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Exactly 34 years ago today -- also on a Friday -- Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker and Tina Turner played for 50,000 fans in Los Angeles. Not in a stadium, but on a small horse racing oval in residential Northridge. Few in the crowd held tickets, and most were stoned. Same for Hendrix, who played so poorly that he vowed to return Sunday and do better. That he did, jamming with drummer Buddy Miles in a memorable set for which bootlegs still trade on the Web. By then, some 200,000 souls had endured the stifling Valley heat, lack of food or water, angry cops and a chain-wielding car club called the Street Racers to hear the Byrds, Rascals, Jethro Tull, Spirit, Eric Burdon, Marvin Gaye and other popular acts of the time.
"Now it's night and the crowd is getting out of hand," remembers Jay Donnellan, guitarist for the band Love. "Helicopters are circling directly overhead with spot lights aimed down and someone on the P.A. is trying to settle down a large group of people who have scaled the chain link fencing and as he does, the fencing collapses on top of the paying crowd. Someone shoots a flare at the helicopters...
...potential mayhem and nobody's in control. The party crashers who couldn't get in were breaking down the perimeter fencing and the police (who were dumber than a bag of hammers), thought it a great idea to keep stirring things up with their helicopters and force presence. Well, somehow the music prevailed..."
Reviewer Pete Johnson in the L.A. Times wrote that fans seated near enough to the stage "may have heard the best performance of their lives." But for most, the sound system was so weak the music blurred into the noise of helicopters, sirens and so many celebrants. With nowhere to stay, they slept overnight in suburban front yards and stripped fruit off backyard trees. Markets nearby were ransacked, and in a Sunday melee 15 police were sent to the hospital.
City Hall went berserk that the largest rock music event ever -- a claim that lasted only until Woodstock, later that summer -- could erupt with little warning in bucolic Northridge. Hauled before the police commission, the young promoter, Mark Robinson Jr., replied when asked what he would do differently next time: "I wouldn't do it." The city promptly banned big outdoor rock festivals.