This article needs additional citations for verification .(January 2009) |
Summer Jam at Watkins Glen | |
---|---|
Genre | Jam band music, rock music |
Dates | July 28, 1973 |
Location(s) | Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway outside of Watkins Glen, New York |
Years active | 1973 |
Founders | Shelly Finkel, Jim Koplik |
Attendance | 600,000 |
Website | Photographs of Summer Jam at Watkins Glen |
The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen was a July 1973 rock festival outside Watkins Glen, New York, that featured the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and the Band. The July 28, 1973, event long held the Guinness Book of World Records entry for "largest audience at a pop festival," with an estimated 600,000 fans in attendance at the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway. Approximately 150,000 tickets were purchased in advance, the rest being admitted in what became a "free concert".
The concert was produced by Shelly Finkel and Jim Koplik, two promoters who had organized a successful Grateful Dead concert at Dillon Stadium, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1972. [1] [ page needed ] At that show the Grateful Dead were joined on-stage by Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, and Jai Johanny Johanson, members of the Allman Brothers Band. [1] [ page needed ] This impromptu jam planted the seeds that would eventually spawn the "Summer Jam" concert in Watkins Glen, New York. [1] [ page needed ]
Similar to the 1969 Woodstock Festival, an enormous traffic jam created chaos for those who attempted to make it to the concert site. Long and narrow country roads forced fans to abandon their vehicles and walk 5–8 miles on that hot summer day. 150,000 tickets were sold for $10 each, but for all the other people it was a free concert.[ citation needed ]
Also similar to Woodstock, there were no reports of violence at Watkins Glen. However, unknown to attendees, the day was marred by the death of Willard Smith, 35, a skydiver from Syracuse, New York. One of the flares he dove with ignited his body suit, and he was engulfed in flames. Smith's body was eventually found in the woods near the concert site. There is also the unsolved disappearance of two high school teenagers (Mitchel Weiser and Bonnie Bickwit) from Brooklyn who were hitchhiking to the concert. [2] [3] [4]
Many historians claimed that the Watkins Glen event was the largest gathering of people in the history of the United States. In essence, that meant that on July 28, one out of every 350 people living in America at the time was listening to the sounds of rock at the New York state racetrack. Considering that most of those who attended the event hailed from the Northeast, and that the average age of those present was approximately seventeen to twenty-four, close to one out of every three young people from Boston to New York was at the festival. [5]
Summer Jam was the last concert event to be held at Watkins Glen International until 2011, when the rock band Phish organized and performed at a three-day festival, called Super Ball IX, at the complex. [6]
Bill Graham's FM Productions provided lights, staging and a 50,000-watt sound system. [7] The sound system introduced a new concept: digital delay lines to compensate for the speed of sound in air, allowing speaker towers to be placed at intervals from the stage, allowing distant audience members to hear clearly. New Jersey electronics company Eventide brought three digital delay units each capable of 200 milliseconds of delay. Four speaker towers were placed 200 feet (60 m) from the stage, their signal delayed 175 ms to compensate for the speed of sound between the main stage speakers and the delay towers. Six more speaker towers were placed 400 feet from the stage, requiring 350 ms of delay, and a further six towers were placed 600 feet away from the stage, fed with 525 ms of delay, the audio signal coming through all three modules. The most distant audience areas were unable to see the stage because of terrain, but they could hear the concert. Each Eventide DDL 1745 module contained many 1000-bit shift register integrated chips, and cost the same as a new car. [8] The concept meant that the people in the front were not blasted with too much sound in an attempt to reach the back, and the people in the back enjoyed high fidelity sound. The system worked very well. [7]
This concert was attended by 600,000 people – twice the number that went to the Woodstock festival in August 1969. Due to the crowd's enormous size additional broadcast towers were set up, but this required more amplification power. At this time the Grateful Dead only used amplifiers made by McIntosh Laboratory. Alembic sound engineer Jim Furman (later Janet Furman) was dispatched by helicopter with $6,000 cash to nearby Binghamton to obtain five additional 600-watt MC 2300 models, their most powerful amp at that time. Furman located the company owner, bought the amps off the factory floor, and flew back to the festival site, with the overloaded helicopter narrowly avoiding catastrophe. [9]
Although the concert was scheduled to start on July 28, thousands of music fans were already at the concert site on the 27th. Robbie Robertson of The Band requested to do a soundcheck, but was perplexed that so many people were sitting in front of the stage. Bill Graham allowed the soundcheck with the crowd of people in front, and the Band ran through a few numbers to the delight of the audience. The Allman Brothers Band did their soundcheck next, playing "One Way Out" and "Ramblin' Man". Grateful Dead's soundcheck turned into a legendary two-set marathon, featuring their familiar tunes such as "Sugaree", "Tennessee Jed" and "Wharf Rat". They also performed a unique jam that was eventually included on their retrospective CD box set So Many Roads (1965-1995) .
On July 28, the day of the concert, 600,000 music fans had arrived in Watkins Glen. [10] Grateful Dead performed first, playing two long sets. They opened with "Bertha" and played many favorite tunes such as "Box Of Rain", "Jack Straw", "Playing in the Band", "China Cat Sunflower" and "Eyes of the World".
The Band followed the Dead with one two-hour set. However, their set was cut in half by a drenching thunderstorm; in a scene again reminiscent of Woodstock, people were covered with mud. During the storm, keyboardist Garth Hudson performed his signature organ improvisation "The Genetic Method"; when the rain finally let up, the full Band joined Hudson on stage, and segued into their signature song "Chest Fever".
Finally, the Allman Brothers Band performed for three hours. Their performance included songs from their soon-to-be-released album Brothers and Sisters , along with their standards "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed", "Statesboro Blues", "Les Brers in A Minor" and "Whipping Post".
Following the Allmans' second set, there was an hour encore jam featuring musicians from all three bands. The jam featured spirited renditions of "Not Fade Away", "Mountain Jam", and "Johnny B. Goode".
Phish is an American rock band formed in Burlington, Vermont, in 1983. The band consists of guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, drummer Jon Fishman, and keyboardist Page McConnell, all of whom perform vocals, with Anastasio being the lead vocalist. The band is known for their musical improvisation and jams during their concert performances and for their devoted fan following.
The Woodstock Music and Art Fair, commonly referred to as Woodstock, was a music festival held from August 15 to 18, 1969, on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York, 40 miles (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. Billed as "an Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music" and alternatively referred to as the Woodstock Rock Festival, it attracted an audience of more than 460,000. Thirty-two acts performed outdoors despite overcast and sporadic rain. It was one of the largest music festivals in history and became synonymous with the counterculture of the 1960s.
Watkins Glen is a village and census-designated place in and the county seat of Schuyler County, New York, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 1,829. Watkins Glen lies between the towns of Dix and Reading. To the southwest of the village is the Watkins Glen International race track, which hosts annual NASCAR Cup Series and WeatherTech SportsCar Championship races, and formerly hosted the Formula One United States Grand Prix and various IndyCar races.
California Jam was a rock music festival co-headlined by Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, held at the Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, California, on April 6, 1974. It was produced by ABC Entertainment, Sandy Feldman and Leonard Stogel. Pacific Presentations, a Los Angeles–based concert company headed by Sepp Donahower and Gary Perkins, coordinated the event, booked all the musical talent and ran the advertising campaign. Don Branker worked for Leonard Stogel and was responsible for concert site facilitation, toilets, fencing and medical. The California Jam attracted 250,000 paying music fans. The festival set what were then records for the loudest amplification system ever installed, the highest paid attendance, and highest gross in history. It was one of the last of the original wave of rock festivals, as well as one of the most well-executed and financially successful, and presaged the era of media consolidation and the corporatization of the rock music industry.
The Monterey International Pop Festival was a three-day music festival held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California. The festival is remembered for the first major American appearances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar, the first large-scale public performance of Janis Joplin and the introduction of Otis Redding to a mass American audience.
"Mountain Jam" is an improvised instrumental jam by The Allman Brothers Band, based on Donovan's 1967 hit song "There Is a Mountain". The first known recording of a performance was done on May 4, 1969, at Macon Central Park. "Mountain Jam" was originally released in 1972 on the album Eat a Peach, as recorded at the Fillmore East concert hall in March 1971. It is this rendition that is best known.
Live at Watkins Glen is a 1995 album by the Band, presented by Capitol Records as a live album from the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen rock festival held outside Watkins Glen, New York, on July 28, 1973, in front of 600,000 people. Garth Hudson's organ solo, "Too Wet to Work", and the plainly titled "Jam" come from the actual Watkins Glen concert, as does the introduction of the group by Bill Graham. The former track appears on the out-of-print 1994 box set Across the Great Divide, but the latter track is only present on the Watkins Glen disc. The remainder of the tracks are two studio outtakes with overdubbed crowd noise, "Back to Memphis" and "Endless Highway", plus five tracks from the Academy of Music shows in December 1971 and "Don't Ya Tell Henry" from the Woodstock festival in 1969. The two studio outtakes are available on the 2001 re-release of Moondog Matinee, without the crowd overdubs. The Academy of Music tracks are available on the 2001 two-CD re-release of Rock of Ages as "previously unavailable" tracks.
