From the WNIN and Tristate Public Media Center in downtown Evansville.

I'm David James and this is Two Main Street.

Ok. Was Bull Island the rock festival the worst ever?

Well, 50 years later, we look back at the 1972 event in southwestern Indiana, the so-called Woodstock of the Midwest.

Thousands, then tens of thousands of young people converge on a stretch of farmland along the Wabash River on the border of Indiana and Illinois, just north of Evansville, near the small community of Griffin, Indiana, first called the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival, then the Labor Day Soda Pop Festival.

The name that stuck was the Bull Island Rock Festival.

I was there as a young reporter along with my two guests.

Len Wells, also a reporter who ferried me to the site in a John boat.

Remember that Len?

Oh, absolutely.

Also also here is author Dan Davis, who recalls his experiences in the book The Bull Island Rock Festival, aptly named, of course.

So welcome, guys.

It's been 50 years since the music and mayhem of Bull Island, and we all have our stories to share.

So, Dan Davis, let's start with you.

You went to the festival with a friend leaving Zionsville for a three day adventure and returning home almost unrecognizable, dirty, hungry and seriously ill. Is that correct?

That's correct, yes.

Well, tell me about how seriously ill were you?

Ah, well, I wasn't feeling really good when I went to Bull Island.

And then, of course, it rained a large portion of the time when I was there.

And when we left, we hitchhiked back and every ride we got was in the back of a pickup truck.

So it just made things worse.

And so by the time I got back, I was in bad shape and I ended up being taken to the hospital for two or three days.

And you tell in your book that you were left along side of the road?

My buddy, I couldn't walk anymore.

And we were almost home and my buddy to kind of parked me under an overhead bridge and put a sleeping bag over me.

And he walked to get help and he said he knocked on a few doors.

But of course, no one's going to answer the door.

There's this long haired guy dirty, you know?

Probably smelled pretty good, too.

And luckily my sister saw him walking along the road and she picked him up and drove back and got me.

And by then I'd gotten up and apparently I was walking down the side of the road with a sleeping bag draped over me.

And she took it, took me to my parents house and they took one look at me and took me to the hospital when I had penumonia.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

So how old were you then?

19.

19.

Okay.

And I bet they were not too pleased with the situation where they went anyways.

And this confirmed all their worst fears.

Yes.

Oh, my God.

Okay.

Now, Len Wells, of course, a veteran journalist working for news outlets in Indiana and Illinois.

So back in 1972, did Were you living in Grayville then?

I was living in Grayville and I was working at the Mercury Independent newspaper, a little weekly newspaper there owned by the Seal family.

And I had a second job at the time.

I was a Grayville city police officer.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Oh, yeah.

So I had two jobs.

I was I worked at the newspaper and I worked as a as a patrolman in the evening.

And so that's when I first caught wind that Bull Island was coming.

I had a friend of mine by the name of Henry Kyanka, who was an Illinois state trooper.

And by the way, his family from Evansville, the Kyanka family.

But anyway, Henry and I were talking one evening and he says, you know, I'm hearing some things about a big festival that's coming, you know, Bull Island.

And and he said, this isn't right.

He he had actually gone down there and talked to the promoters and so forth and so on.

And he was the first one to really sound the alarm that something big was coming.

And his what he discovered then, I think caused some folks in Indiana to file some suits and so forth to get this stopped before it ever started.

So I know there were some lawsuits filed or some motions filed in court in Indiana to stop this festival from ever happening and that all started with Henry Kyanka finding out that he saw a bunch of activity going back that way.

You know, even though it and you could only get there through Indiana, it's in Illinois.

But he he knew what was going on and he smelled what was happening and tried to try to sound the alarm that this may not be something that this area needs, if you know what I'm saying.

So there were some courts in Indiana that tried to get it stopped.

Right.

Right.

Now, so exactly where is Bull Island, guys?

He can tell you a lot better.

Okay.

I know you have maps and your book.

Yeah, it's it's it's it's on the Wabash River.

And the town north of it is Griffin, Indiana.

And it's a piece of land on the Indiana side of the Wabash, but it belongs to Illinois.

And that was part of the reason they picked that spot, because that all the counties that were fighting the injunctions to stop the festival.

So it's no man's land!

It was no man's land.

Right.

And what's funny about that was they started when they found that piece of land, that belonged to Illinois.

They started to set it up before they even contacted the owner.

And that's what Henry Kyanka was seeing, some activity.

He knew something was happening there.

The Trooper?

Yeah.

And they were starting to build stage right and drilling water wells.

Well, then the man that owned his name was Irvin Hagedorn.

He lived in Saint Meinrad and he went to them and said, You know, you can't be building on my land.

And they said, Well, we'd like to purchase your land.

And they put $10,000 down on it.

And the final price was supposed to be $200,000.

So by then, you know, they had the okay to keep going, but there were 200 people there before he even knew about it.

Really?

Yeah.

So it was this farmland, farm and pasture?

Yeah, Farm and pasture.

