For most people, the decade of the 1960's ended on December 31, 1969.

But the 1960's as counter-culture came crashing to a halt exactly 30 years ago, on April 6, 1974.

If Woodstock symbolized the apex of the iconoclastic decade, the 200,000+ people who attended the California Jam concert in Ontario, California that day witnessed the transformation of the music event into a corporate cross-promotional opportunity. It was planned to be a sort of Woodstock-lite and to avoid the type of chaos that resulted in the 1969 murder at the Rolling Stones' headlined concert at Altamont Speedway. It would be the first controlled and managed mass event.

At least that's what they were hoping for.

The California Jam band line-up was a hodgepodge of disparate acts, starring - in order - Rare Earth; Earth, Wind and Fire; The Eagles; Seals and Croft; Black Oak Arkansas; Black Sabbath; Deep Purple and the headliners, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP).

This would be the fourth time I'd be seeing ELP on this, their "Brain Salad Surgery" tour.

Whereas Woodstock had singer/songwriter Joan Baez pontificating on the merits of draft resistance to the Vietnam war, the California Jam had porn star Linda Lovelace ushered to the microphone as she yelled out two words. No, not THOSE two words - all she said was "right on!" The crowd roared.

The performances were videotaped to be broadcast at a later date on ABC-TV's "In Concert" series and simulcast in Southern California on album oriented rock station, KLOS-FM. Then KLOS disc jockey Don Imus provided the anchor interviews of the talent and a host of other dj's provided back-up interviews of other performers, including a coherent Ozzy Osbourn.

I was 18 years old at the time and lived in the city of Montclair, about 8 miles west of the concert site at the long-demolished Ontario Motor Speedway. For those of us that missed Woodstock because we were too young, too far away or just didn't know about it at the time, the California Jam was our best attempt at recreating the atmosphere of the concert without the inconviences of rain or lousy brown acid.

First thing in the morning, cushman flatbed carts started dumping off 5,000 one gallon plastic jugs around the site so the assembled masses could fill them with water and not have to stand in line or return to the water fountains. Hehe, it's ironic to think that you'd now have to pay upwards of $4.00 for 16 ounces of that same water today.

It was about this time I ran into my friend, Kathy Washburn. She looked at me with her spiked bangs and straight dark brown hair and had one thing to say to me.

"Lemmings," she said.

I knew exactly what she meant. The year before, in 1973, the National Lampoon - with a cast that included the then-unknowns John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest - released a parody of Woodstock titled, "Lemmings." The album cover is a painting of the Arctic rodent multitude as they dance, leap off the speaker towers and get carried away by birds of prey. A popular myth at the time (long since debunked by scientists) was that lemmings would over-populate themselves to the point of decimating their food supply and mindlessly charge en masse until they ended up plummeting to their deaths off steep cliffs into the Arctic Sea.

This behavior of "group dynamics" or "mass hysteria" has often been compared to human behavior by social scientists, demographers and political pollsters. However, as much as human behavior is studied, it's sometimes impossible to predict what will happen when the human tide functions as a single, living membrane. Factor in a populace under the influence of LSD, NASCAR or extreme nationalism and this creature can react in a totally unpredictable manner.

Suffice it to say that a significant percentage of the 200,000 people at the California Jam were under the influence of one drug or another, and LSD was a popular choice. Choice? It's amazing the variety of names LSD was known by: sugarcube, orange sunshine, purple micro-dot, blotter, window pane, pyramid, blue double dome - and certainly many more names that I've forgotten or never knew.

A friend of mine, Andy Sanchez, worked in a concession booth at the speedway for a couple of days prior to the concert, shucking mountains of corn and staffing the booth. During set-up, he recalls ELP keyboardist Keith Emerson riding around the grounds on a moped. At one point he stops and allegedly asks Andy if he has any drugs for sale and he responds that he has some LSD. "How much do you have?" Emerson allegedly asks. Andy says he has 10 hits (doses) of four-way purple window pane. That means each "hit" is made to be split for 4 separate doses. Emerson allegedly says that he'll buy all of them, and right there in front of Andy takes ALL of the LSD - equalling 40 doses. Brain Salad Surgery, indeed.

(DISCLAIMER: please do not infer that by mention of drugs that I am advocating their use or abuse. I am merely recounting an era in my youth when I experimented, not unlike President Clinton's pot smoking, George W. Bush's legendary cocaine use, or California Governor Schwarzenneger's excesses. If you have a problem with substance abuse, please seek help.)

By the time Ozzy Ozbourne sang "I am Iron Man," I was deep into my peak.

