Singin' the Ann Arbor Blues
http://annarborchronicle.com/2009/08/27/column-singin-the-ann-arbor-blues/
1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival was Midwest's Woodstock
By Alan Glenn
August 27, 2009
Forty years ago this month, a great crowd of young people converged
on a small, unsuspecting middle-American town for an incredible
three-day celebration of peace and music. They sat on the cool grass
of an open field, grooved to the tunes of a dizzying array of
legendary performers, smoked pot, drank wine, and generally had a
blast. It was a landmark event that is still spoken of in hushed
tones of awe and reverence among music historians.
No, it wasn't Woodstock. It was something similar, yet very
different, something smaller yet in some ways bigger.
It was something called the Ann Arbor Blues Festival.
In early August 1969, two weeks before the mammoth fete in Bethel,
N.Y., approximately 20,000 eager spectators came to the Fuller
Flatlands on the banks of the lazy Huron River to hear an absolutely
astounding lineup of living legends of the blues B. B. King, Muddy
Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Big Mama Thornton, Son
House, T-Bone Walker, Lightnin' Hopkins, and on and on at the first
major blues festival in the United States.
Although the Ann Arbor event has been almost completely overshadowed
by its big brother in New York, to many serious music fans
especially blues enthusiasts it is by far the more important of the
two. Writing in the October 1969 issue of Downbeat, critic Dan
Morgenstern made his preference plain, dismissing Woodstock in favor
of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, which he declared was "without doubt
the festival of the year, if not the decade."
Choosing the Blues
But it wasn't just the cultured music critics for whom the choice was
clear. In the spring of '69, Steve Wanvig was a 19-year-old blues fan
living in Minneapolis. "I was working at an aluminum window and
siding company," he says, "when I heard about this massive rock show
which was to take place in the summer, out in upstate New York."
"I wanted to go," remembers Wanvig, "but I was much more interested
in the massive blues show which was to take place in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, much closer. So I enlisted a high school buddy to drive his
red '67 Chevy Impala over there. Jim V (may he rest in peace) wasn't
even a big blues guy, but he was a good enough friend to provide
transportation. We threw a tent and some sleeping bags in the car and
headed east."
At that time Wanvig was particularly enamored of the magic harp
(blues-speak for harmonica) of Charlie Musselwhite. "Musselwhite was
to play in Ann Arbor; that did it for me," says Wanvig, now an artist
and graphic designer. "But besides him, you had the biggest
collection of blues legends ever to perform on one stage. It was an
absolute, stone-cold MUST for anyone who called themselves a blues
fan. I chose the blues, and I'm glad I did."
While Woodstock was remarkable largely because of the sheer size of
its audience, the Ann Arbor Blues Festival was all about the music.
"This particular happening did not attract even one-tenth of the
300,000-plus that Woodstock could boast," wrote Dan Morgenstern in
Downbeat. "Total attendance for the three evening and two afternoon
concerts at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival was around 20,000. But
everyone there had come to hear the music not to make the scene
and the enthusiastic response was a joy to behold."
Baby Boomer Blues
Most writers who attended the festival remarked upon the enthusiasm
of the audience. Many also noted the striking contrast between the
performers on the stage mostly older, impecunious black men, with
roots in the Deep South and the spectators on the field, who were
mostly young, white, and well-off. "It was an odd sight to see white
youngsters besieging black men in their sixties and seventies for
autographs," wrote Hollie West in The Washington Post.
In hindsight, however, it shouldn't have seemed all that odd.
Throughout the 1960s there had been occurring what has been termed a
"blues revival" although that is something of a misnomer, since the
blues had never actually died. Instead the phenomenon would be more
accurately described as an awakening of interest in the blues in an
audience that previously hadn't paid it much attention young,
white, educated Americans.
The blues had first started to appear on the radar of the boomer
college crowd in the early sixties, as part of the folk music
explosion. A few African-American country bluesmen were booked into
the coffee houses and were admired by audiences as purveyors of a
truly "authentic" form of traditional American roots music. A number
of popular white folkies, such as Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, also
included blues material in their repertoire.
