PARENTAL ADVISORY: If you’re a young person, don’t let your parents catch you reading these reviews, because there are occasional references to the illicit use of cannabis, LSD, PCP, quaaludes, meth, cocaine and/or vast quantities of alcohol. The other warning is this: If you consume these things, you will forget a great deal of the fun you had, and that’s no fun.

I‘m betting that about three-quarters of the 600,000 people who showed up for the Summer Jam rock festival at the Watkins Glen speedway in upstate New York in 1973 all said the same thing: “I didn’t get to go to Woodstock so …” And it’s a good bet, too, that fully half of them later said, “Yeah, man, I was at Watkins Glen! It was extremely cool! And I never went to another rock festival again after that — no way.”

It was a mind-boggling mid-summer burn-out, complete with thundershowers, and if you didn’t get there early the stage was a figment of the imagination. It was “over there” somewhere, past those dusty hills, on the other side of what looked like pretty much the entire population of America.

They’d been racing cars at Watkins Glen since 1948, but the place only made it into the Guinness Book of World Records when the “Largest Audience at a Pop Festival” accumulated on July 28, 1973, to see the Allman Brothers, the Band and the Grateful Dead.

Promoters Shelly Finkel and Jim Koplik, who’d once put on a Grateful Dead concert, figured they’d sell 150,000 tickets and everyone would be happy. But they hadn’t reckoned on the Woodstock factor, and although Altamont had in the interim murdered the love generation in its cradle, loads of people still wanted the festival experience, even if it did involve traversing mammoth traffic jams, a sea of mud and an ocean of garbage.

Er, that would be me and 599,999 other people.

Fortunately I had a shield to protect me throughout the day-ish and a half-ish I spent there: a hefty, fermenting mosh of beer, weed and — hey, something new! — quaaludes. Unfortunately, the protective shield wouldn’t allow any memory cells inside either, so I really don’t remember much of what actually happened.

Somehow I ended up sailing down the turnpike in a green Porsche Spyder with a $10 ticket in my pocket. At the wheel was a mysterious young man named Steve (that’s him in the pic) who drifted in and out of my life in a hashish haze over the course of a year or two. He was a rich developer’s son, which only got his sister kidnapped and held for ransom when he was young.

The Porsche was a gas, even if I did keep thinking of James Dean and his Spydery crash, and all the way down to the racecourse I had to hold the throttle open for Steve by pulling back hard and constantly on a nob next to the parking brake between the seats. It was a major strain and necessitated several stops to fend off cramps, but somehow we got there, and here’s the thing: I don’t recall getting bogged down in anything like the galactic traffic gridlock that, according to every account, completely engulfed the Glen.

I’m thinking this must have been because we just got there after almost everyone else. To this day I’m not sure if that was good timing or bad timing. The jam we encountered instead, apart from the endless stream of comings and goings onstage, was in the people crush. We tried getting closer to the stage but it was simply impossible. We were outmanoeuvred at every angle by the mass of men leading lives of demented desperation.

“It’s a free concert from now on,” or Woodstockian words of resignation to that effect, had already been pronounced over the loudspeakers long before we tumbled down a formerly grassy hillside into the immense hive of humanity. For all I know it may even have been uber-promoter Bill Graham making the crowd-too-big-open-the-gates declaration; he was running the Band’s tour at the time, the same summer as he was handling CSNY’s reunion stroll.

There were so many people already there the day before the Saturday show that the performers’ soundchecks became an impromptu concert in their own right, the Dead reeling out an unplanned two-set marathon of their own. Those guys never did have any sense of the clock, though.

The Dead were first onstage for the actual concert on Saturday, again churning out two long sets, from “Bertha” and “Box Of Rain” to “Playing in the Band” and “Eyes of the World”.

The Band followed with a two-hour set sliced right down the middle by a mudfield-inducing thunderstorm, during which Garth Hudson — “at his organ again” — improvised something called “Genetic Method” until the rain let up. This too became a legend within the legend.

It rained? Well, okay, I’ll take their word for it. I was too busy to notice, exploring the strange submarine soup that quaaludes turn your world into, thick as split-pea and not nearly as tasty. I was obliged to the American providers of the pills but wondered what on earth could be so wrong with their lives that they needed a drug like that! Maybe it was a Grateful Dead thing. I never did understand Deadheads, even though I also somehow found myself at one of the group’s later headliner shows.

Occasionally over the course of the next 30-hour epoch I managed to wobble to my feet and gaze in the general direction of the source of the music, the stage, perhaps half a mile away, only its vertically striped, green and yellow canopy discernible through the heat and the haze. The colours were dull, as was the festival’s overal ambience. I looked around and all I could see were half-naked bodies lolling across the hillocks that rolled up from the main bowl. I kept thinking, “Where’s the racetrack?”, unaware that we were grooving away (if that’s what we were doing) in another part of Watkins Glen altogether.

