The things you find in the old newspapers …
50 years ago this week, in late June 1973, a county judge in northern Wisconsin issued a restraining order preventing what was described as “an extravagant rockfest” from taking place on the Menominee Indian Reservation.
The Great American Indian Experience was billed as “bigger than Woodstock!” The whole thing was to have been filmed, as was Woodstock.
The band getting top billing — Phil Buss and the Beef Jerky Band — was a Midwest folk-rock band.
As for some of the “32 Groups Playing the Latest Rock & Roll” — The Grateful Dead, Richie Havens, Pink Floyd, Joan Baez and Buffy Sainte-Marie — well, yeah, no.
Not that anyone could easily have known or looked it up back then, but:
- The Grateful Dead was playing the Universal Amphitheatre in Universal City, Calif., on June 30, July 1 and July 2, the three days that The Great American Indian Experience was to have taken place.
- Pink Floyd played the Brighton Dome in Brighton, England, on June 28 and 29, the two days prior to the festival weekend dates, then took the rest of the summer off from its Dark Side of the Moon Tour.
- Joan Baez was in Los Angeles that week, taping and hosting an episode of “The Midnight Special” that aired in July.
Doesn’t seem as if Menominee County Judge O.S. Luckenbach need have bothered with a restraining order. The festival’s director, one Ronald G. Lewis, didn’t show up in court. He was living in a pup tent on the reservation.
Because news sometimes traveled slowly to remote Wisconsin locations 50 years ago, Luckenbach might not have known that the Illinois attorney general already had pretty much put the kibosh on the festival.
The ad seen above appeared in the Chicago Tribune on April 15, 1973. There must have been complaints almost immediately. Not even a month later, state Attorney General William J. Scott put Lewis into a legal headlock, getting him to retract the ad because it contained a bunch of bogus claims about the festival.
Lewis agreed to not advertise that any musical performer would perform at the festival unless there was a written agreement, and to not advertise that any Indian organization would benefit from the festival unless there was a written agreement with any Indian organization getting at least 50 percent of the profits.
Anyone who’d bought those $20 tickets were to get refunds upon request, with the Illinois attorney general’s office overseeing the refunds.
In late June, as what was to have been festival weekend drew near, “posters put up in the area were torn down as fast as they appeared,” the Wausau Daily Record-Herald reported.
Marathon County Sheriff Louis Gianoli, who had some kind of role in helping police the reservation, which was 50 miles east of his primary jurisdiction, “said he would do little except keep an eye on the situation and give help if called for.”
If any kind of “an extravagant rockfest” took place that weekend — and that seems unlikely — there’s nothing in the old newspapers about it.