The rise of interest in acoustic blues was followed by a surge of
enthusiasm for the heavily blues-influenced rock 'n' roll of the
early British Invasion. The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Who, and
the Kinks were among the many English rock bands that ironically
enough introduced scores of young American listeners to the blues,
via rocking covers of blues standards as well as their own
blues-tinged originals.
By the late sixties a new white blues-rock scene was in full swing on
both sides of the Atlantic. Janis Joplin, Paul Butterfield, Canned
Heat, Steve Miller, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, and others made
millions with their hybridized versions of black American blues. At
the same time, most freely acknowledged the debt owed their
African-American forbears, who in turn enjoyed an increase of
interest in their work (although nothing on the level of the white performers).
Roots of the Festival
The Ann Arbor Blues Festival was the brainchild of a small group of
University of Michigan undergraduates, led by John Fishel, a
20-year-old anthropology major. Music festivals had become quite
fashionable in the late sixties, and Fishel remembers that there was
interest on campus in putting together some sort of fete.
"Somebody put me in touch with one or two people," he says. "It ended
up with maybe four or five of us getting together. Some of us knew
each other, some didn't. We really didn't have a concept at the time.
We didn't know whether it would be a series or a one-shot deal. We
didn't know whether it was an inside show in an auditorium, or
whether it was an outdoor show. But I agreed to do the entertainment
part of it."
Having been a blues enthusiast from an early age, Fishel naturally
wanted to make it a blues festival. The others were either of like
mind or were easily persuaded, and so, nascent concept in hand, they
set about putting the gears in motion. Fishel and several companions
traveled to Chicago, then probably the biggest blues city in America,
to make key contacts among the performers and promoters, and to get a
better feel for the milieu.
Fishel put his knowledge of the genre to work, and expanded his
horizons in the process. "I had a lot of records at the time and I
had some sense of who was alive, who was still performing. But there
was much more that I didn't know and it sort of took me into a world
that I remain very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be part of."
Easy Money
Probably the most crucial part of the festival's development was
fundraising. In that the organizers were unbelievably fortunate.
Somehow they persuaded two university-connected nonprofit entities
the University Activities Center (UAC), and Canterbury House, the
student Episcopalian organization to put up $70,000 for the event.
(That's a jaw-dropping $400,000 in today's money.) "To this day, I'm
still not clear why they said yes," marvels Fishel.
Cash in hand, the small group of organizers began to develop the
festival in earnest. It was decided to hold a try-out of sorts a
small, free blues concert in the spring of 1969 in order to gauge
potential interest. On one of their trips to Chicago they had
discovered the perfect artist for such an event: the then-unknown
guitarist Luther Allison.
"We sort of discovered Luther Allison," says Joel Silvers, another of
the festival's organizers. "He was playing in this very traditional
West Side club where most of the people were fresh from the South. I
don't know who initiated the conversation with him, but he was
absolutely delighted to find any interest whatsoever in a university
or a white audience for the kind of music that he was performing."
Allison came to Ann Arbor in late April for a four-hour free show in
the ballroom of the student union. At first the audience was small.
But, as John Fishel remembers, "he started to play, and it was
electric. People just started to pour in from all over the campus."
As the performance wrapped around midnight, the planning committee
were all smiles. The blues had passed the test; the community had
responded. The show would go on.
Radical Blues
Today many may wonder why Ann Arbor a small, Midwestern town, far
from the South, with a tiny black population should have been the
site for the country's first major blues festival. But consider that
the core of the white awakening to the blues in the 1960s were the
free thinkers, political activists, and countercultural rebels and
that in those days Ann Arbor was a major center of anti-establishment
activity, home to all those types and more.
Festival organizer Bert Stratton recalls that in those days to like
the blues was to be part of an exclusive, rebellious club. "It was
like a secret language. If you were a young white kid who was into
the black blues you thought you were pretty cool. It was an identity
search on our part. We wanted something that was totally authentic,
as opposed to what we were, which was not, I guess," Stratton says
with a chuckle. He explains that listening to performers like Howlin'
Wolf or Muddy Waters was a sure-fire way to annoy the "straights."
