Last time out, we shared the story about a long-ago Wisconsin rock festival that never happened after the organizer was exposed as a hustler at best and a potential fraud at worst.
That reminded me of another long-ago Wisconsin rock festival that never happened after the organizer was exposed as a hustler at best and a potential fraud at worst.
That one was six years later, in the summer of 1979. The decline and fall of the Wisconsin Jam took place in two newspaper stories written by a 22-year-old kid who was in his second year in the news business.
That kid was me.
I’d heard the Wisconsin Jam hyped on local radio in Eau Claire, where I worked for the Leader-Telegram, and seen it hyped in advertising flyers in the record stores on Water Street.
It didn’t add up, though. Ted Nugent, Cheap Trick, Waylon Jennings and Aerosmith on the same bill somewhere in Wisconsin? Yet you still vote for the acts, and they don’t tell you where the festival is?
So I convinced a skeptical middle-aged editor to let me look into it and to write about it if there was something to it. There was.
The Wisconsin Jam, scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 18, 1979, was being promoted by one Ken Rittmueller. He was 37 (though for some reason he told me he was a year older). He had a 206-acre farm near Pigeon Falls, a tiny hamlet in rural west-central Wisconsin. He told me he was a guy who “hustles” for a living, speculating in real estate and livestock and raising Clydesdale horses.
I made a ton of phone calls — to managers, promoters, booking agents, radio stations, even Rolling Stone magazine — seeking confirmation of Rittmueller’s rock fest claims.
I vividly remember Ted Nugent’s manager, Nick Caris of Detroit, getting agitated at hearing the news and all but screaming into the phone: “No way! We’re booked for Largo, Maryland, on that date. We’ve had no contact by that promoter.”
(That is true. Ted Nugent played at Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, with Blackfoot and The Scorpions on Aug. 18, 1979.)
“What’s with this guy?” asked JoAnne Nelson of Madison, who worked with Cheap Trick’s management agency, Ken Adamany Associates. “They are to be in Sacramento, California, on that date.”
(That is true. Cheap Trick played the California State Fair in Sacramento with Blue Oyster Cult, The Pat Travers Band and Shakin’ Street on Aug. 18, 1979.)
Rittmueller insisted Cheap Trick had agreed to play his festival early in the day, then fly west for the California show because one of the band members was from Wisconsin Dells. Nope, nope, nope, Nelson said. “Ken wouldn’t allow it.”
The message from Aerosmith’s booking agent in Los Angeles was this: “We don’t have anything set for Wisconsin for that date.”
(That appears to be true, especially considering guitarist Joe Perry quit the band in the last week of July 1979.)
Waylon Jennings didn’t, either. “We have no intention of being in Wisconsin. We’ve had no contact, no wires from (Ken Rittmueller). He called us and we told him to call us back. Haven’t heard anything else from him,” said Doug Piggott, who was Jennings’ booking agent in Nashville.
(That rings true. Jennings was said to be home in Texas between gigs. He played Chicagofest on Aug. 8 and then a show in Oklahoma City on Aug. 25.)
That’s when I called Ken Rittmueller back and told him each of his four advertised main acts were to be elsewhere across the country on the Wisconsin Jam date.
At that moment, the Wisconsin Jam started to unravel.
“We do have some problems, but we’ll make sure by the time this happens, we’ll have top-caliber groups,” Rittmueller told me. There was indeed no contract with Ted Nugent, he said, adding that he “would have to follow up further” on the others.
That Wisconsin Jam flyer did double duty. It was a ticket order form and a ballot on which ticket buyers could vote for the bands they wanted to see. There were 24 nationally known rock acts on the ballot. Rittmueller said he’d try to book the most popular acts. “We’re working for Foreigner, Heart and Toto,” he told me.
Nowhere on the flyer, though, did it say where the Wisconsin Jam was going to be. That detail was to come in the mail, along with the tickets and a list of the bands playing, a couple of weeks before the festival.
Rittmueller told me the Wisconsin Jam would take place at an old ski area just west of Wisconsin Dells in south-central Wisconsin, almost 120 miles southeast of Eau Claire, where his radio ads were airing.
So I made some more calls.
The chairman of the town where the old ski area was located hadn’t heard anything about a rock festival. No one had applied to the town board for permits for a large gathering and the beer sales that likely would accompany one. Neither anyone at the local chamber of commerce nor music writers in nearby Madison nor anyone at Rolling Stone had heard anything about a rock festival called the Wisconsin Jam.
My first story, with all that, was published on June 28.
A week later, with investigators from the Wisconsin Department of Justice starting to nose around, Rittmueller said he was canceling the Wisconsin Jam, canceling all radio commercials and refunding ticket buyers’ money. The DOJ confirmed that the next day.
After I talked to the assistant attorney general who’d told me of the cancellation, I called down to Pigeon Falls, seeking confirmation from Ken Rittmueller. He declined comment. He was pissed. I’d spoiled whatever he was cooking up. “Get your own information,” he snarled, and he hung up.
My second — and much shorter — story was published on July 7.
Now it is 44 years later.
Of course I looked him up. Ken Rittmueller is still with us, but he may or may not be in good health. He no longer lives in Wisconsin. Let’s just leave it at that.
That was a good story, but I remember getting the stink eye from some older staffers as I made all those calls about some rock festival. They probably thought I could better spend my time calling local officials about budgets or landfills.
That was a good story, but there wasn’t a lot of interest in it. A rock festival gets canceled. Who cares? No other paper picked up the story — can’t remember whether local TV did — nor did the state AP or UPI. There wasn’t much for young people in almost any mainstream paper back then. Youth culture didn’t sell papers, unless it was the establishment looking down its nose at the kids. That hurt newspapers for years to come, perhaps still hurts newspapers.
That was a good story, but I still wonder how the hell I pulled all that off. I dreaded making cold calls and I loathed confrontation — which explains my relatively short career as a reporter — and I made dozens of calls for that story, with the calls to Ken Rittmueller as nerve-wracking as you’d imagine. The whole experience was equal parts exhilarating and terrifying.
