Pubdate: Sat, 31 Aug 2002
Source: Evansville Courier & Press (IN)
Copyright: 2002 The Evansville Courier
Contact:  http://www.courierpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/138
Author: Garret Mathews

100,000 TURNED OUT, TURNED ON, TUNED IN

People swimming naked. People making love on logs. Not enough food. Not 
enough water. Not enough toilets. Sugar cubes hawked as "San Francisco LSD" 
on sale for a dollar. Crowds estimated at more than 100,000.

The Labor Day Soda Pop Festival was held 30 years ago this weekend on Bull 
Island, Ill., a patch of land left by the shifting waters of the Wabash River.

Traffic was blocked the six miles from Interstate 64 to the festival site. 
Hundreds of rock fans left their vehicles and camped alongside the gravel 
roads around Griffin, Ind.

Ravi Shankar and Black Oak Arkansas performed, but many top-billed acts 
either didn't show up or never made it to the stage.

Numerous people were treated for drug overdoses during the 72-hour 
festival. One man allegedly drowned while trying to circumvent the $20 
entry fee. He probably could have stayed dry. Thousands stormed the 
inadequate gates and attended for free.

Edgar Simmons was there.

"I saw some things I thought I'd never see. There were people having sex 
and young men and women giving themselves shots of dope. Everything was 
wide open. I'll say this, though. A full 95 percent of those who came were 
good people."

The 62-year-old Griffin man said he wasn't much of a music fan.

"I just watched the people. Curious, I guess you could say. We had a pickup 
and were heading out one day when we saw these four boys by the side of the 
road. We offered them a ride and they jumped in the back of the truck. They 
thanked us and asked if we wanted some drugs. Angel hair, I believe they 
said. We didn't want any."

Simmons' wife, Gloria, almost went into labor during the festival.

"The roads were so blocked it took me three hours to get her to Deaconess. 
The people at the festival couldn't understand why we were leaving. They 
kept saying we should have the baby at the concert like they did at Woodstock."

Sharon Fifer was also at Bull Island.

"You could see just about anything you wanted to see. Pigs on a leash. 
Runaways. Little babies sleeping on the ground."

Fifer, now 61, recalled that some festivalgoers knew little or nothing 
about life in the Midwest.

"This one group asked how to get to Bull Island. I pointed out a way 
through the cornfields that could take miles off their trip. They didn't 
want any part of that shortcut. They were scared to death they might 
disappear in the stalks and be lost forever."

She said the overwhelming majority of music fans were not troublemakers.

"As many as there were, they could have completely taken over Griffin. They 
were content to come to the store, get supplies and walk back to the concert."

But she does remember an incident with a school bus.

"Some of the people - probably on drugs - stopped this one bus and came 
inside to ask the children if they really wanted to go to school. The kids 
were pretty scared of the long-hairs and said, yeah, they really wanted to 
go to class."

Fifer said there wouldn't have been a trash problem if promoters had 
collected it immediately after the show.

"Most of the people were pretty neat and put their stuff in black bags. But 
you had souvenir-hunters who went through the garbage and ended up leaving 
it all over the place."

Not just trash was left.

"Years later, farmers plowed up everything from parts of abandoned cars to 
bread racks. It was like the show lived on."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth