I was just about to turn 16 in 1967. The Byrds were my favorite band, so I attended this festival with my older brother and a few friends. We all partook of some of the psychedelics that were popular at that time so a lot what happened is hard to remember now ( it was the sixties after all) but I do have a couple of distinct memories. The festival started as standing room only on the main floor because the light show had hung huge sheets of paper from the rafter beams on both sides of the floor to project their lights on. The sheets of paper hung down nearly to the floor covering up all the seats above the sides of the main floor. This was a 12-hour event so eventually some people started to get tired of standing so they started to tear down the paper to get to the seats. This freaked out the festival promoters and they announced from the stage that the paper was attached to the rafter beams with piles of bricks, and they were afraid that the bricks could come raining down on the crowd if people kept tearing the paper. This wasn’t a very good thing to say to a very large group of people in altered states of mind and it created quite a bit of concern but luckily there was no rain of bricks. The only bands I remember performing were the Byrds and Jefferson Airplane. The Byrds performed before the Airplane, and they put on a great show. There were only four of them because Gene Clark wasn’t with the band. David Crosby talked quite a bit between numbers and invited all of us to come down to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. I remember that when some of the groups performed there were go-go dancers dancing on the sides of the stage, which I didn’t feel fit mood of the festival. There was a very long break between some of the performances and some people from the crowd would go up on stage and do impromptu amateur performances with the equipment that was up there. During one of these long breaks, we formed a long conga line in the crowd and were having a great time dancing using cans and bottles for percussion instruments making our own music. We did this for quite a long time until there was an announcement that the Jefferson Airplane were refusing to come on stage until we stopped dancing and making noise. We were having such a great time that it took a while for us to quit but shortly after we did the Airplane finally came on. In our states of mind, it was magical to see Grace Slick standing up there a few feet away from us singing White Rabbit. Even though I don’t remember a lot of what happened at this festival I do remember it being a great experience and it only cost $5.00 to attend.
As a side note the night before this festival the Byrds performed at a country club somewhere near Tacoma (perhaps Gig Harbor} and I was at that show. The stage was about one foot high, and we sat on the floor right in front of the stage about five feet from the band. There were probably less than 200 people there. Being such a huge Byrds fan, this turned out to be one of the best times of my life.
Beauknows