Texas International Pop Festival - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Texas International Pop Festival was a music festival

Music festival

A music festival is a festival oriented towards music that is sometimes presented with a theme such as musical genre, nationality or locality of musicians, or holiday. They are commonly held outdoors, and are often inclusive of other attractions such as food and merchandise vending machines,...

held at Lewisville, Texas

Lewisville, Texas

Lewisville is a city in Denton County in the U.S. state of Texas. The 2010 United States Census placed the population at 95,290 within . The city also includes of Lewisville Lake....

, on Labor Day

Labor Day

Labor Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in September that celebrates the economic and social contributions of workers.-History:...

weekend, August 30-September 1, 1969. It occurred two weeks after Woodstock

Woodstock Festival

Woodstock Music & Art Fair was a music festival, billed as "An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music". It was held at Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm in the Catskills near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York, from August 15 to August 18, 1969...

. The site for the event was the newly-opened Dallas International Motor Speedway, located on the east side of Interstate Highway 35E

Interstate 35E (Texas)

Interstate 35E , an Interstate Highway, is the eastern half of Interstate 35 where it splits to serve different cities in Texas. I-35 splits into two branch routes, I-35W and I-35E at Hillsboro. I-35E runs north for , maintaining I-35's sequence of exit numbers. It runs through Dallas before...

, across from the Round Grove Road

Farm to Market Road 3040

Farm to Market Road 3040 is a highway in the farm to market road system of Texas. It runs about from Flower Mound to Lewisville in Denton County.-Route description:FM 3040 begins at the intersection of and Flower Mound Road in Flower Mound...

intersection.

History

The festival was the brainchild of Angus G. Wynne III, son of Angus G. Wynne

Angus G. Wynne

Angus Gilchrist Wynne, Jr. was a land developer, founder of Wynnewood Shopping Center and community development in Oak Cliff, a suburb of Dallas. He also developed Six Flags Over Texas and Six Flags Over Georgia and Six Flags St. Louis theme parks in Texas, Georgia, and Missouri...

, the founder of the Six Flags Over Texas

Six Flags Over Texas

Six Flags Over Texas is a major amusement park located in Arlington, Texas , east of Fort Worth and about west of Dallas. It is the oldest park of the Six Flags chain. The park opened on August 5, 1961 following just a year of construction and an initial investment of US$10 million by real estate...

Amusement Park. Wynne was a concert

Concert

A concert is a live performance before an audience. The performance may be by a single musician, sometimes then called a recital, or by a musical ensemble, such as an orchestra, a choir, or a musical band...

promoter who had attended the Atlanta International Pop Festival

Atlanta International Pop Festival (1969)

The first Atlanta International Pop Festival was a music festival held at the Atlanta International Raceway on the July Fourth and weekend, 1969, more than a month before Woodstock. It was organized by Alex Cooley, who later went on to organize the Texas International Pop Festival. The crowd...

on the July Fourth

Independence Day (United States)

Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain...

weekend. He decided to put a festival on near Dallas, and joined with the Atlanta festival's main organizer, Alex Cooley, forming the company Interpop Superfest.

Artists performing at the festival were: Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin were an English rock band, active in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Formed in 1968, they consisted of guitarist Jimmy Page, singer Robert Plant, bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham...

, B.B. King, Canned Heat

Canned Heat

Canned Heat is a blues-rock/boogie rock band that formed in Los Angeles, California in 1965. The group has been noted for its own interpretations of blues material as well as for efforts to promote the interest in this type of music and its original artists...

, Chicago

Chicago (band)

Chicago is an American rock band formed in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois. The self-described "rock and roll band with horns" began as a politically charged, sometimes experimental, rock band and later moved to a predominantly softer sound, becoming famous for producing a number of hit ballads. They had...

(then called Chicago Transit Authority), Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, Freddie King

Freddie King

Freddie King , thought to have been born as Frederick Christian, originally recording as Freddy King, and nicknamed "the Texas Cannonball", was an influential African-American blues guitarist and singer. He is often mentioned as one of "the Three Kings" of electric blues guitar, along with Albert...