Okay.

And Bull Island is.

Well, it's really in your neck of the woods there, Len.

I mean, I had never heard of it.

I did not have no idea what it was or anything about it until this happened.

Until I heard the, you know, from Henry Kyanka, because something was going on.

I had never heard of the place, never been there, had no reason to go there.

And it wasn't easy to get to from Grayville except by boat.

So it wasn't really a known location.

Absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

I wonder how it got its name, Bull Island, I guess the grazing of bull?

I don’t know.

Cattle?

That is livestock, I think.

Okay.

Okay.

Now, so.

So the idea of jurors jury jurisdiction was was a big issue.

Who who's in charge of this?

And who's going to be in charge of the security of this area?

Well, the two guys who put it on was Bob Alexander and Tom Duncan.

And Bob Alexander had promoted.

He'd been a promoter for Roy Orbison and the Righteous Brothers.

So he had a little experience with it.

And in June, they put on a festival in Evansville at the not pronouncing it right, the Bosse?

Bosse Field.

I was bit corrected on that once before, well, named after Mayor Benjamin Bosse.

Oh.

Bosse Field.

And they had Ike and Tina Turner and Edgar Winter and Black Oak Arkansas.

It had several big names there, and they made $30,000, $30,000 off of that.

No, I'm sorry, There were 30,000 people there and they made quite a bit of money off of that.

They made enough money that Alexander ended up taking his family and friends to an island in the Caribbean and paid for everything.

So then they got this idea, well, this was successful.

Let's do another one.

And that's when they started trying to set the festival up in Chandler, Indiana.

And that was a quick turnaround because the one at Bosse Field was in July.

Yeah.

And of course, they're talking about a Labor Day weekend festival.

Right.

That is quick.

That is a quick turnaround for something as massive as they planned.

Yes.

And just the idea of them rounding up all these groups in that short amount of time was incredible.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I understand that, Dan, you researched that the Chandler Raceway was the first choice for the festival.

Yes.

Yes.

And but they put a full page ad out in Rolling Stone magazine.

But WLS got ahold of this in Chicago.

In Chicago, where I heard about it.

And when that word got out to the radio station, hundreds and hundreds of hippies started showing up and they were camping around Chandler, they were camping.

You know, it's that along the Ohio here.

And I don't imagine they were very popular in Chandler.

Hippies at the time.

That's what that's what it was and Chandler didn't want anything to do with it.

And that's when they had the county filed an injunction to stop it.

And then most of the other counties in southwestern Indiana did the same.

And now they're stuck with all these people that are here, you know, in here for a festival that isn't going to be here.

Yeah, right.

Of course, we got to can look at 1972.

Vietnam War was still going on.

Yeah, a lot of a lot of tension there.

You know, a lot of a lot of rednecks basically didn't like these long haired hippies coming to town.

And so there was some friction there.

And yeah, I bet that was that was something.

Now, Len, when you learned the festival was going on to be held in your backyard, was the immediate reaction, curiosity, anxiety, what?

It was mainly curiosity because again, nobody knew where this place was.

It really wasn't on anybody's map.

I mean, in your mind.

Well, but they knew it was nearby.

They knew it was very nearby.

But I never been there.

You ever been there?

No, I never been there.

So it was like, well, it's not here.

It's over across the river, which it wasn't.

But but it was just something that nobody really thought of.

It certainly in the gravel area.

Now, at the time, I was a reporter at WGBF Radio in Evansville, which was the NBC affiliate.

For that time.

I had worked with the Evansville Courier and the Sunday Courier, and Press while studying journalism at the University of Evansville.

I had very little broadcast experience and suddenly learned I was going to cover Bull Island for NBC's Weekend radio program Monitor, and I had no idea how to get there.

And Len Wells came to my rescue and my brother, my brother Steve.

My brother Steve had a boat and we knew that you needed to get to Bull Island.

And he he he had already been ferrying some people back and forth from the Grayville boat dock to Bull Island.

Some of them are reporters.

Some of them were just interested people, some are just curious folks.

But we took you down there for your report and it worked out pretty well.

It did, Yeah, because it was the easiest way to get there safely, certainly.

And well, it wasn't very long of a boat ride, was it?

No, it wasn't.

But 15 minutes was very short boat ride.

And as we walked, when we got there, people are bathing in the river.

Like Ron White said, you see one naked woman, you want to see the rest of them?

No, they were just people were just uninhibited, weren't they?

Oh, sure.

People just took their clothes off and jumped in, took a bath or whatever they did.

And that's what it was like all along.

The bank going up to Bull Island.

And logistically, I had to get back after doing my my reporting down there.

And there are no phones down there and there's no cell phones back and cell phones didn't exist.

So the nearest phone was at the Grayville Mercury Independent newspaper Fightin Billy Seal's Desk, The editor's desk, was it upstairs?

No, it was.

It was right in the front door to the right.

Okay.

I know that should have been his at his desk.

So anyway, I kind of had a little cubbyhole there.