At any rate, I was either too far gone or gone altogether by the time the Allmans delivered a three-hour, jam-intensive show. I seem to retain some almost genetic-method memory of “Whipping Post” swirling through the air. Could be a dream fragment; could be narcotics. I would have loved to have been in a better state to appreciate Dicky Betts’ guitar playing, though.

Then, the official record shows, all three bands were together onstage hammering on for another four hours! This must have been the soundtrack to my undersoup journey as I slept, not that there’s any difference between sleeping and being awake when it comes to quaaludes.

One thing I do remember is seeing the skydiver who was killed, though I had no idea I was watching someone die. Only later did I learn that Willard Smith wasn’t just sending off a fake jetstream as he descended into the crowd. He dived out of his plane with flares and accidentally ignited his coveralls — “blew a hole in his chest”, in fact, according to his buddy. They found him later in the woods nearby. Three other skydivers who came down with him seemed to indicate that the stunt went off fine.

Poor Willard’s family had their own reckoning up to do. For the rest of us, someone figured out that one out of every 350 people living in America was at Watkins Glen that July 28. Most were from the Northeast and 17 to 24 years old, so close to one out of every three young people from Boston to New York was at the festival.

Compared to Woodstock, Robert Santelli wrote in “Aquarius Rising”, Watkins Glen “is more important for what it wasn’t … At Watkins Glen a feeling of monotony and tedium constantly challenged the viewers’ interest in the music and the proceedings onstage. Long, winding solos were frequent. The heat, the lack of comfort, and the crowded conditions dulled otherwise stirring moments.” Ah, so it wasn’t just the dope.

Santelli also pointed out that Woodstock produced two sets of LPs and a movie, while the memory of Summer Jam came down to a few tossed-together tracks released many years later, an oversight due primarily to the Dead putting up a quite lively resistance to a Watkins Glen album. Apparently this is also why few people are aware that the Dead performed at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival: They didn’t want to be in DA Pennebaker’s film.

“CBS shot some footage of the event, but the Dead refused to allow it or any other film to be released commercially … The Dead had always demanded full editorial control of their music and live performances. Whenever they were denied such power, they simply declined to be part of the project.”

Just the same, Garcia and Co included Hudson’s rain-soaked organ jam on their “So Many Roads” album. The Band chucked a few bits together with live tracks from elsewhere and called it their Watkins Glen LP.

Monotony, tedium, heat, lack of comfort — why is this concert in my Top 15? Because I remembered enough of it to know that it was an experience I’ll never forget.

REVIEW COPYRIGHTED — If you’d like to borrow, just ask: Click “Get in touch” at the top of the menu. The Google Earth image below is recent. That dark area isn’t a crowd, just woods. The fans at the concert sat in the area sweeping up and left from where the stage was.

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The Grateful Dead lured me to one of their own concerts two months later, on September 26 at Buffalo Memorial Auditorium. It must have been for one of two reasons: Either I wanted to get a sense of Ken Kesey’s Trips Festivals, for which the Dead had famously supplied the music or, more likely, I wanted to get a sense of what the hell I’d missed at Watkins Glen.

Mmmm, not much either way, as it turned out. There were a bunch of tie-dyed Deadheads twirling around, dumbly dervish, on the perimeter of the mostly seated audience as Jerry and Phil and the pointlessly doubled-up drummers just went on and on and on.

The warm-up act was the Doug Sahm Band, led by the stringy-haired Texan who once had a big and bigly vapid hit called “Mendocino” with his former outfit, the Sir Douglas Quintet. God it was awful, but out of respect for Sahm, who died in 1999, age 58, I have to point out that he did get Bob Dylan to write and sing along on “Wallflower” on his solo album.

The Band turned up again on the Eric Clapton-Freddie King tour in 1974, which I had the pleasure of seeing on July 6 at Orchard Park Stadium just outside Buffalo. It was in fact the first concert ever held at the home of football’s Buffalo Bills. Once the Band cleared off, the show was very blues-intensive, but not especially fiery.

Clapton, who always seems to have “seen better days”, pulled a sweet charmer on 47,000 fans by sharing his spotlight with Freddie King, the Texas Cannonball. Slowhand was still finding his fingers when King recorded “Hide Away” in 1960, and Eric recorded it soon after with Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

Freddie, who was #25 on Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of history’s 100 greatest guitarists, died of a heart attack in 1976, still only 42.

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I’m indebted to former US Marine “Sarge T”, whose website has a pile of newspaper clippings on Summer Jam from which some of the pix seen here were scalped and Photoshopped. The sergeant didn’t have a terrific time at the concert but definitely remembers it better than I do.

* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory