Promoters continued to search for a way to book multiple acts profitably. ![]() A rock festival, with dozens of acts over a few days, could more easily absorb the hits and misses. In early 1969, for example, Led Zeppelin found themselves playing tiny auditoriums, sometimes as the opening act, with their debut album roaring up the charts, while Vanilla Fudge found themselves no longer the draw they had been the year before. Since shows had to be planned many months in advance, and it was hard to anticipate how one band might have a breakout hit, and how another may have become over the hill, or even broken up, in the few short months between booking the show and playing it. Multi-act events were appealing to promoters because they inherently hedged risk in a volatile music market. Live rock music got bigger every year, and various efforts were tried to find a way to have "festival" events on a large scale. Legendary as these events were, most fans did not attend more than one giant event, and most communities that had endured a huge rock festival did not tolerate a second one. By the time of the biggest festivals of 19, most famously Woodstock, hundreds of thousands of people would come to some outlying area and camp out for several days, while live rock music blasted 24/7. Gina Arnold's excellent book Half A Million Strong (2018 U of Iowa Press) tracks how "free shows in the park" evolved into "giant multi-day events in some farmer's muddy field" over the course of a few years (yes, she's my sister, but you should read it). Rock Festivals were a product of the 1960s. Rock Festivals and Major Rock Venues: Status Report, Early 1974 This post will look at the 1974 California Jam concert at Ontario Motor Speedway in its proper context, and reflect on how it was both influential, profitable and yet repeated only a single time. The 168,000 paid attendance-out of probably 200,000 in total-at the 1974 show make it an important event, yet rock history has put it aside. The paid attendance record was only known to have been eclipsed one time-at the successor concert at Ontario Speedway on March 18, 1978, known as "California Jam II". Yet the "California Jam," as it was called, had great economic significance in the history of rock concerts, in that it had the highest paid attendance of any rock concert up until that time. The Ontario Motor Speedway in Ontario, CA, 35 miles East of Los Angeles, is largely forgotten today, as was the major rock concert held at the Speedway on April 6, 1974. ApOntario Motor Speedway, Ontario, CA: Emerson Lake & Palmer/Deep Purple/Black Sabbath/Black Oak Arkansas/Seals & Crofts/Eagles/Earth Wind & Fire/Rare Earth (Saturday) California Jam
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |