The Superpromoters

In the tiny upstate New York town of Watkins Glen last week, the sound of rock music was heard no more. The previous weekend's massive Summer Jam was over, and in its wake were other sounds. The vroom of departing campers, jalopies and motorcycles as the last of 600,000 pop fans set out along roads which for the first time in nearly a week were not clogged with traffic. The crunching of garbage compacters at work on tons of litter from the auto-race-track festival site. The echo of unanimous voices raised at the Schuyler County legislature in favor of a four-month moratorium on further large concerts in the area. And, of course, the rustle of money being counted; after expenses of $1.3 million, the Summer Jam stands to net a profit of $200,000.

Not a bad showing for the festival's young, unknown co-producers, Shelly Finkel, 29, and Jim Koplik, 23. The Brooklyn-born Finkel started kicking around the music business a decade ago, when he was a night student in marketing at New York University; he spent several years managing small rock groups. In 1970 one of his groups appeared in a concert at Ohio State University promoted by Koplik, then an undergraduate majoring in sociology. The pair hit it off, and after Koplik graduated they teamed up to promote concerts in Hartford and New Haven, Conn. Watkins Glen was their first big venture.

"The secret of our success was time," says Finkel. "We began planning six months ahead and devoted our full time to it for two months, trying to cover all the bases." In contrast to the 1969 Woodstock festival, Summer Jam had a whopping stage (100 ft. by 60 ft. by 12 ft.) completed three weeks before the show. The electrical wires were all put underground, the 1,000 portable toilets were in place a week early, and the 100,000 gal. of bottled water arrived days in advance of the crowds. Koplik and Finkel also laid on five helicopters for constant use by medical personnel, the press and the musicians.

"We figured that the first arrivals would be people interested in spending some time in the country, camping and so on," Finkel explains. "So we had 1,200 acres of land reserved. Then we figured that those people coming up after work on Friday were coming for the music." For the latter, the producers lined up a daylong, total-immersion bill of three top groups: The Band, the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band. Then they arranged for a sophisticated system of twelve sound towers to relay the music at one-tenth-of-a-second delays back through the audience.

Despite careful advance planning, and despite a minimal advertising outlay of $31,000--mostly for posters and spots on rock radio stations--Finkel and Koplik found themselves on the big weekend with a crowd three times larger than anticipated, and far more orderly than at many recent rock festivals. Why? TIME's Larry Kramer, who spent four days among the campers and concertgoers, suggests this answer:

"With college students home for the summer, and with Watergate a daily reminder of so much wrong in the older generation, the Summer Jam tapped a widespread desire to return to the uninhibited atmosphere of the campus, to create a vast, congenial party atmosphere with none of the negative overtones of rock's erratic past. Most of the kids just wanted to lie back in the grass, smoke dope, drink wine and be free of worry about being busted--or about being harassed by any adult authority. Then, too, many of them were younger brothers and sisters of the Woodstock generation, eager to live up to the stories they have heard for years about that great communal event."

Finkel and Koplik are hoping to stage another big outdoor concert next summer. With Watkins Glen probably ruled out, they need a new site, but they may not have to look very hard. Already they are considering offers from Canada, California and Virginia.

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