Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408130006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RALPH BERRIER JR. and MARK MORRISON STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: WOODLAWN LENGTH: Long
Some were there to hear the music, some were there for the drugs and free love, many just showed up because everyone else was there.
For three days, revelers romped naked in the woods and waged chemical warfare on their brain cells, as some of the biggest names in music provided a live soundtrack for their partying.
It wasn't Woodstock. It wasn't rural New York.
It was Stompin' 76.
It happened right here.
While many former and current hippies are spending this weekend celebrating the 25th anniversary of Woodstock, there are those in Carroll County who are reminded of the musical festival of Woodstockian proportions that occurred in their back yards.
From Aug. 6-8, 1976 - a Friday through a Sunday - an estimated 100,000 people attended Stompin' 76 on a farm bordering the New River in the Pot Rock section of Carroll County. No one was prepared for the crush of hedonistic humanity that invaded this heretofore peaceful rural area.
Traffic backed up for many miles, and facilities could not accommodate the crowd. There were only 377 chemical toilets at the stage site - a ratio of 265 people per toilet
Many partiers spent the weekend drinking, ingesting a variety of illegal drugs, fornicating, trampling farmers' fields and causing fear and loathing among the locals.
Some of the attendees even listened to the music, a splendid blend of rock, rhythm and blues, and bluegrass performed by a lineup that included some of popular music's biggest names and some up-and-coming stars - Bonnie Raitt, John Prine, Doc and Merle Watson, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Ry Cooder, New Grass Revival and the Earl Scruggs Revue.
Promotional flyers and advertisements - which appeared in national publications such as Rolling Stone and the New York Times - billed the event as "the most spectacular American music festival of the bicentennial summer."
It was the biggest news event to hit Carroll County since the infamous Courthouse Massacre in 1912, in which the Allen clan sprung one of their brethren from a trial by barging into the courtroom and shooting a judge, a witness, a jury member and the local sheriff.
"When the 20th-century history of Carroll County is written in the year 2000," said Mickey Andrews, one of the masterminds behind Stompin' 76, "the Allen shoot-out and Stompin' 76 will be the two biggest things."
Nothing like Stompin' 76 had ever happened in Carroll County. Because of it, nothing like it will ever happen again.
Even today, no one quite knows what to make of Stompin' 76, or "the Stomp-in" as it is called by some of the locals today.
"It was the Woodstock of bluegrass," said Andrews.
"It was a hell of a mess," said Faye Mabe, a resident of the Pot Rock community.
These days, it's difficult to imagine anything like Stompin' 76 occurring in Pot Rock. It was that way in 1976, too.
It's tough to get to Pot Rock. Virginia 635, better known as Pot Rock Road, is the only road that passes by the festival grounds. The sloping hillsides that lead up to the ridges and cliffs above the river seem more suited for hayfields or grazing land for cattle. Mickey Andrews thought the land was suitable for an outdoor concert.
"The area up there is so accepting to festivals," said Andrews, a Winston-Salem lawyer who bought 150 acres of land in the Pot Rock section in 1969.
In 1975 and early 1976, Andrews produced a couple of outdoor shows called the New River Jams. The concerts took place on a 92-acre field Andrews rented from his Pot Rock neighbors, Boyd and Lourena Lawson. With two long, fairly steep hills forming a narrow valley below, the field is a natural amphitheater. A dilapidated stage that was used for the New River Jams still sits in the field.
The weekend-long shows drew about 1,000 people, far fewer than Andrews had expected.
In the spring of 1976, Andrews met promoter Hal Abramson at a music festival in Union Grove, N.C. Abramson, a 21-year-old, 114-pound college dropout originally from Baltimore, was working with Cactus Productions, a Las Vegas-based outfit that was looking for a place to stage a big outdoor show. He had heard that Andrews had some land and money. A deal was struck.
Nearly 300 acres of open fields were set aside for Stompin' 76. The show itself took place on the Lawsons' property, which had been leased to Cactus Productions for $2,000.
Land was graded for a temporary stage to be built on one of the hilltops. The field's other hill served as a campground and viewing area. The expected crowd could also sit or stand on the hill leading up to the stage. More land was graded near the stage for a helicopter landing pad, where performers and VIPs would be flown in.