Yeah.

And you’re filing reports?

I'm filing reports.

And I know the producer from New York got on the phone and said, Are you.

Are you ready for the broadcast?

I go, Well, yeah, I guess so.

I put like Bill Cullen on there and he was doing the weekend monitor at that time.

Of course, people might remember Bill Cullen.

Oh yeah.

The game show host.

Announcer.

Long time personality.

So he was the guy who interviewed me.

So I have vivid memories of being in the Mercury Independent, which was a musty, musty old building or just papers stacked.

It was it was classic old newsreel newspaper and the Moose Lodge next door.

So now Dan is the author of the new book about his experiences.

And you went with a guy named John and your buddy that you went with, John Davidson.

I my grandmother lived on the same block that he grew up on, so I'd see him quite a bit.

So I'd known him since childhood and he's he was about three years younger than I am.

So, or I was.

So he was even if you were a teenager and he was a young teenager.

Maybe only like 16 years old.

Wow.

Yeah.

So do you kidnap him or what?

No, he was what he was all for it.

It was an adventure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So did he get his parents permission or did I doubt he just snuck out?

Yeah, knowin’ him.

Yeah.

Wow.

So you two guys have have a wild hair.

Really?

Basically, we're going to go down to this place.

We don't know where it's at.

But we're going to go down there and find it.

So what did you take with you?

And we took a pup tent.

We had a duffel bag.

We stuffed everything in and we had, I think, two cans of Vienna sausages.

Oh, my.

Well, yes, crackers and a couple of canteens.

What else do you need?

And very little money.

Oh, yeah.

Very little money between the two of us.

Did you have tickets for the festival?

No, no, we.

We did.

We did intend to buy them when we got there, and we walked up to the ticket table and John noticed that people were walking off to the side and walking into the corn.

So we thought, well, we'll try that too.

So we stepped out of line.

We walked over there and the fence was all stopped down and walked right in.

Yeah.

As I recall the the ticket area, if people just went past it, knocked it over the fence over and everybody just came in.

And so their ticket sales kind of went- advanced.

Ticket sales were good, I guess.

But at the site.

Well, I'm I'm curious so if you hitchhike there or you drive there there's no parking really for the festival Was there any parking or do you just everything's pretty well taken.

They all parked at Bull Island on the field, you know, especially people that had campers and RV, things like that.

Okay.

But cars were backed up or, you know, onto onto the interstate, you know, So people just parked their car on the shoulder and started walking.

Yeah.

And there were literally hundreds of cars lining from from Griffin all the way back to Grayville exit, even in the median.

Absolutely everywhere.

Well, how long of a walk was it from the interstate to the site?

I think it was like seven miles?

Oh, really?

Oh, yeah.

Was a long way.

It was a trek.

Yeah, absolutely.

It was like walking from Grayville to Crossville if that gives you a Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

Seven miles from Grayville to Crossville.

And what I remember about that too, is walking in, everybody was all, you know, excited.

You going to the concert right now and everybody's going out.

People are dragging along.

They were tired, hungry, dirty, hung over.

It's a whole different crowd coming out that went in.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

The enthusiasm was has lost.

Not to mention half the bands that were promoted to be there didn't show up or couldn't show up for whatever reason, you know.

And you said that it rained.

It rained, It rained at some time every day except Monday.

That's my recollection.

And I understand what I remember seeing.

It was muddy.

Everything was muddy.

Yeah, well, well, I know there.

The food, water, sanitary facilities are very scarce at the festival site.

And of course, that led to frustration and violence.

We'll talk about that in a moment.

And also the big acts that did and didn't appear at the Bull Island Rock Festival 50 years ago.

Guys, that's amazing.

So guys, before we go over the list of the bands that showed up and didn't show up, let's learn more about my guests, Len Wells and Dan Davis.

So Dan, in the book, you say you grew up in Zionsville, so where did you go to school in Zionsville?

Zionsville High School, Yeah.

And from there, where did you go into what profession did you go into?

Oh, well, this might be a good story.

I was working on a construction crew right out of there, a bricklaying crew at the time, and I ended up going to school in Lamar, Colorado.

Oh, really?

Cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what prompted you to go to Colorado?

Honestly, I was getting in some trouble in Indiana, and I had a friend in Lamar that was going to school out there, so I thought it was a good time to just get away from everybody for a while.

Well, there you go.

There.

That's that's a story.

Makes sense to me.

You know, I don’t know how much you wanna go into that.

But anyway, so anyway, and you returned back to Indiana though.

Came back.

Yeah.

Came back to Indiana.

And I ended up working for a pipeline company for 40 years.

I retired in 2019.

Okay.

All right.

And so why what prompted you to write this book?

Well, I'd been interested in trying to think back on on Bull Island, and I started doing research on it about seven years ago or so.

And I had folders full of information about it.

And that's when COVID hit.

You know, I'm homebound most of the time.

And I started- A lot of books were written during COVID.

Yeah, yeah.

Memoirs.

