New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
The CONCERT that NEVER WAS
The town canceled Powder Ridge Rock Festival, musicians stayed away — except for Melanie — but the kids came anyway
“I do remember specifically waking up and the guy in the group next to us saying, ‘Would you like some electric Kool-aid?’ ” Ilene Coman of East Haddam
In late July 1970, tens of thousands of young people descended on the Powder Ridge ski area in Middlefield. They had come to revel in a Woodstock-style rock festival featuring a star-studded lineup of 24 performers including Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, Little Richard and Janis Joplin.
The Vietnam War was raging, and the shootings at Kent State occurred less than three months prior. Townspeople wanted the festival banned. A judge agreed, and issued an injunction.
The musicians stayed away, but the music fans did not. The ski slopes were slathered in dangerous drugs, nonchalant nudity and nonstop partying the likes of which Middlefield, and quite possibly Connecticut, had never seen before or since.
Accounts of what really happened 50 years ago in Middlefield differ depending on who’s telling the story. Some say 30,000 people came to the Powder Ridge Rock Festival of July 31-Aug. 2, 1970. Others claim there were upward of 50,000 concertgoers.
I was told four different names of the first selectman at the time — it was Ferd Olson — and no fewer than five people in multiple Facebook groups claimed to be in charge of security. Concertgoers were described as peaceful and kind, and alternately as addicts and thieves.
But certain things are indisputable. Drugs were plentiful. Clothes were scarce. Singer-songwriter Melanie was the only billed act who actually showed up and played. With the power to Powder Ridge cut off, she performed with a makeshift sound system hooked up to the generator of a Mister Softee ice cream truck.
In Connecticut lore, the story of the Powder Ridge Rock Festival is a quaint tale. How did our little state almost end up with Woodstock Part 2? That would have been so cool!
Concert posters promoted Powder Ridge’s “natural amphitheatre” that was “already electrified and in operation. Powder Ridge seems the perfect place for a Festival. That’s why we believe that this is the important one for 1970.”
But for Middlefield, and its smalltown susceptibility, the repercussions of the controversial festival were felt for more than a generation.
Historical perspective
Trish Nellis Dynia, a former writer for The Town Times, a local paper covering Middlefield and Durham, wrote a multi-part series about the Powder Ridge Rock Festival 10 years ago to commemorate the 40th anniversary.
“The Town Times wanted somebody to write an article on the 30th anniversary, and people in town were still divided over what had happened,” says Dynia, a Durham resident. “There was a lot of controversy. There were neighbors who were still angry with other neighbors. There were people in town who were like, ‘Fine, let the kids come in and have their concert.’
And the others were more, ‘Oh my god. This is terrible, we’re going to have a bunch of dirty hippies in town.’
“So even 30 years after, it was like, don’t go there. People are going to be upset. But by the time 40 years had passed it was fine.”
In the heat of the moment, and underneath the heat of the summer sun, the residents of Powder Hill Road — the only road to the resort — who were so adamantly against the festival still showed compassion.
Streets were blocked off to anyone who couldn’t show ID with a Middlefield address on it, so anyone heading to the Ridge had to walk for miles.
“They started leaving out hoses for them to get a drink of water,” Dynia says. “They were making them things like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bologna sandwiches because they were hot, they were thirsty and they were hungry.”
Quinnipiac professor Richard Hanley, who included a snippet about Powder Ridge in his documentary about the New Haven Coliseum, was 14 and living in Northford at the time.
“It was interesting to see national news cover something right up the road from where you are,” Hanley says.
He remembers the reports of tens of thousands of kids flocking to a canceled event.
“If you’re familiar with the geography of that place, it would have been terrific for a concert. Have the crowd sit on the ski slopes and watch the acts.”
On what would have been the first day of the festival, NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report informed the nation what was happening in
Middlefield.
Standing in front of a crude map of Connecticut, David Brinkley delivered the following: “Even though there is no music, and won’t be, Powder Ridge seems to have become a kind of outdoor folk ritual, or puberty rite, and a social scene offering a variety of fun and games.”
On-site reporter Liz Trotta called it more of an “overcrowded country picnic” than a rock festival.
Dynia was on vacation with her parents in upstate New York. Her mother found out about the festival in the local newspaper and immediately called home to Middletown. Dynia was only 9 but her brothers were 20 and 18.
“She called my brothers and said, ‘Don’t you dare go over to that thing!’” Dynia says. “The funny thing was, it was summer; they were working summer jobs during college. They didn’t know anything about it. And it was like, ‘OK, Mom, we won’t.’ And then my brother Jerry gets off the phone. ‘Hey Steve, guess what? There’s a big concert in Middlefield this weekend. Pack up our friends and let’s go!’ So of course they went.”
A ticket for the three-day festival cost $20, not a bad deal considering the lineup that was supposed to show. An even better deal would have been $2, which is what one poster erroneously listed as the price.
Because of the success and immediate legacy of Woodstock, festivals began sprouting up all over the country, although many were canceled.
“A lot of towns were scared of it,”
Hanley says. “Not just Middlefield, but all across the United States. They didn’t want any part of this.”
Powder Ridge was an outlier in the sense that hordes of people still showed up despite the ban.