, Grand Funk Railroad

Grand Funk Railroad

Grand Funk Railroad is an American rock band that was highly popular during the 1970s. Grand Funk Railroad toured constantly to packed arenas worldwide. A popular take on the band during its heyday was that, although the critics hated them, audiences loved them...

, Herbie Mann

Herbie Mann

Herbert Jay Solomon , better known as Herbie Mann, was a Jewish American jazz flutist and important early practitioner of world music...

, Incredible String Band

Incredible String Band

The Incredible String Band were a psychedelic folk band formed in Scotland in 1966. The band built a considerable following, especially within British counterculture, before splitting up in 1974...

, James Cotton

James Cotton

James Cotton is an American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter, who has performed and recorded with many of the great blues artists of his time as well as with his own band.-Career:...

, Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin

Janis Lyn Joplin was an American singer, songwriter, painter, dancer and music arranger. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company and later as a solo artist with her backing groups, The Kozmic Blues Band and The Full Tilt Boogie Band...

, Johnny Winter

Johnny Winter

John Dawson "Johnny" Winter III is an American blues guitarist, singer, and producer. Best known for his late 1960s and 1970s high-energy blues-rock albums and live performances, Winter also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for blues legend Muddy Waters...

, Nazz, Rotary Connection

Rotary Connection

Rotary Connection was an American psychedelic soul band, formed in Chicago in 1966. The highly experimental band was the idea of Marshall Chess, son of Chess Records founder Leonard Chess. Marshall was the director behind a start-up label, Cadet Concept Records, and wanted to focus on music outside...

, Sam and Dave, Santana

Santana (band)

Santana is a rock band based around guitarist Carlos Santana and founded in the late 1960s. It first came to public attention after their performing the song "Soul Sacrifice" at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, when their Latin rock provided a contrast to other acts on the bill...

, Shiva's Headband

Shiva's Headband

Shiva’s Headband, an early Texas psychedelic rock band, formed in Austin in 1967. The group was the house band at the Vulcan Gas Company, a late 1960s Austin nightclub. The band is credited with a significant role in the founding of the Armadillo World Headquarters. The bands first royalty check...

, Sly and the Family Stone, Space Opera

Space opera

Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, generally involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities. The term has no relation to music and it is analogous to "soap...

, Spirit

Spirit (band)

Spirit was an American jazz/hard rock/progressive rock/psychedelic band founded in 1967, based in Los Angeles, California.- The original lineup :...

, Sweetwater

Sweetwater (band)

Sweetwater was a rock band originally from Los Angeles. They were the act scheduled to play first at the Woodstock Festival in 1969, although due to problems within the band, solo folksinger Richie Havens became the first performer...

, Ten Years After

Ten Years After

Ten Years After is an English blues-rock band, most popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1968 and 1973, Ten Years After scored eight Top 40 albums on the UK Albums Chart...

and Tony Joe White

Tony Joe White

Tony Joe White is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known for his 1969 hit "Polk Salad Annie"; "Rainy Night in Georgia", which he wrote but was first made popular by Brook Benton in 1970; and "Steamy Windows", a hit for Tina Turner in 1989...

.

North of the festival site was the campground on Lewisville Lake

Lewisville Lake

Lewisville Lake is a reservoir located in North Texas on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River in Denton County near Lewisville. The lake is primarily used recreationally for boating and watercraft, however, it was built for flood control purposes and to serve as a water source for Dallas and its...

, where hippie attendees skinny-dipped and bathed. Also on the campground was the free stage, where some bands played after their main stage gig and several bands not playing on the main stage performed. It was on this stage that Wavy Gravy

Wavy Gravy

Wavy Gravy is an American entertainer and activist for peace, best known for his hippie appearance, personality and beliefs. His moniker...

