promoter since 1964, so he had quite a bit of experience with organizing big festivals. Now, they wanted to go for a larger venue that would be more of a Woodstock-style event, but they still didnt have a location to stage it. They had planned to have their new festival in Chandler, Indiana at the Chandler Raceway, but the officials in the area had opposed it. On August 31st, they met with the Mayor of Evansville, Russell Lloyd, who had some serious concerns about crowd control. With rock fans already camping in Chandler in anticipation of the festival, the locals grew nervous, and legal action was taken to keep the festival from Chandler. By now, the pair had spent about $700,000 on the venture. The two promoters had also spent $2,800 to take out a full-page ad in Rolling Stone magazine, but the biggest exposure, that they were receiving for free, was from Chicagos WLS radio station, whose broadcasts could be heard over a wide part of the country . Somehow, the radio personalities there had heard about the plans for the rockfest. As Alexander relates in a later interview with Sean McDevitt of the Evansville Courier & Press, They were on WLS about every 15 minutes talking about the festival - for free! So, they started spreading the word nationwide, and we knew people were coming because of all the phone calls we received. They just kept talking about it on the radio. Wheres it going to be?. So, inadvertently, all of the injunctions, and all of the negative press from the police and the state, thats what really drew the crowds. There was no internet or websites or anything at that time. If it were today, wed have drawn a million people.

Now, due to WLS and just by word of mouth, more people had started to arrive into the area in anticipation of the festival and were camping in the towns of Chandler and Poseyville, as well as by the Ohio river in Evansville. The local officials had grown more concerned about the estimated 50 to 60 thousand rockfans that had been anticipated for the festival, and they worried about the security, traffic, and water and sanitation plans that would have to be made, so they had issued a restraining order to stop the event. Officials in the surrounding Indiana Counties of Posey, Warrick, Vanderburgh, Gibson and Pike also took legal steps to block the festival in their jurisdictions. Alexander and Duncan had already signed contracts to rent helicopters and were having holes dug for about 500 portable toilets for the Chandler event they had planned. And, they had already sold 20,000 advance tickets, had booked more than 30 rock acts, and tickets had gone on sale in several cities. With the crowds still coming into the area, the Courier & Press reported that they were part of the growing army of nomadic young people roaming the country. Food and a place to stay are minor concerns. Duncan seemed to be emboldened by the prospect of a state intervention, and was quoted as saying, You dont have a festival without an injunction!. But now Alexander and Duncan had been legally blocked from holding the rock event in any of the southwest Indiana counties. With all the tickets that had already been sold, and with the massive influx of festival-hungry rock fans flooding the area, they had to find a new venue for their venture and do it within the next few days. Then they became aware of a place that was in a unique location that might just fit the bill.