Every year the university would throw a music festival on the intramural fields down by the river. It was called springfest. And it was fun. Beer trucks outnumbered food trucks, and it was rivaled only by Halloween weekend during the late 80’s. The three weekends prior, each green would have a weekend with bands, beer and food trucks out on the main commons area of that green. East was first, West was Second and South went last. The money would then help pay for the sound staging and entertainment that went into putting on Springfest It was usually the last big hurrah before we finished up Spring quarter, our finals were typically in early June.
So in 1988, The university removed alcohol from campus events because the majority of the students were below the newly adopted drinking age of of 21. This meant that the Spring fest of 1989 had not chance of surviving this setback. They tried, The Hooters were the main act and it was as expected, sparsely attended and the writing was on the wall for Springfest.
The vibe amongst the student body was to say fuck-it let’s do it anyway and big house parties were getting planned to fill in the blank. And all of us in the Athens music community we were in the know because a lot of these parties needed bands and sound systems. So The police got wind of the organizing that was going on and made a public notice that all big parties would be heavily scrutinized and most likely shutdown that weekend, especially those a bands because they tended to be the more difficult to manage as far as numbers and noise..
My house was 4 Palmer and the girls next door lived in 6 and 6.5. We decided to throw a party. So I spent several weeks and weekends prior to fest day, collecting whatever building materials I could “find”, built a stage behind the house at 6 Palmer Street. And We all pooled our money and purchased 16 kegs, got a band and spread the news.
So what happened that night of the party was the cops got so busy dealing with parties on the west side of town cause the bulk of them were on the west side of town, that they left us alone way out on Palmer, at that time Palmer was considered out there. It was on the fringe so we were the last of the worries for the police force thay had that night. So the party started growing and blowing up...exponential... It blew up like one of those midwestern thunderstorms timelapses you see on the weather channel.
People are rolling in, sun goes down, stage lights come up, band goes on, and it’s on.
16 kegs man, we had 16 kegs. That was a big party for OU...and all of them were blowing foam at 9:30 PM. that’s how many people were there. and I thought, we are fucked, but the people rallied, like Bobcats do and we emptied the drive thru at the end of the road...as the other parties were shut down they rolled down hill to Palmer and it quickly felt too big....I knew I might have a problem when my dog showed up wearing a glow necklace and I asked my girlfriend at the time where’d this come from and she said there are some guys selling them. A couple dudes showed up with extra things they brought to bootleg at the official Springfest, they obviously didn’t do all that well and they found our party, set-up shop and sold out..
So the cops showed up around 10:00 and took me off to the side and said they were reluctant to pull the plug with that many people and we needed to turn it down and contain. Everything had to be behind the sidewalk. Actually they didn’t have the manpower yet in the area, to deal with it if it was to shut down and turn ugly. So they gave me time to wind it up and said they would be back to arrest people at 11:00.
I told the band to jump to the back half of their third set. Because we need to finish this up. They crushed it and it wrapped. No one got arrested.
