Bull Island, IL’s infamous disasterous music festival

bull-island
Bull Island
bull-island

Bull Island

Bandsplaining released this great rock music documentary about the disastrous Erie Canal Soda Pop Music Festival, that was banned in it’s original intended venue in Indiana and was subversively moved by it’s two young promoters Bob Alexander and Tom Duncan  to an ‘island’ that sits within Illinois in a pocket of the Wabash River on the Stateline.

The 1972 festival which was promoted to have Black Sabbath, Joe Cocker, Fleetwood Mac, Amboy Dukes, and many more big name rock bands with some thinking it was going to be the next Woodstock, but it turned out to a Fyre Festival during Labor Day festival before there even was a Fyre Festival.

Black Sabbath, Cocker, and Fleetwood Mac along with the Allman Bros and the Doors would all cancel after they got to the site. They knew how bad it was and in some cases they were only expecting a crowd of 50,000 not the hundreds of thousands that reportedly attended. Some bands did end up performing including the Eagles.

There was six bathrooms for a crowd of over a quarter a million people who came to the obscure destination fest. There was block long lines for water. It was a huge mess for those that attended and performed at the fest. There was just one dirt road in and out of the area with a quarter inch of rain turned that road into a swamp. The medical staff was overwhelmed with festival goers consuming bad drugs. The scarcity of food encouraged some hungry people to kill a cow still grazing on the island. The food vendors mobile kitchen was looted.  Unfortunate violence followed with food trucks and even a stage was set on fire. Two men died at the festival. It was just an awful situation all around to say the least.

 

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