The Forgotten Festival: Remembering US '82 and '83 three decades later
We insatiable music lovers live in a rather glorious time when wildly eclectic weekend-long festivals packed with the biggest names from all corners of the globe are taken for granted, defying economic downturns and routinely drawing tens of thousands to sell-out encounters.
The annual spring Coachella gathering, 13 years strong and currently doubled in size, remains the pace-setter, with the behemoth Bonnaroo in Tennessee, Austin City Limits, Chicago-centered Lollapalooza, Sasquatch to the north and Outside Lands in San Francisco right behind it. This very weekend brings two more: rap maven Jay-Z’s Made in America festival in Philadelphia, featuring Pearl Jam, Beyoncé, D’Angelo and the reunited Run-D.M.C., plus Bumbershoot in Seattle, spearheaded by Jane’s Addiction, electronic star Skrillex and pop legend Tony Bennett. So popular are such bacchanals that, like Coachella and Bonnaroo before them, these too will stream live via YouTube.
Those are only the leading lights of a trend whose offshoots come a dime a dozen. If rabid festival junkies really wanted to – and had the thousands it would cost to indulge their habit – they could travel the country from Easter to Thanksgiving and experience major events virtually every week.
But there was a time when just the opposite was true. For decades festivals were shunned by cities fearful of having another violent Altamont on their hands. Monterey Pop, that utopian granddaddy of all rock festivals from the Summer of Love, established an idealistic concept that just two years later was all but played out by the time a half-million people descended upon Woodstock in August 1969.
Between then and the dawn of the modern festival era in 1999, there were scant few events of such magnitude anywhere in America. Which is why you probably don’t remember the two landmark US Festivals from the early ’80s, the first of which took place across 500 acres at Glen Helen Park in San Bernardino 30 years ago this Labor Day weekend.