Joel Silvers remembers that in the sixties there was a politicized
subculture that followed American roots music. "A lot of these people
were white," he says, "but had their roots in the civil rights
movement. These were people who were both counterculture and highly
politicized in some way or another. I mean they were still college
students. They weren't necessarily marching in Selma, but they were
absorbing this sense of a black-white cultural alliance that was
still possible in 1969."
"Within a couple of years," he adds, "between black power and
whatever happened in terms of a cultural backlash or political
backlash, a lot of white kids were no longer as interested in
authentic black music, so it was a bit of a short-lived phenomenon."
Part of the radical agenda in the late sixties was a rejection of
mainstream white culture in favor of that of minority groups,
especially African-Americans. From early on the festival organizers
had decided that it would feature predominantly black performers.
This decision was made not only to help right the wrongs that black
artists had been suffering for decades, but also to expose
concertgoers to the roots of the blues, with which many were expected
to be unfamiliar. Festival organizer Cary Gordon told The Washington
Post, "I feel the blues is a black phenomenon, and assuming there
will be more blues festivals after this, we felt the first festival
here should be devoted to first-generation blues."
Bert Stratton remembers that at the '69 festival it was unofficially
decided that black attendees would be let in without charge. Not that
it much mattered, he says. "I don't think we had more than 50 black
people in the audience at any one time." He also suspects that
although their hearts were in the right place, the organizers were
unwittingly insulting those they intended to help. "It would have
been totally embarrassing for any black person to say, 'I want to get
in for free,'" he says.
"This Is So Beautiful"
The first Ann Arbor Blues Festival got underway at 7:30 p.m. on
Friday, August 1, 1969. Over the next two days attendees would be
treated to nearly 24 solid hours of the best and most authentic blues
music the country had to offer, old and new, from country blues to
city blues and everything in between. Some reviewers had minor
complaints about one or two of the performances, but overall critical
opinion was glowing. Norman Gibson of The Ann Arbor News perhaps
summed it up best, writing simply that "the first Ann Arbor Blues
Festival in history was a success from almost any point of view and
those who arranged it can be proud of the results."
The audience was, if anything, even more enthusiastic than the
experts. Many performers received heartfelt standing ovations, and
the moving, quiet performance by the venerable Son House that closed
the festival brought tears to the eyes of many. Dan Morgenstern wrote
in Downbeat that "the performers especially the veterans were
treated with respect that bordered on reverence. It added up to a
kind of recognition that blues artists have seldom, if ever, received
from their own people."
For their part the performers were more than happy to bask in the
unaccustomed glow of appreciation that the festival audience gave. To
many it was the most amazing thing in which they had ever taken part.
Michael Erlewine, a guitarist who played in a local blues band,
helped out behind the scenes at the festival and had a chance to
interview many of the performers. He recalls that James Cotton told
him, "I've never seen nothin' like this in my life. This is the
beautifulest thing I ever seen in my life. This is so beautiful."
Festival organizer Ken Whipple related a similar story to The
Michigan Daily, about how he met B. B. King coming off the stage
after finishing his set. "He put his arm around me," Whipple said,
"asked me my name and said what a great thing it was that he was able
to be here. There were tears in his eyes. It's the greatest thing in
the world."
It was also a sad fact that most of the performers were thrilled with
the money. "The Blues Festival is a dream for some of these guys, not
for the prestige but because they need the bread," John Fishel told
The Michigan Daily. "These guys will play two nights a week from 8
until 5 in the morning and only get $30. And even if they do get a
chance to make a record, they usually get screwed."
One of the more significant aspects of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival,
in the opinion of music promoter Dick Waterman, was that it was the
first to pay black bluesmen a commercial wage. "Others such as
Newport, Berkeley, UCLA, Mariposa, et. al., insist on
$50-a-day-plus-travel," wrote Waterman in 1969, "which is fine for an
act that is making a regular living Baez, Dylan, Peter, Paul and
Mary but hard on the bluesman who needs the festival for exposure
but also needs it for actual living money."
