Sky River Rock Festival – 1968

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Author: Mike Cherry

retired broadcaster: on-air, MD, PD, asst PD, Prod Mgr, IT, station technician/engineer, pioneer Internet webcaster, station installation/maintenance; 12 years in commercial radio, 17 years volunteer in campus/community radio in B.C., Alberta & Wash. Amateur radio operator & "DXer" specializing in AM night-time DX, short-wave DX/listening & remote SDR DXing/listening
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4 thoughts on “Sky River Rock Festival – 1968

  1. From the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) we reclaim some of our Lost Comments:

    Steven Smith says:
    September 1, 2018 7:04 am at
    I remember that, did not go but a bog deal. Was that 1969?

    Mike Cherry says:
    September 1, 2018 7:36 am at
    Steven – 1968…I’ve just updated the post with the date. You’re right that it was a bog deal – I think it rained for a portion of the weekend. Mud + Rockfest = a great time!

    Steven Smith says:
    September 2, 2018 10:00 am at
    I was 16 so my folks would not let me go. But then my 60 plus year old dad decided he wanted to see first hand the social decay caused by hippies. So we drove through Skykomish that weekend. Never got out of the car, but I remember it was lots of cars and wet. But it was maybe the first big rock festival in our area.

    Mike Cherry says:
    September 2, 2018 3:12 pm at
    haha that’s pretty funny Steven & typical of our parents in the 1960’s whose curiosity about “hippies” prevailed. Not only was it the first big rock festival of our region, it one of the very first rock fests anywhere! The Monterrey Pop Festival pre-dates Sky River by a year. There may be one or two others I’ve forgotten but think Sky River among the first. It had a huge roster of world-renowned bands & plenty of Pacific NW talent from both sides of the “dotted line.”

    1. Ed, the background is in the Walt Crowley book:

      On a hot summer night in 1963, a teenager named Walt Crowley hopped off a bus in Seattle s University District, and began his own personal journey through the 1960s. Four years later at age 19, he was installed as rapidograph in residence at the Helix, the region s leading underground newspaper. His cartoons, cover art, and political essays helped define his generation s experience during that tumultuous decade.Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle weaves Crowley s personal experience with the strands of international, intellectual, and political history that shaped the decade. As both a member and in-house critic of the New Left and counter-culture, the author offers a unique perspective in explaining why the experiments and excess of the period made sense at the time. Anti-war marches, human be-ins, rock festivals, psychedelic drugs, underground newspapers, free universities, light shows, inner-city riots, radical skirmishes, and hippie antics are chronicled with personal anecdotes, contemporary accounts, and historical insights. In the pages of Rites of Passage, the reader will encounter Black (and White) Panthers, the Seattle and Chicago Seven, Weathermen and Radical Women, and many more remarkable characters.As an engaging blend of history and personal reminiscence, Rites of Passage places the sixties in a context unavailable to its participants at the time. In addition to his text, Crowley has assembled a chronology of the decade beginning with its harbingers in the forties and fifties and continuing through its aftermath. This compilation covers political, social, and cultural events, and provides the most complete synopsis of sixties history now in print.

      https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=sdcHCwAAQBAJ&rdid=book-sdcHCwAAQBAJ&rdot=1&source=gbs_vpt_read&pcampaignid=books_booksearch_viewport

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