“A lot of the hard-feelings part that people came away with was the place was trashed,” Dynia says. “When everybody left, it was trashed.”
John Bugai was 9 years old at the time and lived on his family’s dairy farm on the Durham side of Powder Hill Road. Due to the road closures, Bugai says, people were walking by his house for a week before the concert was supposed to begin.
“It was a steady stream, groups of four, groups of five. There was always some group walking through,” says Bugai, who still lives in Durham. “Even in the middle of the night you would hear people walking.”
Ilene Coman lived on Main Street in Middlefield. She was 15 years old and had just lost her father the month before. Her mother allowed her to go to Powder Ridge and stay overnight under the watchful eye of her 24-year-old brother and his wife.
“A lot of people didn’t have clothes on,” Coman says. “That was just so odd, and they were nonchalant about everything.”
Her most vivid memory is from the next morning.
“I do remember specifically waking up and the guy in the group next to us saying, ‘Would you like some electric Kool-aid?’” Coman declined the offer.
Coman, who today lives in East
Haddam, got married in 1990 and had the reception at Powder Ridge. (The open bar did not include electric Kool-aid.)
The hippies on the ridge
These days Karen Ercolani
Wines lives off the grid in Washington state close to the Canadian border, up in the mountains.
In the summer of 1970 she was a 21-year-old who spent the whole festival weekend up on the Ridge.
She grew up on nearby Lake Beseck, so she did enjoy the luxury of not having to bathe in the “Powder Puddle.” The little pond at the base of the slopes was used by many during the festival for swimming, bathing and god knows what else. It had to be closed off due to the skyrocketing bacteria level.
“I partied most of the time up there,” Wines says. “Left now and then to go get cleaned up again and feel human, but then right back up there. I even took my dad up there. He wanted to see what the festival looked like, and he was a little shocked at the undress of the people. There were not a lot of clothes being used. And you didn’t dare go swimming in the lake that was there.”
Wines says she’s glad she experienced the Powder Ridge festival, but it’s difficult for her to speak about that era without conflating Vietnam and Kent State into the memories. She mentions that her husband was in Vietnam and that she lost friends in the war, and there’s always a hole when Kent State comes up.
She laments that college-educated and wealthy Americans were detached from the realities of what others were facing.
“But I do digress because that is a time that’s still inside me,” Wines says.
Quite a few Vietnam vets were in Middlefield and at other similar gatherings, she says, because they wanted to promote the anti-war movement.
“Festivals like that didn’t last long enough,” she says.
She also says the opposition from locals helped to increase attendance.
“Word went out that Middlefield wasn’t really behind it at all. And so, all the people who were not really thrilled with the government at that point in time said, ‘Oh, well, we’re going to show up anyway,’” Wines says.
Barbara Mroczka knew from a young age that she would never conform.
She was “married for about five minutes” when she was 16 and had her own apartment on Main Street in Middlefield in 1970 when she was 20. She had a friend who lived in Meriden and offered to babysit Mroczka’s son the week of the festival.
“That was one of the best weeks of my life,” she says. “I wasn’t responsible for anybody but myself.”
The year before, she had wanted to go to Woodstock but her baby was just an infant. Her boyfriend, now husband, talked her out of it.
For the week leading up to the festival, Mroczka and her friend across the street who owned a bakeshop would take day-old bread, doughnuts and anything else down to Powder Ridge to feed the growing masses.
When the weekend arrived, Mroczka’s friends left their cars at her apartment and they all made the 4-mile walk together.
“One of our friends had just come home from basic training and he had the shaved head,” Mroczka says. “And so we dug up a wig for him because he really felt like he would be targeted for being in the military, because obviously in that time period nobody had hair like that unless you were in the military. And we got halfway up the Ridge and it was too hot. I remember him just sweating bullets.
“He said, ‘I’m taking off this stupid thing. If somebody wants to give me a hard time they can give me a hard time.’ And the most interesting thing is no one said a word to him ever. No one commented in any way. To this day I find that so interesting.”
She says they walked in and saw card tables set up with all types of drugs.
“What was hysterical is they were having price wars. They’d start off at like $4 or $5 and cross it out and everything got down to $1,” Mroczka says. That sounds a lot like capitalism. “Yeah, definitely. At a time when everybody believed that wasn’t the way they were going.”
The way things are going is what’s befuddling and concerning now for Mroczka, who makes her home on the Virginia shore.
“It still amazes me today ... how we could bring up children and grandchildren who are not at all like we were in the late ’60s and ’70s,” she says. “They protest now and they have their automatic weapons with them. It just catches my breath because that’s not who we were back then. How did we produce these children and grandchildren?”
The legacy of Powder Ridge is that it didn’t happen. It’s the festival that wasn’t. The most famous concert never played. But still, so much happened. A town remained divided for a generation. Melanie played on an ice cream truck. There are probably people who say they were there when they weren’t, and people who actually were there who don’t remember.
“Anybody who talks about Woodstock, I say, ‘I can one-up ya.’ Not with the music, but the humanity,” Mroczka says.
“I felt very hopeful that as a generation we were going to make a difference and we were going to change the world. But then some of us forgot.”