The Bull Island Rock Festival: The experience had by me and others at 1972's Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival

By Dan Davis

In 1972 the banks of the Wabash River in southeastern Illinois played host to one of the most disorganized music festivals in history. The Bull Island Rock Festival was officially called The Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival and also went by Woodstock on the Wabash— and the 3 day event degenerated into chaos. By the end of the festival even the stage had been burned down.

"The Bull Island Rock Festival" is Dan Davis' story of attending this troubled event. Thwarted by rampant drug use, lack of food and water, cancellations at the last minute by high profile rock bands, and the burning of most of the structures involved, this is a personal history of a forgotten event.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098334284

Dan Davis

Meet Coach Chad Dennis and Coach Dan Davis - two highly accomplished individuals dedicated to helping athletes succeed. With their extensive experience in leadership and training, they have developed a program called ELEVATE, designed to help athletes build a strong foundation for success in sports and life. Coach Dennis has spent many years working in law enforcement. He is a former NCAA D1 baseball player for Eastern Kentucky University. He has also coached high-level athletic teams for over 25 years. He has a proven record of creating high-performance athletes, teams, and coaches. He understands what it takes to get athletes to the next level and has worked with hundreds of successful athletes on their mental performance. Coach Davis is a retired Sergeant Major from the U.S. Army who has operated and led teams in some of the most demanding, diverse, and challenging environments. As a former collegiate baseball player, he was selected to play for the All-Army Sports program for several years. He was chosen as head coach of the program in 2019. He currently coaches at the collegiate level and understands the importance of controlling the chaos during high-pressure situations. Coach Davis has worked with hundreds of athletes, assisting them in elevating their mental performance in their chosen sport. Coach Dennis and Coach Davis deeply understand the importance of mental performance in athletics and life. They have studied, worked with, and trained alongside some of the most successful people on the planet. With ELEVATE, they aim to help athletes set a solid foundation for success, drawing upon their own experiences in leadership and athletic achievement. Contact Information: www.mindsetmattersathletics.com

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ISBN 978-1-09833-427-7 eBook 978-1-09833-428-4

"To be a member of such a crowd...is not much

to be far removed from solitude: the freedom of

everyone is assured by the freedom to which

everyone else lays claim."

-Remy de Gourmont

I’m afraid concerts spoil people for everyday life.

-L.M. Montgomery

To my wife Deb, for putting up with having to hear me tell tales of the festival, and for her help and patience as I worked on this project.

Foreword

This is the story of my experiences and the experiences of others at what was officially called The Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival and later the Labor Day Soda Pop Festival, but was better known as The Bull Island Rock Festival. The official name was probably used to downplay the actual intent of the festival promoters, (they had done this before when putting on the Ice Cream Social and Freedom Fest in Evansville, Indiana two months earlier, which was better known as the Bosse Field Festival and it had done very well). Secondly, Bull Island was not an island at all, but sort of a peninsula that jutted into Indiana from the Wabash River, and was actually a part of Illinois (more about that later). The Bull Island Rock Festival attracted somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 people, the actual count being hard to pin down since so many people got in free and weren’t counted. It has since been described as the Woodstock on the Wabash. It has also been called the worst festival in history due to over half of the scheduled bands canceling (including some of the biggest named bands), sanitation problems, drug abuse, scarcity of food and water, and the deaths of two people.

If some of this story differs from how others that attended this festival recall it, I apologize. I’ve tried to remember my experience there, but the festival occurred almost 50 years ago, and the memory of it has faded quite a bit (for one reason or another!). So, I’ve added many comments that have been placed on various social media sources by people that had been at the festival. I’m hoping that it will give the different perspectives of many of the attendees, instead of just my limited memory of my time there (and several of those other attendees have done a better job of expressing their views than I have!). I’ve also used many on-line publications, blogs, and libraries to get background information and to show what others have expressed during their exposure to this Midwestern Woodstock wanna-be. I’ve tried to get the correct day and order of appearance of the music groups that performed there. There are some Bull Island set lists on the internet that I’ve used to put the bands in order, but when I researched each individual band tour history that is listed online, there were discrepancies. So, I’ve arranged them by best-guess with the information available, and if anyone remembers a certain band appearing on a different day than I’ve listed, I’m sorry. And lastly, I tried not to dwell too much on the drug use that was at Bull Island. Yes, it was there, and it was widespread, so it had to be mentioned, but for me and many others, we were there for the music and the adventure. The drugs were just a sideshow.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 1