, head of the Hog Farm

Hog Farm

The Hog Farm is an organization considered to be America's longest running hippie commune. With beginnings as an actual collective hog farm in Tujunga, California, the group, founded in the 1960s by peace activist and clown Wavy Gravy, evolved into a "mobile, hallucination-extended family", active...

commune, acquired his name. (At Woodstock, he was Hugh Romney.)

The Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey

Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a...

's group, was in charge of the free stage and camping area. While Kesey was neither at the Texas event nor at Woodstock, his right hand man, Ken Babbs

Ken Babbs

Ken Babbs is a famous Merry Prankster who became one of the psychedelic leaders of the 1960s. He along with best friend and Prankster leader, Ken Kesey wrote the book Last Go Round...

, and his psychedelic bus, Further (Furthur

Furthur

Further was a 1939 International Harvester school bus purchased by author Ken Kesey in 1964 for $1,500 from Andre Hobson in Atherton, California. The bus was stripped down and remodeled inside and out for a psychedelic excursion across the country with Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on board...

) were. The Hog Farm

Hog Farm

provided security, a trip tent, and free food.

Attendance at the festival remains unknown, but is estimated between 120,000 and 150,000. As with Woodstock, there were no violent crimes reported. There was one death, due to heatstroke, and one birth.

High-quality soundboard bootleg recording

Bootleg recording

A bootleg recording is an audio or video recording of a performance that was not officially released by the artist or under other legal authority. The process of making and distributing such recordings is known as bootlegging...

s of almost the entire festival are circulated on the internet. Led Zeppelin's set is one of the most popular Led Zeppelin bootlegs due to the high technical and musical quality of the performance.

Schedule

The Festival began at 4:00 p.m. each day. Grand Funk Railroad opened all three days and played through the afternoon heat till the 4:00 p.m. opening band. BB King played all three nights and told the same jokes and stories, perhaps thinking he had a different 150,000 person crowd for each show.

Saturday, August 30

Canned Heat
Chicago Transit Authority
James Cotton Blues Band
Janis Joplin
B.B. King
Herbie Mann
Rotary Connection
Sam & Dave

Sunday, August 31

Chicago Transit Authority
James Cotton Blues Band
Delaney & Bonnie & Friends
Incredible String Band
B.B. King
Led Zeppelin (announced as "The Led Zeppelin")
Herbie Mann
Sam & Dave
Santana

Monday, September 1

Johnny Winter
Delaney & Bonnie & Friends
B.B. King
Nazz
Sly and the Family Stone
Spirit
Sweetwater
Ten Years After
Tony Joe White

Memorial

On January 29, 2010, the Texas Historical Commission

Texas Historical Commission

The Texas Historical Commission is an agency dedicated to historic preservation within the state of Texas. It administers the National Register of Historic Places for sites in Texas....

approved the placement of a state historical marker

Historical marker

A historical marker or historic marker is an indicator such as a plaque or sign to commemorate an event or person of historic interest and to associate that point of interest with a specific locale one can visit.-Description:...

near Hebron Station, a Denton County Transportation Authority

Denton County Transportation Authority

The Denton County Transportation Authority is the transit authority that operates in Denton County, Texas, USA, which is northwest of Dallas County...

train station in eastern Lewisville

Lewisville, Texas

Lewisville is a city in Denton County in the U.S. state of Texas. The 2010 United States Census placed the population at 95,290 within . The city also includes of Lewisville Lake....

, close to the former site of the festival stage. A benefit concert

Benefit concert

A benefit concert or charity concert is a concert, show or gala featuring musicians, comedians, or other performers that is held for a charitable purpose, often directed at a specific and immediate humanitarian crisis. Such events raise both funds and public awareness to address the cause at...

was held in Lake Dallas, Texas

Lake Dallas, Texas

Lake Dallas is a city in Denton County, Texas, United States. The population was 6,166 at the 2000 census.-Geography:Lake Dallas is located at ....

, on January 31, 2010, to raise the $1,500 required to pay for this marker. The marker will be placed at the site with a formal dedication ceremony to be held at the nearby train station on October 1, 2011.

External links

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