Yeah, I know it and I figured it had to be a book out there somewhere.

So I started looking and there wasn't one.

And I looked over my research.

I thought, well, I could probably stick something together.

So I kind of made a rough manuscript and started putting things together.

And I got permission from the University of Southern Indiana to post the pictures that Sonny Brown had taken there.

And I just went from there, you know, And your book, you have a lot of Sonny’s pictures in there.

That's definitely some good stuff.

Definitely.

And Sonny was only able really to take pictures of the bands.

He said he could only get close enough one time to take a picture.

Ravi Shankar, but he never got a picture of anybody else on stage.

Yeah, that's the only closeup in there, really.

One of the acts.

Yeah, definitely.

And I'm surprised too, that there was not a crew there recording this, recording the music.

There was actually a crew in route and they were on I-64 and they were going to film it, film it, and they got stuck in traffic.

And after they sat there for several hours, they said, Well, you know, this is enough, they turned around and went back.

That would have been a tremendous documentary.

Oh, gosh, yeah.

Oh, there's nothing.

And that's a shame that that's been lost.

And there were some great, great acts there.

So I understand your wife, Deb, played a role in getting this done, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She kept trying, telling me to try to put something together.

People might buy it, you know?

I mean, there was almost 300,000 people there.

Yeah, the ones that are still alive.

My- Well, and their grandkids.

Their grandkids.

Yeah.

This is what Grandpa and Grandma were doing.

in ‘72.

My goodness.

Which is kind of shocking in a way.

So now had Deb been hearing these stories for years?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And it's funny because the memories start coming back.

You know, I'll forget one of them.

I didn't put it in the book, but every time there was a pause or no banter on stage, there was a guy that called the Yodeler, and this guy would yodel off the top of his lungs and everybody could hear him.

And I'd forgotten all about that.

Somebody jogged my memory on that.

I hadn’t heard that story.

Did he go on stage and do that?

No, no.

He was in the crowd.

Oh the crowd.

He was doing it loud enough that people could hear him.

And they were probably hooting and hollering for him.

Oh, yeah.

What happened to the yodeler?

Kind of like a Batman character.

Yodeler.

Oh, boy.

Now, Len, of course, a veteran journalist, radio and TV personnel boy, you name it.

A long list of stuff.

Now, Len, did you grow up in the Grayville area.

Are you- Actually, I was born I was born in White County, which is Grayville’s in White County also in Edwards and Wabash.

But I was born in Monie and raised in Carmi and- Kinda like Bull Island.

Yeah, kind of like Bull Island.

Like Monie is pretty close to Bull Island actually.

But anyway, yeah, I raised my family in Grayville, so and I was living there at the time of Bull Island of course, now working at the Mercury Independent.

Gotta be a lot of great stories there.

A lot of stories there.

Yeah.

Now, your father in law was my father in law was the main character in there.

Quite a character.

World War Two veteran of fighter pilot and the fire chief, too.

So he was the fire chief at the time and I was a city cop, so it was like they ran the town fightin’ Billy Seal was his- Yeah, he got shot down over North Africa in a fighter jet, a third, say, jet World War Two.

The fighter bailed out and landed behind enemy lines.

And anyway, so I had quite a story.

That's why they call him Fightin Billy.

You know, he survived.

And, you know, all these small towns had their own newspapers.

Yeah.

His dad, his grandfather started the paper, and then his dad owned it and then Fightin’ Billy ran it.

And then his son, Patrick Seal.

So it's like four or five generations in this newspaper.

And I married into the family at the time.

So.

So I worked there for I think like nine years, worked at the newspaper before I made the jump.

Oddly, from newspaper to TV, I usually don't make that jump, but I did went from newspaper to TV and then back to radio and back to newspaper.

And I know when you worked at Channel 14, you would cover some of the more unusual stories.

Yeah, I was called a Country traveler.

I did a lot of feature stories, and I think that's kind of how I got involved in Channel 14.

I was helping set up some of these feature stories for Johnny Man.

He was the traveler reporter at the time.

And so then I took his place.

Yeah, was interesting.

A lot of interest and Bull Island was one of the most interesting.

Oh, one of the in your career.

And then you worked for several radio stations.

I know you were.

I was at the Fairfield.

Yes.

In Fairfield was a news director there for 25 years.

Really?

25 years.

And now you have a new gig.

Got it.

Well, for a short time after radio, I became the editor of the Carmi Chronicle newspaper for a couple of years, and it folded.

Not that where you'd like it to fold, but it went out of business.

And then after that it went out of business.

The end of 2021.

And so three months later, my partner, partner and I formed a online website news website called crimebeat.net.

It's a free website, no paywall or anything like that, but crimebeat.net.

So I'm covering crime and corruption, corruption in courts in several counties in south eastern Illinois.

And you recently were interviewed by Oxygen.

Oxygen.

I had a producer from California came and interviewed me about a murder that happened back in 1995.

And Wayne County, this you doing a documentary called Homicides for the Holiday.

