More Wrong than Right

To many rock fans, nothing beats a good weekend festival of sound. Out in the open, with a dozen or so singers and bands to groove with, the living is easy. "Everybody is smiling and offering you food and laughing," explains one hip ticket buyer. "It's a really groovy thing when it's going right--kind of like the way you'd like the world to be."

Unfortunately, things have been wrong more often than right at rock festivals across the U.S. this summer. In June, the Newport '69 Festival outside Los Angeles was disrupted repeatedly as gangs of toughs and pseudo toughs crashed the gates by the thousands, threw sticks, bottles and rocks at the police. At the Denver Pop Festival the next weekend, gate crashers lobbed firecrackers, bottles and debris at the police and the police threw tear gas. At the Newport (Rhode Island) Jazz Festival over the July 4 weekend, where rock was included for the first time, bonfires were set, chairs and fences broken inside the festival grounds; on the last day, Producer George Wein announced that the appearance of one of Britain's top new groups, Led Zeppelin, would be canceled in the "interests of public safety." So worried about safety were the Newport city fathers that they issued an edict prohibiting any rock at Wein's Newport Folk Festival last weekend. As it happens, no rock groups had been scheduled to appear, but Wein called off a pre-festival program that was to have been built around another hot new British combo, Blind Faith. "Rock is out," he said.

Understandably, rock festivals have their failings. Among them: poor sound and visibility; inadequate parking, housing, sanitation facilities, and a mind-boggling plethora of uneven talent, which is often the result of a booking agency's insistence that a promoter has to take three or four second-rate acts to get a good name group. This summer's disturbances, however, do not mean that there is something inherent in rock that automatically leads to rioting; too many kids have lived un-rebelliously with today's pop sound for that to be true. Instead, the festivals seem to have become an experience akin to the spring vacation at Fort Lauderdale, where swarms of beery or pot-high youngsters congregate for a bash to remember. Says Ray Riepen, president of the Boston underground radio station WBCN: "A rock festival is like a football game now. It doesn't have anything to do with music any more. It's just a scene."

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