At this point, we are all familiar with the Fyre Festival disaster. The Netflix and Hulu documentaries about the absolute failure of a concert captured the American youth. However, Fyre Fest was not the first music festival to crash and burn. In fact, it’s quite common for music festivals to end in disaster. Whether it be due to the kind of crowd music festivals attract, or the kind of people who are crazy enough to plan these events, or a fundamental flaw with the concept, they always seem to scrape right along the lines of disaster. As wild as Fyre Festival was, though, it’s nothing compared to the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival, AKA Bull Island.
The Advent of the Music Festival
In 1969 music festivals were thrust into reality when Woodstock brought nearly half a million people to a small town in New York. Across the nation, copycat festivals started popping up left and right. There was one major issue, though. Music festivals are a logistical nightmare. Live music events have hundreds of moving parts. Multi-day festivals introduce things like food, lodging, and waste management into the equation. It is no mystery how many of those early music festivals ended up being disastrous. They all paled in comparison to the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival.
The Promoters of Bull Island
Bob Alexander and Tom Duncan planned bull Island. The two were veteran concert promoters with years of shows under their belts. They had been courting the idea of a music festival for quite some time. Months before the festival at Bull Island, the duo successfully put on a small festival called the Freedom Festival and Ice Cream social in Evansville, Indiana.
The Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival
Despite the success of the festival, local officials were not happy with the event. The show brought large crowds to the small Indiana town; the crowd was not exactly the kind of crowd that small-town public officials like to see roaming their streets. Likewise, the aftermath of the concert left a large cleanup issue. The relationship with Duncan, Alexander, and the county was strained. So, when the team booked the local speedway for another much larger festival, the government began scrambling to block the event from ever happening. That is what they did, and that is how Bull Island became the original Fyre Festival.
The Birth of Bull Island
The county passed down a judgment that Alexander and Duncan could not book their planned festival anywhere within county limits. Then, nearby counties began following in suit. In a matter of days, the duo was banned from booking an event anywhere in southern Indiana. Unfortunately for the promoters, they had already been advertising the event and had sold thousands of tickets.
Image Courtesy of Wikipedia
They then began scrambling to find a new venue for their budding festival. Eventually, they settled on farmland located on Bull Island, Illinois. The location was beneficial because it was technically in Illinois, but its location was accessible primarily from Indiana and was east of the Wabash River. Bob and Tom knew that had county officials in Illinois learned of the event, the show would surely be canceled, so they waited. They waited until just days before the event to announce, over the radio, the new location of the show. By this point, thousands of concert-goers were already at the site of the previous festival, and the county began to see the gravity of their mistake.
Fyre Festival Was Nothing Like Bull Island
On the first day of the event, concert-goers lined the one highway into Bull Island in bumper-to-bumper traffic. After extended wait times in traffic, many of the attendees began parking on the shoulder and walking into the venue. Upon arrival, it became clear that the event planners were not prepared for the magnitude of the show. There was inadequate parking, far less food than necessary, nearly no room for the tents, and only a couple of portapotties.
The collapse of the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival
Bob Alexander and Tom Duncan expected 55,000 attendees; final estimates totaled nearly 300,000. This far exceeded what they were prepared for. To make matters worse, the event’s headliners began to pick up on the size of the crowd and began attempting to renegotiate their contract. When Tom and Bob couldn’t satisfy the request to increase payments to be equivalent to the increase in the crowd the big names began dropping from the show. Little by little, as the conditions at the venue, got worse, more and more artists began dropping. Fans started stealing food, destroying property, and going absolutely wild.
Conclusion
Fyre Festival was a music festival disaster, but it was not the first, and it probably won’t be the last. As long as there are promoters who want to book the next big sensation, there will be failed music fests. Bull Island is an early version of the same old story. Many endured awful conditions to see an only decent show. Likewise, the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival was a disaster, but it could have been significantly worse. Some of the storylines throughout the event are unbelievable. Watch or Listen to this episode of the Things I Learned Last Night Podcast for the full story.
Learn more about the absolutely bonkers life of Charles J Guiteau in this episode of Things I Learned Last Night. Things I Learned Last Night is an educational comedy podcast where best friends Jaron Myers and Tim Stone talk about random topics and have fun all along the way. If you like learning, and laughing a whole lot while you do, then you’ll love TILLN. Watch or listen to this episode right now!
Sources
The Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival – Wikipedia
The Worst Music Festival of All Time – Open Culture
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