And this particular murder happened on the 4th of July.

Oh, my gosh.

So that was kind of an interesting thing.

So you're reliving all of these events now.

And before that, I had a Hollywood crew came in and interviewed me about Bruce D. Mendenhall.

Serial killer.

Serial killer from Albion.

He used to- yeah.

The Truck Stop.

Truck Stop Killer.

Yeah, I remember that.

He's awaiting trial right now in Indianapolis.

Oh, my God.

His third murder trial.

He got, like, four more after that.

So.

Good grief.

For some reason they keep coming back and wanting to interview me about stuff like this.

Well, you know all that stuff, definitely.

But anyway.

Okay, now back to the 50th anniversary of the Bull Island Rock Festival, Labor Day weekend, 1972 in southwestern Indiana.

So two months earlier, we talked about the promoters, Bob Alexander and Tom Dugan staged a smaller, successful event at Evansville’s Bosse Field, the Freedom and Ice Cream Festival?

Yeah, that was a one day, 12 hour show featuring an impressive lineup of Acts Black Oak, Arkansas, Country Joe and the Fish, Edgar Winter, John Lee Hooker and Ike and Tina Turner were actually here, among others.

Big crowd.

So these guys, of course, they were enthusiastic and they had a great show on in their resume.

A lot of bravado.

They started lining up these big acts for the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival, and we said they were searching for a venue.

They finally came up with Bull Island and Len I understand that at Bull Island there were only three White County, Illinois deputies trying to police the crowd.

That is correct.

Three, three deputies.

That was probably the sheriff and two deputies.

If you want to know the truth, there'd be one deputy for every 92,000 people.

And they really didn't do any patrolling.

I think basically what they tried to do was if there was an emergency or crisis, they'd try to get medical help if somebody was injured or hurt or needed medical attention.

That's basically all they could do because they were they were overwhelmed.

They couldn't do any law enforcement, certainly.

Now, Dan Davis, author of Bull Island Rock Festival.

So the promoters were able to line up this in this incredible acts for this Woodstock wannabe big names of the time, black Sabbath, Cheech and Chong, Nazareth, Ted Nugent, Ravi Shankar, and the list goes on and on.

Yeah, Yeah.

I mean, how’d they get these guys, you know, it must have been Bob Alexander's connections that he had that that.

Yeah, that was a really good lineup.

They had their they had several bands didn't show up at all the Allman Brothers, The Doors, REO Speedwagon, Fleetwood Mac.

They were they were originally supposed to be, but Stewart was they were trying to get him.

Well, he did was manager.

He showed up and then when they saw the conditions of the stage, I guess the stage had about an inch of water on it and electric cords running through it.

Oh, my gosh.

And they'd already paid him $100,000, but he wouldn’t perform.

But he did come back a year later to Evansville and performed at Robert’s Stadium.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

So he made good on his contract, so to speak.

That's right.

So you were there for three days.

Dan, What acts stood out to you?

The ones I remember everybody else seems to remember Black Oak Arkansas, put on a really good show and they came in by helicopter.

The dropped fliers of visors with their names on them.

Okay, all over the crowd.

And then as soon as they got on stage, they ripped their shirts off and Jim Dandy dunked, dunked his head into a bucket of water and they start performing at the end of it.

They wanted to release white doves.

So they send someone out to find some white doves to release.

Well, they couldn't find white doves, so they came back with a bunch of pigeons.

They didn't come back with quail.

Yeah.

Anyway, and when they released them, they didn't realize the pigeons won't fly in the dark.

So they were landed on their guitars and on their heads.

And I actually talked to the lead guitarist about that, too, and he told me that was one thing they've always remembered, is those pigeons landed all over the place and making a mess to Oh well, they may have ended up on somebody's plate.

Southern Illinois you know?

Cooking up some pigeons.

Squab.

Wow.

Len, what feedback did you receive from your friends about the music there at Bull Island?

To be honest with you, not a lot, because the people I the people I knew that went there really didn't go there for the music.

They just went there for the experience.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

They went there for their lunch and a lot of think a lot of people just went out of pure curiosity.

Sure.

A lot of people from the Grayville area.

Oh, I've got to go down there and see that, I heard there’s naked people out and that's the truth.

People, a lot of people went down there just to see what this was about.

And those were the people that I knew.

They just went out of curiosity and not for the bands.

Now, on on the other hand, my brother Keith decided he was going to be quite the entrepreneur.

He decided he was going to make a small fortune at Bull Island.

Yeah, big crowd there, big crowds.

So he took his camper down there and set it up and selling ham sandwiches because the crowd needed to be fed, of course.

Yeah.

And he was he price gouging or.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

He was the hippie himself.

Oh, trust me.

He was a longhaired hippie himself who had served in the Vietnam.

Not the war, but Vietnam era.

Certainly.

Okay, So he knew he was in with people that he liked and no price gouging.

But as soon as he ran out of ham sandwiches, they set his trailer on fire and that ended his career selling ham sandwiches.