The smog-filled sky - a result of the Inland Empire's famous inversion layer - refracted the setting sun, turning it into a dramatic ball of fire. Orange sunset on orange sunshine. By this time, Deep Purple had started playing and the rainbow sign above the stage was illuminated.

No doubt the afore-mentioned Christopher Guest had Deep Purple in mind when he created the mockumentary, "This Is Spinal Tap." You can just imagine guitarist Ritchie Blackmore wishing that he could exceed the ear-bleeding decibals and crank it "up to 11." The memory of Blackmore standing in front of his Marshall stacks, at the end of "Space Truckin'," smashing his Strat over the poor ABC-TV camera operator's lens is theatrical hokum at its self-parodying worse. As Jon Lord throws his Hammond B-3 organ over, he's apparently trying to upstage Keith Emerson, who's on next. Their new singer David Coverdale went on to lead some of the worst big hair music of the Eighties as he fronted the band Whitesnake.

After Deep Purple finished, there was an unusually long time between sets. The crowd was tired, stoned and getting impatient.

I was sitting near the top of a gentle slope as I waited for Emerson, Lake and Palmer to begin. Despite the fact that - in the interest of efficiency - the promoters had put the band equipment on moving platforms riding on portable rails for a quick change, the delay continued.

In front of the stage, the diehards had been moving in all day and were packed in so tight so that the people sitting at the bottom of the hill couldn't see the stage as they reclined. Up where I was I could hear them yelling continuously at them. "Sit down!"

"SIT down!"

"SIT DOWN!"

Some people down the hill started throwing things at them. But the people couldn't sit down. Hell, they couldn't even move.

Some people started throwing the plastic water jugs that had been passed out earlier in the day.

Then I witnessed the most bizarre occurance I've ever seen in my life. I can only guess at the cause of what ensued. As the people down the hill were throwing jugs, it's possible that people from a distance saw them flying and were enjoying the drug induced "trails" they created. "Trails" occur for the same reason our mind is able to view cinema's 24 individual frames-a-second as smooth action: persistance of vision. LSD enables a hyper-persisitance of vision.

So THEY started throwing jugs. And it's likely that people sitting even further back saw the jugs flying and started throwing THEIRS. Within a couple minutes - I swear this is true - there were most of the 5,000 water jugs flying through the air! It was unbelievable, but on such a mass scale that could only be realized by such a large, disconnected crowd. We had BECOME a singular, living membrane.

My good friend, Doug Hard, said of the experience, "It looked like being inside a giant popcorn popper."

This is probably the best comparison I can think of to convey the imagery. The plastic bottles really did seem to be popping out of the ground...

As amazing as it looked, people around me were being hit by the jugs. "Hey, someone could get hurt." Yes, perhaps a partially filled plastic jug hurled from thirty feet away could gain enough velocity to be considered a serious projectile.

Finally, the announcer bolted to the microphone. "What's the matter with you people?" he yelled. And suddenly it all stopped, as if the stupidity of our actions came to an instant focus. We WERE lemmings, ready to leap off the cliffs to our death.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer finally took to the stage, opening with the now familiar "Jerusalem" that I'd heard on three previous venues (once at the San Bernardino Orange Show auditorium and twice at the Long Beach Arena).

As Greg Lake sang the lyrics, "And was the Holy Lamb of God," the guilt that a drug induced stupor can cause set in, and I was compelled to leave at EXACTLY that moment. Upon hearing those lyrics, I was suddenly ashamed at being entertained by the throwing of the jugs that was hurting people and I saw that as a message from God. So I left. The main act I'd gone to see, ELP, had just started and I was leaving.

As I was slowly walking past the tens of thousands of people still there, I maneuvered my way out as the ambient glow of the stage lights illuminated their faces.

I finally walked out of the speedway grounds and made my way to the adjacent Interstate 10, aka, the San Bernardino Freeway. Cars had parked all along the edge of the freeway for proximity to the concert.

Since I only lived about 8 miles away, I stood at the edge of the freeway and stuck out my thumb for a ride. A car soon pulled over.

There were several Chicanos in the car and they asked with curiousity what was going on there. I told them that it was a concert and that I'd had a religious experience that caused me to leave.

The driver looked at the speedway in the darkness and made note of the orange light eminating from inside the banked walls of the massive structure.

"It reminds me of the colliseum where the gladiators used to fight and Christians were fed to the lions," he said.

I looked back at the glow and just nodded in agreement.

Posted by: Adrian / 12:23 PM
permalink