Summer Jam, 1973: When a skydiver set himself on fire over a Grateful Dead concert
People will do wild things to be the centre of attention, and gigs are not immune to this despite the performers being the ones who deserve all of the focus to be on them. If you’ve paid good money to be at a concert, then the chances are you’re not there to watch the crowd, and even if something exciting is happening off-stage, the hope is that it won’t be the highlight of the show or indeed what it is remembered by for eternity.
Call me boring, but I am not the biggest fan of some of the activities that crowds get into at shows. My petite and fragile frame was not built for the moshpit, and I really don’t appreciate my fellow gig-goers offering me some sort of sacrificial lamb to be passed around for crowd-surfing. Worse still are stage divers and hecklers, and goodness knows what is going through the minds of those who do choose to participate in such displays of self-importance.
All of these are cardinal sins in my own personal gig-goer’s handbook, but if you’re going to perform a stunt of sorts at a concert, you’ve got to appreciate it when someone goes the extra mile to create a spectacle. Veteran skydiver Willard ‘Smitty’ Smith Jr would attempt a daring feat at the fabled New York Summer Jam in 1973 that would surely grab the attention of the estimated 600,000 attendees, but things went awry when it came to his moment.
Boasting a lineup of The Allman Brothers Band, The Band, and the Grateful Dead, all for the nominal cost of $10 a ticket, over half a million people descended upon Watkins Glen State Park for a day of live entertainment, hard drugs, and flagrant displays of exhibitionism. While it was a success in terms of turnout, the police and medical staff had their work cut out, attending to various overdoses and acts of public indecency, and The Band also had their set cut short due to a thunderstorm that made it unsafe to perform.
However, the most shocking incident came some time before the storms broke out, and it was the unfortunate fate of Smith’s daredevil stunt at the centre of it all. Depending on whose account you believe – bearing in mind the amount of LSD-induced time dilation that festival-goers were experiencing – the Grateful Dead were coming towards the end of their three to five-hour-long set when Smith hurled himself from a plane above the park before setting off a flare mid-fall.
The flare, which a close friend of Smith’s reported to have been a military-grade explosive containing four ounces of TNT, set the jumpsuit that Smith was wearing ablaze as he plummeted towards the ground. Unable to steer himself while on fire, his body landed in a woodland area around half a mile from the festival site, and the skydiver tragically succumbed to his injuries as a result.
It’s a harrowing tale of how a death-defying act can sometimes go horribly wrong, but you can’t fault Smith for his truly original approach to the tired traditions of crowd-surfing and stage-diving, nor for the sheer moxie it would have taken for him to perform such a feat during a festival.
