STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER

By Ben Robicheau ~ brobicheau@cogeco.ca

In the summer of 1969 in the month of August, half a million people made their way to Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York to attend the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. The concert became renowned around the world as the largest music festival ever held. Today most people know about Woodstock and its place in popular music history. What many people do not know however, is that another music festival, “a second Woodstock” was held in Canada one year later.
Strawberry Fields – An International Carnival of Sound and Freedom was originally planned to be held on the Woodstock site, but the locals had had enough of noise and traffic jams and now had bylaws in place that made a repeat of the previous year’s event impossible. The backers of the festival, (one of whom was rumoured to be John Lennon himself) had already sold thousands of tickets and had to go ahead with the show, so they moved the venue, appropriately enough, to a strawberry farm in Maine. But here again, the locals were scared off by the potential of being inundated by hundreds of thousands of “Hippies” and quickly passed their own restrictive laws. At this point the organisers decided to look northward and announced that the concert would now be held in New Brunswick. Apparently there was a plan to set the stage up on the Bay of Fundy shore and hold performances when the tide was out with the audience gathered on the beach. Thousands of people where most likely saved from drowning when permits were again denied and the festival moved west in its never-ending search for a home.
In Ontario they settled on Mosport Park, a 500 acre auto racing venue about an hour east of Toronto. By this time the people behind the scenes had figured out that a huge rock festival was not everyone’s idea of a good neighbour, so they tried to keep things under wraps. To rent the facility, they had to guarantee to put on an automotive event, so the week-end was advertised as a motorcycle race with “added entertainment”.
On Friday morning of the festival week-end, I was on Hwy. 401, hitching home to N.S., when three guys in a ’57 Chevy with Maryland plates pulled up and asked if I knew where Mosport was. I had been following the story of the wandering rock concert, and the last I had heard was that the Attorney General for Ontario had brought an injunction application to prohibit the festival from taking place. I told them that I knew where Mosport was but wasn’t sure if the concert was on. They said if I came with them and there was no concert they would drive me to N.S., so I got in the car.
As we approached Mosport it became obvious that the show was indeed going ahead. The roads were lined with cars and clogged with people walking towards the main gate. Since I had neither a ticket nor the money to buy one, (it was $15 for the week-end), I got out of the car with the intention of heading back to the highway. Walking along the edge of the park, I noticed a line of people snaking into the bushes. I quickly took a place in line and within a few minutes was through a hole in the fence and inside the park.
The first thing I saw inside the fence was a girl disappearing into the ground! It turned out that she had stepped into a hole hidden by the tall grass. As I helped her out, she introduced herself as Anne, from Texas. Since the concert had originally been planned for the States, most of the tickets had been sold to Americans, some of whom had spent the last few days travelling from New York to Maine to New Brunswick to Ontario, trying to catch up with the latest incarnation of the festival. When border officials noticed thousands of teen-agers suddenly trying to flood into Canada, some with nothing more than five dollars and a bag of groceries to last them the week-end, they turned them back by the hundreds; still, most managed to find an alternate route over the border.
Anne and I made our way across the race track to the infield area where a stage and massive sound system had been set up. The ground in front of the stage was packed with people who had staked out their area with a sleeping bag or blanket. Most of them would spend the next three days in this same tiny spot. I found an empty patch of ground next to the fence and marked out my own little space.
The performers for the week-end included Procol Harum, Ten Years After, Eric Burdon & War, Grand Funk Railroad, Sly & the Family Stone, Jethro Tull, Mountain, Crowbar, Luke and The Apostles, The Youngbloods, Melanie, Delaney and Bonnie, Jose Feliciano and a little-known-at-the-time performer named Alice Cooper, maybe a female folk singer?
I spent the next three days in the middle of a sea of 250,000 people. The bands took the stage in the late afternoon and went on into the early morning hours, the rest of the time was spent attempting to get some sleep, trying to find a Port-A-Potty fit for human use, or foraging for food. By noon Saturday, the gates to the park had been thrown open and people could come and go as they pleased. The only store nearby had sold out of anything that could be remotely considered food or drink. Water trucks were brought in and local entrepreneurs arrived selling everything from toilet paper to a tractor-trailer full of watermelons. A medical tent had been set up and members of a local commune were handing out free cheese sandwiches and oranges to those who had run out of money.
On Saturday afternoon the motorcycle race was held. It was a total disaster. People were wandering across the track at random, oblivious to the bikes. The race was started and stopped several times, the PA announcer kept telling people to stay off the course. It looked like someone could easily get killed. Some of the concert-goers stepped in as voluntary course marshals, trying to control the people and warn the racers of obstacles ahead. After less than an hour of this erratic, stop-and-go “racing”, it was called off. I found out years later from one of the racers that they were paid $50 each and told “no racing, just complete three laps of the track”. All they wanted was to meet their obligation by appearing to hold a race. He said he had a leisurely ride around the course and was greeted at the hairpin turn by several naked people waving at him. He just waved back and continued on.
Alice Cooper played late Saturday night...definitely not a folk singer. He put on an incredible light and sound show that had the audience amazed and mesmerised. The concert closed early Monday morning just as the sun was coming up to the sounds of Sly & the Family Stone doing “I Want To Take You Higher”. Anne had gone off to find the friends she had come with, and I, along with thousands of others, made my weary way back to the highway where I got a ride with some Americans who were headed to the border crossing at the Thousand Islands Bridge. A couple of miles from the bridge, traffic came to a complete stop; it was backed up from the border out to the highway. I got out and caught a ride with a car that had just come across the bridge; the driver said that cars going into the States were being torn apart by the American border guards, probably looking for drugs. He said people waiting on the bridge were getting out of their cars and tossing stuff into the river.
A couple of days later I was back home, sitting in the poolroom, when in walked Anne from Texas! She had tried to convince her friends to head east, they decided to go west instead, so she set out on her own. All she knew was my first name, that I lived on an island in Nova Scotia and that I had seven sisters; she figured that working with this wealth of information, I wouldn’t be too hard to find.
Having made it to Halifax, she was sitting by the Public Gardens trying to figure out what to do next when she was approached by a police officer. Her explanation of what she was doing and who she was looking for was met with a blank stare, but the officer had a new recruit with him who thought her description sounded a lot like a guy that he had gone to school with in Digby. When she got to Digby, someone sent her to the only Benny they knew, an old fellow who had a garage in Barton. She quickly figured out that this was not the right place but again luck was on her side; someone from the Islands happened to be at the garage, heard her story, and headed her in the right direction.
Someone I met briefly a thousand miles away, using only very basic information, comes to the province and by talking to a few random people, is able to find me! This could only happen in Nova Scotia!