I had only graduated from High School the year before and had just turned 19 and I felt like I was going to be missing out on another Woodstock-type event.

I had been working on a bricking crew, carrying the bricks and mortar to the brick masons on their scaffolding (what they call a hod carrier) and living in a small house in Zionsville, Indiana with a couple of friends, when a friend told me that he had been listening to WLS (a radio station out of Chicago) and they had just announced that a big music festival was being organized in Chandler, which was a town in Southwest Indiana. I was determined not to miss this one. I had already missed out on a rock festival that had taken place 2 months earlier in Evansville, Indiana that everyone called The Bosse Field Festival. It had been highly successful, attracting about 30,000 music fans and had featured the likes of Ike & Tina Turner, Edgar Winter, Dr. John, Black Oak Arkansas, Spirit, John Lee Hooker, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and others. Now I was determined to find a way to this next one.

The Woodstock Music & Art Fair had become a legend to me. I had been too young to attend it, but I had studied everything there was to know about it. I had purchased and listened to both the Woodstock and Woodstock 2 albums until I had almost worn them out, and I had watched the Woodstock documentary film several times. Just the idea that I couldn’t have attended it when some of my very favorite artists had performed, like Santana, Janis Joplin, Mountain, The Who, 10 Years After, and of course, Jimi Hendrix, ate at me because I couldn’t be there due to my young age at the time, so I absolutely had to find a way to get to this new festival. I needed to find out more about it, how to get to it, and most of all, find a friend who was willing to go with me.

*

Bob Alexander and Tom Duncan were the two men that had put on the successful Freedom Festival and Ice Cream Social in early July of 1972 in Evansville. Alexander had previously been in a business relationship with Roy Orbison, and had been a concert promoter since 1964, so he had quite a bit of experience with organizing big festivals. Now, they wanted to go for a larger venue that would be more of a Woodstock-style event, but they still didn’t have a location to stage it. They had planned to have their new festival in Chandler, Indiana at the Chandler Raceway, but the officials in the area had opposed it. On August 31st, they met with the Mayor of Evansville, Russell Lloyd, who had some serious concerns about crowd control. With rock fans already camping in Chandler in anticipation of the festival, the locals grew nervous, and legal action was taken to keep the festival from Chandler. By now, the pair had spent about $700,000 on the venture. The two promoters had also spent $2,800 to take out a full-page ad in Rolling Stone magazine, but the biggest exposure, that they were receiving for free, was from Chicago’s WLS radio station, whose broadcasts could be heard over a wide part of the country . Somehow, the radio personalities there had heard about the plans for the rockfest. As Alexander relates in a later interview with Sean McDevitt of the Evansville Courier & Press, They were on WLS about every 15 minutes talking about the festival - for free! So, they started spreading the word nationwide, and we knew people were coming because of all the phone calls we received. They just kept talking about it on the radio. ‘Where’s it going to be?’. So, inadvertently, all of the injunctions, and all of the negative press from the police and the state, that’s what really drew the crowds. There was no internet or websites or anything at that time. If it were today, we’d have drawn a million people.

Now, due to WLS and just by word of mouth, more people had started to arrive into the area in anticipation of the festival and were camping in the towns of Chandler and Poseyville, as well as by the Ohio river in Evansville. The local officials had grown more concerned about the estimated 50 to 60 thousand rockfans that had been anticipated for the festival, and they worried about the security, traffic, and water and sanitation plans that would have to be made, so they had issued a restraining order to stop the event. Officials in the surrounding Indiana Counties