The Berkeley Folk Music Festival

Wild West Festival Poster, 22-24 August 1969. Rock industry impresarios hired Barry Olivier to run the combined admission-only Kezar Stadium concerts and free events in Golden Gate Park. Olivier chose to cancel Wild West at the last moment in response to protests—some potentially violent—from counterculturalists who objected to its commercial dimensions. Olivier’s decision was probably wise given the deaths that occurred a few months later at the ill-fated Altamont concert on the outskirts of the Bay Area in December of 1969.

The Berkeley Folk Music Festival took place in a particular milieu and context: Northern California during the 1950s and 60s. As such, the Berkeley Archive not only preserves the proceedings of the Festival itself, but also provides glimpses of the vibrant West Coast cultural and political scene as a whole.

Barry Olivier organized additional folk festivals and events in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Asti in Sonoma County (just north of Berkeley), El Cerrito (a town just north of Berkeley), and Stern Grove, a park in San Francisco. He attended or sent representatives to attend other festivals: the San Francisco State College Folk Festival, the UCLA Folk Festival, the Monterey Folk Festival. He stayed in touch with promoters and musicians from San Diego to Fresno. He traveled to folk-oriented communal gatherings at places such as Sweet’s Mill in the Sierra Nevada mountain foothills. And Olivier photographed events around Berkeley, both cultural and political, from the 1967 Jazz Festival at the university to the People’s Park protests in 1969.

One also sees in the Berkeley archive how as director of the Festival, Olivier became a key participant in a national and even international folk circuit, a world that straddled the line between commerce and community. On the one hand, there were music industry managers and record companies and full-color articles in major magazines; on the other, the Berkeley Festival never lost contact with local musicians, educators, government and university officials, and attendees (Olivier always wrote back to anyone, famous or not, who contacted him about the Festival).

Perhaps most of all, the Berkeley archive reveals how the sensibilities of the folk revival—a pursuit of intimate, festive community and connection—persisted even as Bay Area music exploded into the psychedelic swirls of rock music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Barry Olivier himself attended events such as the Monterey International Pop Festival in June of 1967 and the tragic Altamont concert in December of 1969.

In the spring of 1969, Olivier was asked by a group of rock music impresarios to direct the Wild West Festival. Wild West was to combine free arts and music events across Golden Gate Park with admission-only superstar rock concerts in the Park’s Kezar Stadium that would pay for the free parts of the festival. Artists and musicians themselves would form committees to design and organize the free events, overseen by Olivier as director. The dream the rock band managers, promoters, and musicians had was to recover the original, communal spirit of the 1967 Summer of Love, which had soured quite a bit by 1969. The hippie mecca Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in particular was plagued by hard drugs, prostitution, and homelessness. The hope was that Wild West would rejuvenate San Francisco’s reputation. In the summer of 1969, Wild West seemed like it was going to be such a big deal that writers in the underground press referred to a similar arts and music festival planned for upstate New York that August as “Wild East.”

The Woodstock Festival in upstate New York became an enduring symbol of the era. Alas, despite many efforts to keep Wild West on track, protests among hippies, political activists, and others derailed the event. When protesters threatened violence, Olivier chose to cancel Wild West. At the time, some blamed Olivier for a lack of nerve, but given the violence and disorder that reigned at Altamont a few months later, in December of 1969, perhaps Olivier was wise to call off Wild West.

At Wild West in 1969, the original ethos of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival seemed to fade into nasty disputes over profits and ownership and control. Who should determine the culture of the counterculture? Who should make money from it? To whom did the music and culture belong? These arguments prevented the event from occurring, but in an important sense, they were also a continuation, if more contentiously, of questions that the Berkeley Folk Music Festival itself raised about musical and cultural heritage in the United States, and even about the nature of democracy in America itself.

Stick ‘Em Up “Wild West,” This is a Strike! Protest flier distributed by the Haight Commune to protest the Wild West Festival, August 1969.

Just as New Left political activists asked in the 1960s if the practice of “participatory democracy” might replace the alienating institutions of Cold War American life, so too cultural activists in the folk revival wondered if a more participatory approach to musical activity might improve the situation. Rock bands at Wild West and other big festivals at the tail end of the 1960s wanted to swirl together primal experiences of ecstatic communion with shimmering pop electricity. As much as they broke away from the folk revival into a hallucinogenic whirlwind, they also retained core folk efforts to discover more fulfilling combinations of old and new.

The questions raised by at festivals during the 1960s, whether folk or rock, were many: Could music connect past and present, the traditional and the contemporary, effectively? Could it establish egalitarian bonds between those on the margins and those at the center of postwar American society? Could it offer alternatives to the persistent racism, sexism, exploitation, and inequity in American life? Or was it merely reviving a romanticized national cultural heritage that covered over the sins of the United States? 

Rock music at the Wild West Festival and other rock mega-events were meant, surprisingly, to extend from—and fit back into—the folk revival ideals of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival. To be sure, they devolved into ever larger divisions between the unreachable superstars on stage and the rest of the audience in the dark, muddy fields or huge arenas. But many of the performers in the San Francisco scene in particular tried to hold on to the original ideals of the folk revival. They had enthusiastically participated in it at Berkeley and they retained much of its spirit as best they could into the rock era of the 1970s and beyond.

Today, the original spirit of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival persists, if dimly, in contemporary music festivals. To be sure, events such as Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, Lollapalooza, and Coachella, not to mention myriad other festivals around the United States and the world, are far more commercialized. Sometimes they are really nothing more than an excuse for excessive partying. Yet however faded the more serious goals of the Berkeley Folk Music Festival may be, the original ethos of shared, participatory involvement remains. It is part of the allure of the music festival as something more than just a concert, but an intensified, if temporary, gathering of people assembling in concert.

• The UCLA Folk Festival
• Asti Folk Festival
• Stern Grove Festival
• Jackson Hole Folk Festival
• The Monterey Folk Festival
• The San Francisco State College Folk Festival
• The Monterey International Pop Festival
• The Wild West Festival
• Altamont Festival
• Sky River Rock Festival
• Rock ‘n’ Roll Conference, Mills College
• The Berkeley Blues Festival
• The Berkeley Jazz Festival
• Sweet’s Mill Music Camp

In June of 1967, Barry Olivier traveled south to the Monterey International Pop Festival to photograph the event. He captured many of the up-and-coming performers of the rock era: Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, Laura Nyro, the Byrds, Hugh Masekela, Lou Rawls, the Mamas and the Papas, Canned Heat, the Electric Flag, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Country Joe and the Fish, and many more.

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