An Open Air Pop Festival was held at Parade Stadium on July 19, 1970, attended by 6,000 people.  This is not to be confused with the two Open Air Festivals held at Midway Stadium in the summer of 1971.  This festival was organized by Pat Raines, the owner of the Prison in Burnsville.

Performers who were advertised were:

• Sly and the Family Stone
• Johnny Winter
• Richie Havens
• The Amboy Dukes.  They didn’t show, and were replaced by the Illinois Speed Press.
• blumsberry people.  Well, they didn’t show either, maybe because the ad butchered their name?  There was a band called The Bloomsbury People, described on discogs as a psych rock band out of Milwaukee.  This was presumably the warmup band and was replaced by local favorites, White Lightning.

 

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REVIEWS

6,000 fans attended the concert on the gray and blustery day, and it merited reviews in both the Minneapolis Star, by free-lance reviewer Kristen Bachler, and the Minneapolis Tribune, by Will Shapira, who reviewed concerts for the Trib and for Connie’s Insider.  Let’s go act by act.

White Lightning opened the show in a hurry, according to Shapira, with tributes to Dick Nixon and Richard Daley.  Bachler dismissed them as a “dance rock” band, but liked their “Fantasy Daze 2” original piece.  Both enjoyed their crowd-pleasing version of the “William Tell Overture.”

 

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Sly and the Family Stone had committed to play this festival and also Randall’s Island rock festival in New York on the same day.  Pat Raines got wind of the double booking and obtained an order in Manhattan Superior Court requiring Sly to appear in Minneapolis.  “They were interested in both festivals and weren’t sure which they would make,” said Raines.  We helped them make up their minds.”   Another version of the story is that Sly had told Raines that he wanted out of his contract ahead of time, but after some jockeying of time spots, he agreed to appear.

At any rate he was there, although he came on at least an hour late and reportedly drunk, starting with the words “Minneapolis stinks.” Sly supposedly called Minneapolis “worthless.”  Doug Hoaglund remembered “Sly was very late and the emcee was making excuses like “traffic” or something. When Sly stumbled onstage he laughed about the excuses and said he was sitting in his Limo behind the stage. He sounded out of it. Dumb.”  Reviewer Shapira complained that “Sly spent too much time indulging in non sequiturs and curbstone philosophy.”

Illinois Speed Press unveiled a new Country-Rock sound at the show, according to Shapira.  He liked it, and so did Bachler, but the latter noted that the group received only a cool response from the audience.

Johnny Winter made his fourth visit to the Twin Cities here, and was the crowd favorite.  He shone with his work on electric and slide guitars, “reaching his greatest heights during a guitar duet with Rick Derringer.”

 

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Richie Havens closed the show with an excellent set that included his current hit, “Handsome Johnny,” “Fire and Rain,” and his signature “Freedom.”  Shapira called him an eloquent and compelling folk singer.  Bachler wrote that “the audience really came alive for the first time during the entire day on “Freedom.”

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UPSHOT

Bachelor wrote that the festival was beautifully run, and there was potential for magic, but it was lost in the “lifeless, conditioned responses of a large share of the audience.”  She felt there was no real connection between the musicians and the people who had come to see them.

Shapira also gave the festival administration high marks, but went further:

Except for the delay before Sly, the festival proceeded without excessive delay.  The sound system was good throughout, and between sets a number of people brought out picnic baskets, others communed with mother nature and just about everybody seemed to dig the music and the scene.

There was no major trouble, despite or because of at least 150 cops in riot gear standing guard.  There were 20 arrests, many for gate crashing, which was a fad then, especially for outdoor concerts, but cops left dope smokers alone.  Rains hired 10 Olympic karate experts from the Midwest Karate Association to keep people off the stage. Other arrests were for obscenity in public, breach of the peace, defacing the American flag, drunkenness, and damaging trees.  The names and addresses of the adult (over 18) men who committed these crimes (!) were published in the paper.

For his trouble, Pat Raines lost $35,000.

John Lowen remembered, “What a wild scene it was! Mounted Cops, hippies scaling the fences, Sly screwing up the whole deal, oh what a blast we had though.”

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Sources:

Minneapolis Star, July 16 and 20, 1970

Minneapolis Tribune, July 20, 1970