In this the Ann Arbor event served as an example to other music
festivals, for even though the dozens of performers were paid a
commercial wage, the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival not only recouped
its original $70,000 investment, when all was said and done it had
made a profit of about $200.
Ann Arbor Blues Part Deux
Following the unprecedented success of the first Ann Arbor Blues
Festival, there was no question that there would be a second. There
was a new group of organizers (including a few of the originals such
as John Fishel), but they planned the second festival to be much the
same as the first, on a slightly larger scale, given the bigger
budget that was allotted by UAC and Canterbury House, who once again
were sponsoring.
The success of the first festival brought more attention from the
media for the second. The 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival was another
astounding artistic success, a joyous experience for audience and
performers alike that earned the raves of critics from Downbeat,
Rolling Stone, Billboard, and newspapers across the country.
Financially, however, it was a disaster.
As early as Sunday afternoon, festival organizers realized that they
were going to post a loss of nearly $20,000, an amount that would be
ruinous to the sponsors.
The second festival appears to have suffered much more than the first
at the hands of gate-crashers. It also had the bad luck of taking
place the very same weekend as a giant rock festival near Jackson, at
a park called Goose Lake. That event boasted an impressive roster of
popular acts, including Chicago, Rod Stewart, Bob Seger, John
Sebastian, and Jethro Tull, and would draw an estimated 200,000
attendees over three days. The Goose Lake Festival is an intriguing
story in its own right barbed wire, sanitation problems, emergency
food deliveries, overzealous security, drugs being sold openly like
concessions but in relation to the Ann Arbor Blues Festival it is
usually cast as the grinch who stole Christmas.
Undoubtedly, Goose Lake did have a negative impact on attendance at
the Ann Arbor event. But in fact the figures seem to show that
attendance at the second festival was roughly the same as the first.
What must also be considered is that organizers spent more money on
the second festival, and at the same time lowered ticket prices by
almost 30%. This was done in hopes of attracting more attendees, but
in hindsight may have been a critical mistake.
Moreover, the overwhelming success of the first festival, with its
lineup of performers who were virtually unknown outside the world of
blues freaks, may have led the planners to be a bit overconfident.
Two weeks before the festival, The Washington Post reported that
tickets would be limited to 15,000 "because festival organizers want
to emphasize the music and not the event as a happening." The Post
quoted one of the organizers as saying somewhat ominously, in light
of what would happen that they were trying to make the event "as
esoteric as possible."
This was perhaps not the wisest course of action, especially with so
much money on the line.
Whatever the reason, however, the damage had been done, and the
future of the festival was in peril. In hopes of making up the loss,
and saving UAC and Canterbury House, festival organizers put out a
plea for donations. They also turned to some high-profile
blues-rockers for help. John Fishel explains:
"Johnny Winter came in 1970 as a guest, appeared back stage, hanging
out. He then went on stage with Luther Allison, and they played
together, to the delight of the audience. When the festival lost
money, we went back to him and asked him if he would do a benefit."
Winter readily agreed, and played at the University of Michigan's
Crisler Arena a week later, along with some of the other performers
from the festival. Fishel recalls that enough money was raised to
make good the loss.
Fishel also remembers a tantalizing might-have-been. "We were also
trying to get the Rolling Stones to come and we got pretty close.
Their schedule didn't allow them to do a benefit. Maybe if they had
been there we would have raised sufficient money to not only pay the
debt off, but also to continue the thing in '71 and it might have
been a different reality."
As it was, despite the repayment of the loss, the university was not
about to risk another such financial calamity, and the request for a
third festival in 1971 was turned down. It seemed that the brilliant
light that had shown on the blues in Ann Arbor the two previous years
had been snuffed out.
