Rock festivals | History, Music, & Culture

Rock festivals had their origin in the jazz festivals held in Newport, Rhode Island, and in Monterey, California, in the 1950s. As the folk music revival spread in the early 1960s, the Newport Festival added a folk component, which gave birth to other folk festivals across the country. When the 1965 Newport Folk Festival allowed the Paul Butterfield Blues Band to play and to back up Bob Dylan, controversy over the appearance of electric instruments followed, but the shrewd commercial decision meant that, increasingly, electric performers appeared at these events. The roots of the all-rock festival can be found in the early days of the San Francisco scene, particularly in a 1965 benefit show held at the Ark, a club in Sausalito, and in several subsequent benefits for the San Francisco Mime Troupe organized by Bill Graham. Because by the mid-1960s most rock performers were self-contained acts, these festivals differed from earlier phenomena such as Dick Clark’s Cavalcade of Stars, which generally presented a series of solo singers or vocal groups who worked with a single backing band.

The 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, held at the fairgrounds where the Monterey Jazz Festival was produced, was the first major rock festival, but its logistics, expense, and commercial failure deterred other American promoters from mounting similar events until the Woodstock (New York) Music and Art Fair in 1969 became the prototype. Like Woodstock, many of the subsequent festivals were commercial disasters, which kept any single rock festival from becoming an annual event like the jazz festivals had become, and the Rolling Stones’ unfortunate show at Altamont Speedway in Livermore, California, in 1969 (at which several people were beaten and one man stabbed to death) did nothing to improve their reputation. Another inhibiting factor was expense: Because so many bands went unpaid by promoters, most who would be major attractions at a festival priced themselves out of the market. Only a trusted promoter like Graham, who presented the Watkins Glen (New York) Festival in 1973, could attract big names. In fact, it was Graham who hit on the most workable formula for a rock festival in the mid-1970s with his “Day on the Green” series at the Oakland (California) Coliseum; it was held in an enclosed area, which made it possible for the promoter to minimize gate-crashing and the unauthorized sale of alcohol and drugs.

Of the post-Woodstock festivals, only the Atlanta (Georgia) Pop Festival in 1969–70 could be said to be important to rock history; it packed the lower end of the bill with local groups and thereby invigorated the Southern rock movement of the 1970s. Rock festivals in the United States tapered off after about 1975, only to be revived in the 1990s by Perry Farrell, the leader of Jane’s Addiction, who came up with a very successful formula, based on the “Day on the Green” concept, in the touring Lollapalooza event, a powerful vehicle for bringing alternative rock to middle America by mixing large- and small-stage performances with political and cultural information booths. An all-women festival, the Lilith Fair, copied this approach with great success in the late 1990s.

In Europe the story has been completely different, particularly on the Continent, where festivals are an essential part of the summer scene and where good organization and payment of bands have always been part of the agenda. Every country has its important festivals, and rock bands tour the festival circuit each summer just as jazz performers have done for years. Most European rock festivals are just star-studded, crowd-pleasing events, but Denmark’s Roskilde Festival and France’s Trans Musicales in Rennes, with their balance of big names and developing acts, have become important career stepping-stones for international performers, and England’s Glastonbury Festival is a cornerstone of the British rock scene for established acts and newcomers alike.