July 30, 1973: Watkins Glen Summer Jam -- Grateful Dead, the Band, the Allman Brothers

 

        The Grateful Dead had been at Woodstock, but I missed Woodstock. I famously turned down a last-minute chance to go cover it because my band had a gig that weekend.  But when the Watkins Glen Summer Jam came around in July 1973, featuring not only the Dead, but the Band and the Allman Brothers, I had no such encumbrances. Set up with press credentials, I packed a pup tent and a bunch of snacks and beverages into my Porsche 356-C and rolled up the hillside to the Grand Prix racetrack before sunset Friday (familiar ground for me, I camped at a succession of races there in the 1960s).

          In the passenger seat was a brisk, animated, black-haired, blue-eyed woman named Bree, who was no stranger to the joys and uncertainties of rock ‘n roll life. She showed up in Buffalo a month earlier with the road crew for a concert I attended and she’d been my roommate ever since.

          We went separate ways Saturday morning. I roamed the concert area, notebook in pocket, hung out mostly around the stage and partook in a lot of smoking and toking and drinking, along with a tab or two. To escape the rain, I spent part of the final set by the Allman Brothers in the back of one of their equipment trucks.

          Finding my tent that night was a minor miracle, but I was up again in the morning sober enough to catch the promoters talking to the press, then stuck around to see the sloppy exodus. Eventually, Bree and I joined it. Back in Buffalo that night, I wrote.

No Buffalo News on Sunday in those days, but the Summer Jam was still a hot topic on Monday. This reckoning of the weekend – part straight reportage, part color, part adapted from the wire services, even a bit of a review – appeared on Monday's front page:   

Watkins Glen Shows Few Scars

After State’s Biggest Gathering 

          WATKINS GLEN, July 30 – An endless stream of bumper-to-bumper traffic inched through this Finger Lakes village of 3,000 all day Sunday as the state’s biggest gathering in history broke camp and headed for home.

          It took the horde of more than 600,000 four days to fill the site of the Summer Jam Rock Festival, but it took only 36 hours for them to clear out. About 5,000 campers remained today.

          The massive exodus was slowed by numerous auto accidents. Hundreds, separated from their parties, were temporarily stranded.

          Six people died in and around the concert area at the Watkins Glen Grand Prix race course – four in auto accidents near Geneva Thursday, a skydiver who burned to death Saturday and a youth who drowned in a nearby pond Sunday.

* * *

NEARLY 200 persons were hospitalized suffering from drug problems or broken bones from falls.

          About 80 were arrested, most on drug charges.

          Other arrests included five youths who butchered a farmer’s pig, a youth high on drugs who stole an ambulance and a Syracuse man who went berserk in the Schuyler County Jail, forcing deputies to evacuate their offices after tear gas was used to subdue him. 

          Such incidents were isolated, however, and did not disturb the general calm on the festival site.

          Lawmen who saw duty at the 1969 Woodstock festival, which attracted 400,000, said the atmosphere at Watkins Glen was much more subdued and polite.

* * *

STILL STUNNED by the realization that their festival was bigger than Woodstock, New York City promoters Shelly Finkel and Jim Koplik said they plan to hold more one-day concerts there.

          “I talked to Henry Valent, the owner of the course,” Finkel told reporters in an informal conversation Sunday morning, “and he wants to do more. The only real problem we had this time was the traffic.”

          However, today Mr. Valent said:

          “We’re not going to get involved in anything like that again. The safety of the people of Watkins Glen precludes another big concert.”

          Sheriff Maurice Dean of Schuyler County said they had expected from 150,000 to 200,000 and “we can handle a crowd like that, but when it reaches 600,000 it imposes on our neighbors and on our community.”

          Finkel has a contract to produce as many as three concerts a year here through 1975. The next one is tentatively scheduled for mid-September.

* * *

FINKEL SAID 150,000 tickets were sold at $10 apiece with expenses running about $1 million. Gatekeepers stopped checking tickets late Friday, letting three-quarters of the mob in free.

          Reports Saturday estimated 330,000 in the general area. Some left their cars as far as 30 miles away and walked to the site.

          As the music began shortly before noon Saturday, the throng was packed shoulder to shoulder under homemade flags in the 80-acre concert area as far as the eye could see. Many had slept there overnight.

          The first-aid station at times resembled the Army field hospital in “M.A.S.H.” – cots filled with kids taking oxygen to relieve overdoses of barbiturates and alcohol, others bloody and bandaged as the result of falls or attempts to scale the chain-link fences.

          The 15-hour concert began in broiling 90-degree sunshine, was interrupted three times by thundershowers and finished in a damp chill at 3:33 a.m.

          Opening the day with “Bertha,” the Grateful Dead did their usual four hours of sweet, breezy inspiration, bringing the excitement up once an hour and using “Sugar Magnolia,” “Playing in the Band” and “Truckin’” for a grand finale.

* * *

THE BAND’S three hours seemed less cohesive. Twice they were driven from the stage by rain, once right after they played “Don’t Do It.”

          The dripping throng shivered under plastic and built bonfires as the Allman Brothers rocked them with a tasty, blues-oriented, three-hour performance that many agreed was the most satisfying of the festival.

          The night closed with a 90-minute jam among musicians from all three groups. Selections alternated between the Dead and the Allmans.

* * *

PLANES AND helicopters flew overhead throughout the day and fireworks flashed far into the night. Five skydivers floated earthwards during the Grateful Dead’s set and the crowd was unaware that one died.

          The victim, Willard J. Smith, 35, of Syracuse, a veteran of more than 2,000 jumps, burned to death in midair when a flare he was carrying apparently exploded and set his clothing afire. He landed a quarter-mile behind the stage.

          Sound tower problems kept the rear of the 80-acre field from hearing the first half of the concert, but speakers were fixed in time for the Allmans.

          A soupy blanket of bottles, muddy sleeping bags and torn plastic covered the concert grounds as the crowd strayed slowly out Sunday morning. It looked and smelled like an enormous landfill.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: That September concert at Watkins Glen never materialized. Neither did the ones the promoters planned in 1974 and 1975. In fact, the Glen didn’t see another big musical event until 2011. Meanwhile, Bree was gone before the summer was over, headed back to Colorado or somewhere out West, never to be seen or heard from again.