So, he didn't make a killing.

He did not make a killing.

He lost money.

Sure.

He probably didn't have insurance on it either, I'm guessing.

But I know there were other acts of arson.

Yes, I believe the festival.

Dan?

Yeah.

Some catering truck I think was set on fire?

Yeah.

And I was there when, not when it was set on fire, but I had $20 left and they're selling hamburgers for $10.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, it is in 1972.

In 1972, which is high for 1972.

And I got I finally got to the front line.

They had a table set up there, a long table, and I told the girl who lives there, I said, I want two hamburgers.

So she to get the two hamburgers.

I got my $20 out and about.

Everybody was grumbling about the prices behind me.

And about that time a guy next to me yelled, F this, let's take this place.

And the table went flying over and the girl dropped the hamburgers and ran back in the corner with all the other vendors there.

And everybody made a rush for the grills.

So I thought, you know, I put a 20 by my pocket.

I thought, if I don't go get some food, I'm not going to have any foods.

I ran got a couple of hamburgers too.

Tell you what, hunger will make you do some strange things Later that night.

They did set they set the trailers on fire and you could hear the tires exploding.

You know, I'm sure my brother's trailer was one of them probably.

Yeah.

So there were no firefighting equipment, though.

Oh, and you couldn't get any there if you needed to.

People.

Actually, people were feeding it.

They were throwing wood on it to keep going.

Keep it going.

Yeah.

A big bonfire.

Yeah.

So here you're a 19 year old guy and just taking this all in.

Oh my Gosh, and you're not feeling very well anyway.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

What a what an event.

Dan Davis, author of Bull Island Rock Festival.

You were there for three days, so you can give us a firsthand memories of that.

And you describe the marshy area along the Wabash River called the Turd Field, the Turd Fields.

It's aptly named, I'm sure.

Yeah.

So were there any portable facilities?

There were six Porta Johns there, and they filled up in a hurry.

You think that in fact, people said they opened the door and they'd look in there and they just shut the door because it was people are still trying to use it after it was overflowing.

So they they started using the Turd Fields.

They had another spot and it was the the crap ditch.

So I'll say, crap ditch.

Well, now you know what that is.

And that was the other one.

Yeah, but, and the funny thing about the Turd Field, I, I couldn't find anybody from my group about the whole time I was there, but the one time I did see a friend, I was in the Turd Field and he was squatted down in the weeds about 30 feet from me.

Precious memories.

Yeah.

But by the time I got out of there, he was gone, so I couldn't find my group still.

Oh my.

And so were there any, was there a toilet paper or anything.

Oh well there were some people, one of the bands had dropped some fliers and, and those fliers were all over the Turd Field.

Oh.

Oh yeah.

The, the tree essentially in the beginning was besides the six porta potties, it was just a trench that had been cut.

That's that was just a ditch.

Yeah, that was it.

Yeah.

And there were some water.

Water wells.

They had six pumps.

There were supposed to be 40 and they had six.

Oh yeah.

And those lines were really long for that.

I don’t like that, I bet.

Yeah.

So the frustrated festival goers of course are paying high prices for food.

And we talked about they looted the food trucks and after a while they just were frustrated.

And we talked about the swimmer who was injured by a propeller.

And there were a lot of drugs.

Of course there were there.

There were some overdoses, but not that many for that crowd really?

Yeah.

That's amazing that you think because it was unidentifiable drugs to go with these people are taking.

Yeah.

And people they had people advertising their signs up like, you know, like it was a garage sale or something.

Yes.

But I guess there was one girl walking around there completely nude and she was wearing a pizza top pizza box like a loincloth with the price of the LSD written on the front of it.

Oh, I see.

I vividly remember.

Got tense with a handmade sign out there for LSD, marijuana, mescaline, whatever mescaline is, and just all kinds of whatever you want or you could get.

Yeah, And I think in your book, you say that the the announcer at the stage was warning people about certain drugs.

Yeah, I guess some of them were selling bleach.

Well, things like that there.

So.

Yeah.

So you don't know what was in these things at all?

I think even like strychnine was some of those right now.

I heard strychnine was being sold here.

Oh.

I walked.

They called that a Alice in Wonderland Avenue or Drug Alley.

And that was the lines of campers and tents and had their little handmade signs up and even selling specialized pipes.

Oh, sure.

To smoke things in.

And so, yeah.

Well, as the festival dragged on three long days, conditions deteriorated and then the fans became more frustrated because some of these groups that they were waiting for didn't show and they paid good money to see them.

Yeah, Yeah.

So some of them did.

Some of them did.

That’s what I meant.

And I think the last band was Bang?

Was that the last?

And the only way.

I've never really heard anybody.

Everybody has a different idea of who played last I've heard the Doobie Brothers played last.

The whole reason I put Bang in the book was because Bang put out a book about their experiences and they mentioned that they were the last band.

Now was Bull Island the Worst Rock Festival Ever.

Fans did tell their horror stories, but others had the time of their lives.

