Bill O’Neill, co-promoter of the Satsop rock festival, held the court every morning with the team setting the floor for the Satsop River that would host the three-day event (Photo via Darrell Westmoreland).
Fifty years ago, on September 3, 1971, tens of thousands of attendees went to listen to music at the 77-acre Reality Farm on East Satsop Road.
It’s the Satsop River Fair and Tin Cup races, 4 days of music, more than a bit of chaos and a component of history that the locals fondly remembered.
One of those people was the photographer Darrell Westmorelos angelesnd, who was then running as a correspondent for Los Angeles Vidette in Montesano. Bud Pritchard, owner of vidette, sent the stage structure to the festival site. There, Westmorelos angelesnd knew the artistic spirit behind it. Bill O’Neill, who hired him as the festival’s official photographer. This would eventually lead Los Angeles to launch Westmorelos Angelesnd into the world of rock photography.
Westmoreland was there to take photographs of O’Neill and his co-promoter Gary Friedman as they met at the site with Grays Harbor County commissioners as they competed for a permit, which was ultimately granted, but not before a court hearing and no earlier than two weeks earlier. the scheduled opening of the festival.
The paintings to set the level in the short period of time were frantic: the big scene, some helicopter landing areas, a hundred or more transient toilets and more were hit together, during quite heavy rains.
Westmoreland took photographs of the installation, adding O’Neill sitting a top of a van talking to the painting team at the beginning of a day before the festival opened. cut on site like makeshift force poles.
Scheduled acts of heavyweights such as Ike and Tina Turner, Derek and the Dominoes with Eric Clapton, War, Earth Wind
Still, there’s a lot of music. Westmoreland in particular remembers Steve Miller, and other artists have performed, adding Delaney and Bonnie, Spencer Davis and Pete Jameson, Eric Burden and Wishbone Ash.
There were a lot of things you would expect at a music festival at the time, especially drug use. Westmoreland witnessed his involvement. One story recalled a confrontation between cyclists and festival passers-by that ended in a shootout. Jeff Hammers, now from Spanaway and owner of the festival’s original banner, desperately remembered that he couldn’t get through but at the time he couldn’t get a ticket.
Then there was the “watermelon truck” incident. On September 5, a truck with watermelons drove to the festival site, with its driving force hoping to earn a few dollars by promoting them among festival-goers. An Oregon newspaper photographer took a photo of the chaos at one point before the truck’s motive force got fed up and hit several other people from the escape, slightly injuring three.
On the day of the watermelon truck incident, local teenager John Kirkwood snuck in to attend the festival and was arrested for defying orders not to spend a few days later when his circle of relatives saw his face, the only obviously identifiable face in the photo. in an Orepassn newspaper.
Kirkwood kept some memories of the event, adding a flyer, a t-shirt, and his price ticket: pre-sale price tickets were $16 for the entire festival, ticket price tickets were $24 for the entire festival, $18 for September 4 and 6, $12 for September 5 and 6, and $6 just for the last day.
Randy Beerbower, of the Chehalis Valley Historical Society, accumulated data from those affected or attended the shows: the co-owners of the assets rented it for the festival on the communal farm for $10,000, which are not close to expiring from the damage, adding the use of poles on the assets for the lines of force, and lost the assets a few years after the festival.
Some of the people Beerbower spoke to did what many festival-goers did: park at a safe distance from the festival and walk into the woods for free entry. Another remembered it as the worst rock festival in time she had attended, and she had been in many: the motorcycle teams discussed above got it wrong for the thousands of other more commonly nonviolent people who attended.
In the end, depending on who you communicate with, up to 100,000 more people attended the festival, which is now part of the History of the Northwest.
In the decades following the festival, Westmoreland became the official photographer for many occasion centers across the region, adding the Tacoma Dome and taking iconic rock images, many of which are shared in his book, “Snap Click Flash. “I don’t see many of the shots he did at the Satsop festival.
As he recalled, at the end of each day, he handed out tactile sheets and, in combination with the negatives, passed them on to the concert organizers. Despite the phone calls and studies he’s done since then, he still hasn’t figured it out. he found out what happened to the photos, however, he recovered some of the settings, adding some that he shared with The Daily World for this story.
They established the massive level of the Satsop River Music Festival in 1971. Courtesy of Darrell Westmoreland
A T-shirt from the Satsop River Fair and Tin Cup races in 1971. (Credit: John Kirkwood)