Texas International Pop Festival
Texas
Two weeks after Woodstock, a field outside Lewisville drew a hundred and fifty thousand people to see Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and B.B. King.
Labor Day weekend, nineteen sixty-nine. An open field near Lewisville filled with somewhere between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty thousand people. Woodstock had ended two weeks earlier. This was the Texas International Pop Festival, and the lineup was absurd. Led Zeppelin. Janis Joplin. Santana. Sly and the Family Stone. Chicago, still calling itself the Chicago Transit Authority. B.B. King played all three nights and told the same jokes and the same stories each time, apparently figuring he had a fresh crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand every evening. Grand Funk Railroad opened all three days, grinding through the afternoon heat until the real show started at four. No violent crimes were reported the whole weekend. There was one death, from heatstroke, and one birth. Soundboard recordings of nearly the entire festival still circulate. Zeppelin's set from that Sunday is one of the most traded bootlegs the band ever had.
This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
BB King played all three nights and told the same jokes and stories, perhaps thinking he had a different 150,000 person crowd for each show.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.