And Bull Island Boogie by White Duck, White Duck performs.

And then later, several months later, they came out with an album.

And one of the songs was the Bull Island Boogie, Dan.

Yes.

You did a lot of research into all these bands.

Yeah, that's the thing.

There's a lot out there, you know, if you really search for it, nobody put it together.

But yeah, I did quite a bit of research.

So are you did you collect a lot of albums?

Were you a record person?

Yes, I still, I still got trucks, full of albums.

But, but yeah, there was a band there called Bertha and it was an all girl band and they were really good.

And I've still got one of their albums too.

Well, Bertha, Bertha never heard of that one.

This was before the Go-Go's or The Runaways, you know, the other bands.

Bertha will have to check that out.

Yeah.

So, Dan, can I ask a question?

Is that okay, David?

Go right ahead.

I saw a Bull Island poster not too long ago.

A friend of mine who lives over in Golden Gate Ball Place has a big Bull Island poster, and for some reason, it sticks in my mind.

The word strawberry was at one point in the name of this festival, Strawberry Soda Pop Festival?

Or am I just dreaming that?

No, I hadn't heard- It may have been on the poster Strawberry Soda Pop Festival.

Well, they came up with all kinds of names for this.

For some reason, I got stuck in my mind.

They kind of I guess they kind of glorify it as some kind of a family affair.

That was a whole idea, I thought.

Oh, sure, yeah.

To call it Soda Pop Festival.

The other one, the Ice Cream Social.

Oh, yeah.

And just try to, you know, go over what it really was, a big drug party.

Well, I think that was the PR campaign.

Oh, yeah.

Let's try to get it on.

Definitely.

Now, the Bull Island Boogie, the the lyrics are interesting here.

I'm going to just read the beginning of it here.

“300,000 people jammed up in the road trying to find a place.

They could see the boogie show Move over.

Brother won't you let this van on through.

We trucked up from Tennessee to bring some songs to you with an axle hitting bottom from the riders on the top.

We came to do it for you.

Who knows when it will stop?

Then the chorus of Boogie Boogie to Bull Island.

Boogie Boogie Just as hard as you can.” And that's true, people were- They there on top of vans, on, they were riding on trunks, riding on hoods, hanging out of windows.

I mean, any way you could get there.

Yeah.

And nobody was telling you to get off the vehicle, you know, everybody was all hippies, you know, Let's go.

Let's go to the festival Anyway, you can get there.

So there was a sense of familiarity with all the people there?

Yeah.

Yeah, I didn't.

Did you feel like you were part of the group?

Yeah, Everybody was having a good time.

I just didn't see any violence.

Did you ever feel unsafe?

No.

No.

The only real violence saw.

Really.

And it wasn't intentional.

Some guy kept climbing up on one of the light towers and was mooning the crowd, and.

And the announcer said, you know, get him off of there.

Well, their idea getting them off, they were to throw bottles at him.

Well, the bottles come down somewhere and they burst.

Yeah.

So they had to tell them to cut that out before anybody got hurt.

Oh, my God.

But other than that, I didn't see anything else there that was, you know, dangerous.

And there really was no police presence at the site.

Again, they were just there in case something really, really, really went bad.

And they call in the reinforcements.

So the only way they could come in is by chopper anyway.

Yeah.

They weren't making any drug arrests at the site.

Nah, not that I was aware of just outside later.

They did.

They made some arrests.

I know as people were going home and even in other states, there were some.

I know there were.

I do know there were there were undercover people in there doing, doing reconnaissance and stuff like that.

It did result in some arrests later on down the road after the festival, as in dealers.

And I understand that there was some footage taken, some film taken at the site.

Len.

The state police like to show this occasionally they were kind of I would call it a stag night, I guess you'd call it, because people were uninhibited.

They didn't mind whether they had their clothes on or not.

Yeah.

So there you go.

Well, that's just part of the surveillance video.

That's right.

Surveillance was strictly for police work.

Strictly police work.

Here's another segment of the song.

“We set up Our town tent city out behind the stand, shared a case of warm fall city with other bands out in the front.

The heat's on cannon, something for the stone.

We're running out of beer back here, man.

When do we go on marooned on an island?

We've got no place to go.

We have to take a chopper for to leave this rock and roll and all this boogie boogie with the boogie Bull Island band.

Boogie, boogie.

Just as hard as you can.” Yes.

Good stuff here.

And you have some great comments from the folks here that went there.

And you've got all through your book and you can paste this.

Debra P writes, We met a young woman who we discovered lived near up in New York State.

She was filthy and out of it.

We hitchhiked home, kept her under our wing, and when we delivered her to her front door, her mother was horrified, sounds like.

But your parents pretty close were horrified.

And the canned Heat drummer Adolfo Fito de La Parra told an interviewer.

We were so high, I can't remember if we didn't get paid.

We went on.

He went on to say it was the biggest disaster we ever played.

But I have sympathy for the promoters who were trying to create another Woodstock.

I mean, they did their best they tried.