John Lee Johnson, frequently known by the stage names Jai Johanny Johanson and Jaimoe, is an American drummer and percussionist. He is best known as one of the founding members of the Allman Brothers Band and, with the death of Dickey Betts on April 18, 2024, he is the last surviving original member of the band.
Michael Scott Lang was an American concert promoter, producer, and artistic manager who was best known as a co-creator of the Woodstock Music & Art Festival in 1969. Lang served as the organizer of the event, as well as the organizer for its follow-up events, Woodstock '94 and the ill-fated Woodstock '99. He later became a producer of records, films, and other concerts, as well as a manager for performing artists, a critically acclaimed author, and a sculptor.
Brothers and Sisters is the fourth studio album by American rock band The Allman Brothers Band. Co-produced by Johnny Sandlin and the band, the album was released in August 1973 in the United States, by Capricorn Records. Following the death of group leader Duane Allman in 1971, the Allman Brothers Band released Eat a Peach (1972), a hybrid studio/live album that became their biggest-selling album to date. Afterwards, the group purchased a farm in Juliette, Georgia, to become a "group hangout". However, bassist Berry Oakley was visibly suffering from the death of Duane, excessively drinking and consuming drugs. In November 1972, after nearly a year of severe depression, Oakley was killed in a motorcycle accident, making it the last album on which he played.
One from the Vault is a live album by the Grateful Dead, recorded on August 13, 1975, at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, California, for a small audience of radio programmers. Three weeks later, the concert was broadcast nationwide on FM radio through Metromedia, after which the radio show was widely traded by fans on cassettes, and sold in bootleg LP versions under various titles including Make Believe Ballroom, becoming the most widely circulated Grateful Dead bootleg.
So Many Roads (1965–1995) is a five-disc box set by the Grateful Dead. Primarily consisting of concert recordings from different periods of the band's history, it also contains several songs recorded in the studio. All but one of the forty-two tracks were previously unreleased. The album was released on November 7, 1999. It was certified a gold record by the RIAA on April 12, 2000.
Concert 10 was a rock concert at Pocono International Raceway in Long Pond, Pennsylvania, on July 8 and 9, 1972. The event attracted an estimated 200,000 people who were met with hot weather, then cold and a downpour replete with rain and mud. The general atmosphere of the concert was compared to the Woodstock Festival of 1969. Concert 10 represented a successful revival of the American summer rock festival after the repeated failure of U.S. festivals during the previous two years.
Max Creek is an American rock band formed in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1971. A significant presence in the New England music scene, Max Creek is known as a pioneering "jam band." For over fifty years they have regularly performed at various iconic venues and music festivals, showcasing their live performances. Members of Max Creek have collaborated with and opened for renowned acts such as Leon Russell, Bruce Hornsby, Phish, The Band, Talking Heads, Jefferson Airplane, The Allman Brothers Band, and Grateful Dead.
Starting in 1996, American jam band Phish has hosted a series of festivals—eleven in total, with attendance at around 85,000. They are typically the only band to perform at the festivals, although the 1998 Lemonwheel festival and 1999 Camp Oswego festival both featured a second stage for supporting acts.
Sam Cutler was an English tour manager for The Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, and other acts.
The Grateful Dead were an American rock band known for their lengthy, partially improvised performances, as well as for a loyal fan base who often followed the band for several shows or entire tours. They disbanded in 1995, following the death of de facto bandleader Jerry Garcia. Since then remaining members have reunited for a number of concert tours and one-off performances, often in very different configurations. The following is a list of instances where former Grateful Dead members have reunited.
The first Atlanta International Pop Festival was a rock festival held at the Atlanta International Raceway in Hampton, Georgia, twenty miles south of Atlanta, on the July Fourth (Friday) weekend, 1969, more than a month before Woodstock. Crowd estimates ranged from the high tens of thousands to as high as 150,000, with few problems reported other than those related to the hot weather.
A jam band is a musical group whose concerts and live albums substantially feature improvisational "jamming." Typically, jam bands will play variations of pre-existing songs, extending them to improvise over chord patterns or rhythmic grooves. Jam bands are known for having a very fluid structure, playing long sets of music which often cross genre boundaries, varying their nightly setlists, and segueing from one song into another without a break.
The McIntosh MC-2300 is a solid-state power amplifier which was built by the American high-end audio company McIntosh Laboratory between 1971 and 1980.