Rainbows to the Rescue
All was not lost, however. John Sinclair was a hippie activist living
in Ann Arbor who had come to national attention when in 1969 he was
sent to prison for 10 years for giving two joints to an undercover
policewoman. His unusually harsh sentencing became a cause célèbre,
attracting such notables as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allen
Ginsberg, Jane Fonda, and John Lennon. The two-year campaign to free
him culminated in a huge rally at the University of Michigan's
Crisler Arena, at which Lennon, Bob Seger, Stevie Wonder and others performed.
Released from prison shortly thereafter, Sinclair was looking to get
back into the fray, but perhaps in a less controversial way. In 1968
he had co-founded the White Panther Party, which was modeled on the
Black Panthers, and adopted that group's highly confrontational
stance toward the mainstream American establishment including,
ironically enough, the condemnation of white culture espoused by the
Black Panthers.
While Sinclair had been in prison, however, the White Panthers had
softened their tone, and changed their name to the Rainbow People's
Party, reflecting a new outlook that promoted peace and brotherhood.
Sinclair had been a fan of black music since early childhood, and
reviving the artistically successful Ann Arbor Blues Festival seemed
like a perfect project for the freshly-minted Rainbows.
So Sinclair joined forces with local music promoter Peter Andrews to
form a company unconnected with the university, Rainbow Multi-Media,
and put on a new festival. But this time around there would be no
talk of being esoteric. Jazz, soul, and blues-rock were added to the
bill, in hopes of attracting a wider audience, and bigger-name acts
were booked, such as Ray Charles, Count Basie, Miles Davis, James
Brown, Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, and Booker T. & the M.G.'s.
The revamped Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival would run for three
years, starting in 1972. Despite the changes instituted by Sinclair
and Andrews, the new festivals would follow much the same course as
the original two: each would be hailed as an artistic triumph, but
financially would flop. After the disastrous 1974 festival, which had
to be moved to Canada at the last minute because the newly-Republican
Ann Arbor City Council refused to grant a permit, Sinclair called it
quits. Once again it seemed that the light had gone out.
Ann Arbor Blues Redux
Peter Andrews had not given up, however. He kept the artistic ideals
of the festival burning and in 1992 the Ann Arbor City Council was
once again persuaded (without much difficulty: the vote was
unanimous) to grant a permit for a revitalized Blues and Jazz Festival.
This time the festival would have its longest continuous run,
surviving for nearly a decade and a half. But once again the familiar
pattern would emerge: artistic success, financial failure. After the
last festival in 2006 an accumulated debt of nearly $60,000 remained
on the books.
The festival is now on what seems to be permanent hiatus. Peter
Andrews is pessimistic about the possibility of another revival.
There are too many blues and jazz festivals today, and to compete
would require headliners that would make it nearly impossible to make
money a far cry from 1969, when Ann Arbor was host to the first
major blues festival in history, and obscure but talented artists
could draw a crowd.
Legacy
Although the Ann Arbor blues are no longer being sung, the festivals
have left a rich legacy of which all can be rightfully proud.
Especially the first two events, which brought together a lineup of
blues maestros that had never been seen before or will ever be seen
again. The fact that the organizers were barely old enough to vote
makes it all the more amazing.
John Fishel reflects on those early days with a mixture of pride and
nostalgia. "I think the Ann Arbor Blues Festival did many things. It
inspired the many blues festivals that came after. It resulted in a
group of people who were primarily from Chicago creating a magazine,
Living Blues, the first American magazine that was devoted to this
type of music, a magazine that really became sort of the gold
standard for those that were into it."
"A number of labels were created as a result of the festival," he
continues, "people who came and got inspired because they heard
people that they hadn't heard before and went into the business,
somebody like Bruce Iglauer, who created Alligator Records. It was a
catalyst, which is wonderful."
After a pause, he says simply, "It was magic."
--
Alan Glenn is currently at work a documentary film about Ann Arbor in
the sixties. Visit the film's website for more
information. http://www.modernmajorfilms.com/a2/
While there you can contribute your memories of that time and read
those that others have contributed in a public forum set up
expressly for that purpose.
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