Yeah.

And they had to do it in a hurried location.

They didn't really pick to go to.

Yeah.

So, you know, to do something on the spur of the moment like that, they really did a pretty good job.

Hmm.

Now, Ted Nugent was among the performers.

I bet that was a while.

Yeah.

Rodney Bee recalls Ted Nugent waking everybody up at the crack of dawn with his high octane nonsense.

Another festival goer says he remembers being bored with Ravi Shankar and watching Newton Nugent shooting flaming arrows into his amps, wearing a loincloth and acting like Tarzan on stage.

And he started in the middle of the night.

Ted Nugent did.

And I ended up falling asleep in the tent.

And while I woke up at sunrise, Ted was still performing.

Oh, dear.

He was on stage for a long time.

He must have had some performance enhancing drugs.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my goodness.

Okay.

And you might know these people.

Len.

Pam from Carmi, Illinois.

It was the first time I had seen naked people taking a bath in dirty water.

That's true.

Cara from Grayville I know her already.

I was eight or nine.

She would have been.

My dad and one of his friends took me in on the John boat.

Dad had his hands over my eyes the whole time.

I'm sure.

Yeah, I know, Cara.

I know exactly who you're talking about.

That's funny, Gary.

W we went skinny dipping in the Wabash, and one of the guys in our group got run over by a boat.

The propeller nearly cut off his foot.

He was taken to the hospital by boat and later fully recovered.

We talked about that.

We did have a drowning.

Is that correct?

The woman wasn’t it?

Yeah, that was a woman.

I Think she tried to swim over from the other side?

Yeah.

That's some of the mistake.

And tell the story about the lady that was run over in her sleeping bag.

Yeah, there's a girl there.

She'd just gotten there and she laid in a sleep, was sleeping in a sleeping bag in an open area.

But the area, it turned out to be an area that people had been driving through.

And when a truck pulled out, it ran over.

Cheech and Chong got word of it.

They even said that, you know, there's there's been a chick run over by a truck.

We need to get her- Probably a song in there somewhere.

Oh, my gosh.

And they everybody kind of I guess they handed her over the top of the crowd, you know, hand right past her over the top and got her to the hospital.

But she survived.

Oh, what a deal.

Definitely.

And somebody said, these are all people of water skiing naked on the Wabash.

I saw that myself on one of the one of the trips down there and my brother's boat.

Oh, that's.

That's a memory, definitely.

Oh, yeah.

Precious memories, guys, I tell you.

Now, what's going on at Bull Island now?

Is anybody ever been there?

Is it recovered?

Actually, I was back there in April.

There's a filmmaker doing a documentary on it, I was helping him.

And was there much to shoot there?

Surely.

Well, it's pretty overgrown.

I thought they did a section out there right near where the stage used to be, and they brought me down there to film and talk about a little bit.

And the cleanup after Bull Island must have been incredible.

They used a bulldozer and all the I think they just dissed a lot of it in the ground.

There's this dude and he charged, I guess they charge the promoters $20,000.

They build $20,000 for the cleanup.

And they, of course, they never paid it.

Oh, no, no.

Well, I know after the festival, there was all kinds of lawsuits.

That was the question I was going to ask.

How many lawsuits there were the vendors, the investors, the IRS, the Working Music Company sued because they rented a piano and it was on the stage and people that were left over, after all the bands were done were using it for a toilet.

Oh.

And there was a farmer that sued because he had some cows die and he claimed it was marijuana.

Smoke inhalation.

Happy cow.

Oh, yeah.

Well, there was one story about the festival where they butchered a cow or something.

They butchered it, but it didn't seem like they knew what they were doing.

I guess it was all a bit more of a Manson deal than anything.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, It had been pretty gruesome.

I bet it was.

And you told me, since you've written this book, more stories have surfaced.

Oh, I've.

Yeah, I've heard from a lot of people and a lot of my friends, You know, I wrote the book, and they'll say, You should have talked to me.

And I had no idea you were there, you know?

But the Wabash River is it it's muddy.

I mean, there's nothing clean or pristine about.

It's like the Mississippi.

It's the muddy.

Mississippi is muddy Wabash.

Yeah.

And they were bathing in muddy water.

Yeah, but I guess it was still felt more refreshing than being, you know, grungey.

That's my vivid memory of of Bull Island is just it was filthy.

The people were filthy.

Some of them looked pretty miserable when I saw them.

And it just was just it was a mess.

It was just that even the people swimming didn't look like they were having a great time.

It just seemed like it was kind of a depressing area.

Yeah, but we weren't there when the bands were playing.

Everybody was in hootin’ and hollerin.’ And I wasn’t high.

No, me either.

So anyway, Bull Island people went there.

They had a good time.

Almost everybody survived just about to to relate their stories 50 years later.

Well, memories from Bull Island, three old guys who were there.

I hope we haven't bored our audience.

Oh, I doubt it.

My thanks to Dan Davis and Len Wells.

I'm David James.

And this is Two Main Street.