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theses

In 1969, on the nights of June 27, 28 and 29, Mile High Stadium in Denver, Colorado hosted the Denver Pop Festival. It was three nights of incredible music brought to the Rocky Mountain Region by an upstart concert promoter named Barry Fey. Pop/rock festivals were a new invention, and Fey attempted for his event to follow a mold that had been created two years earlier at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival in northern California. Musical acts like The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Creedence Clearwater Revival electrified the Denver crowds, but what stole the show each of the three nights was gatecrashing and protests that resulted in violence, arrests and police brutality.

Each night’s violence dominated the media coverage of the festival, but the media, the police, and even Fey all failed to understand why the violence occured. In this paper I trace the origins of the pop festival and link it to a cultural movement that sprung from the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, California. I then explain, primarily through Fey, unique connections that Denver had with the cultural movement that came out of San Francisco. To do this I read through the archives of Denver newspapers, The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, examined the archives of Rolling Stone magazine, and explored an assortment of related biographies, autobiographies and music festival-related publications. My research uncovered the reason why violence broke out each night and disproved the theories from the media, the authorities, and the man who created the event. The results of this paper tell readers what happens when an organic non-commercial vibe is packaged and sold for profit.

ETD_9297

M.A.

Includes bibliographical references

by Justin Kite

doi:10.7282/t3-jv7h-j563

ETD graduate

The author owns the copyright to this work.