David Squires delves into… the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival
In January, as you look ahead to a much-needed summer, festivals stand out as a vital chance for humanity to reconnect to its roots and reckon with the crooked modern age. By mid-September, you soberly realise how far humanity has come.
Showers, toilets, roofs, mattresses, taps, all acquire a magical wonder that no daft healing tent could ever possibly hope to conjure… especially if we’re talking about the mid-September of 1972, shortly after The Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival, also known as the Bull Island Rock Festival.
Roughly 55,000 people had been expected to rock up to Evansville, Indiana, to see the likes of Black Sabbath, Joe Cocker, Fleetwood Mac, the Allman Brothers Band, John Mayall, Santana, Bob Seger, the Eagles, Canned Heat, Ravi Shankar, Albert King, the Doors, and a whole lot more play.
But as the savvy music fans among you might have noticed, that’s one hell of a line-up. So, the Soda festival ended up drawing an unsuspected surplus of around 200,000 attendees. That brought the total to a safe estimate of around 250,000 in total, and with hardly enough provisions for even the original estimate, chaos ensued.
In the cartoon below, David Squires brings you up to speed with the craziest festival of the ’70s with his unique comic stylings. Enjoy…
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