Promoters printed 35,000 tickets and advertised the show in 22 states during early summer. They expected most of the tickets, which sold for $12 for the entire weekend, to be sold at the gate.
"I may go down in history," Abramson told a reporter during the show, "but I don't think I'll wind up making any bucks."
Cactus Productions did little local advertising. Most locals thought the show would be comparable to the New River Jams.
Cars from up and down the East Coast and as far away as California jammed the main highways. Route 58 was backed up for 15 miles near Galax. The available campsites were filled Thursday. By noon Friday, the 40,000 total had been reached. The cars still poured in.
Betty Hill and her husband, Edward, stood at the top of the hill in front of the house belonging to Coy and Joy Hill, Edward's brother and sister-in-law, and surveyed the cars lined up for miles down Pot Rock Road.
"There was no end to them," she said.
By the time the show began Friday, the music site was full, and concert-goers began pitching tents wherever they could find an open patch of ground, even if it meant invading someone's yard or field. Folks had to park their vehicles and walk as far as 10 miles to get to the site. People climbed over gates to get into the show. Hundreds of others floated up the New River on rafts, canoes and inner tubes and walked through the woods to get to the field. The crowd carried food, sleeping bags, coolers of beer, drugs and jugs of home brew with them.
Inside the gates, a line of vendors openly sold marijuana, heroin, cocaine and LSD.
The throng prevented mail from being delivered near the site, and it kept many residents from going to work. One local factory had to shut down because many of its employees couldn't get out of Pot Rock and neighboring communities.
Attempts at controlling crowd size, which neared 80,000 late Friday, were scuttled.
"It's a hell of a crowd," Carroll County Sheriff E.O. "Mutt" Semones told a reporter at the scene.
It was a hell of a show.
Folk singer Doc Watson and his son Merle, who died a few years ago in a farming accident, highlighted the first day's performances before a crowd that was becoming more occupied with partying than with music.
The senior Watson said he will never forget the event. It was the largest crowd he has ever played for, but the sheer number of people made it less than ideal from a performer's standpoint. "There were so many people, you just about had to play for yourself, you know what I mean?" he said.
Heavy rains marred an otherwise fine show on Saturday, when Bonnie Raitt and John Prine played separately before hooking up for a set in front of a rain-soaked crowd of approximately 100,000, two-thirds of which got in free.
Jeff Hannah of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band also recalled the size of the festival and the helicopter ride in. He said Woodstock is the only comparison. "When we flew over it, it sort of went on forever."
Forever is also how long it seemed that fans from Stompin' 76 followed the group to its concerts afterward, Hannah said. It became a band joke. "The guy in the Stompin' 76 T-shirt sort of following us around for 10 years, I guess that's sort of our story from it. You know, yelling, 'Right on!'"
Drugs were often more prevalent than clothing at Stompin' 76.
Festival announcers warned the attendees about bad acid and other unsafe drugs that were readily available at the show.
Drugs were everywhere. Marijuana and LSD were doled out like hot dogs and hamburgers from open-air vendors. A dozen or so people were arrested outside the gates on public drunkenness charges. Inside the gates, though, it was anything goes.
In a story about the Saturday session, the Aug. 8 edition of The Roanoke Times reported: "As the Earl Scruggs Revue fiddled in the afternoon, two nude men flat-footed near the stage. They were left alone."
In areas near the festival grounds, there were often more nude people than clothed. Men and women bathed and swam naked in the New River and in Crooked Creek. Nude people streaked through the woods.
Carroll Lineberry, who was a 23-year-old Pot Rock resident at the time, said he saw at least 300 naked people in or around the New River on Saturday afternoon.
``You never saw a girl in a short miniskirt in these parts,'' recalled Lineberry. ``Then this thing happens, and everybody's nekkid."
Natural law ruled. Late Saturday night, a young woman attending the festival gave birth.
"I'd like to dedicate this set to a newborn baby," Raitt said as she began her performance.
There was no shortage of rough elements at Stompin' 76.
Dickie Duncan was vice president of the Pagans motorcycle gang chapter in Hillsville at the time. He is no longer with the group. Duncan remembered that about 700 Pagans, not including their women, showed up for the festival from all across the East. It wasn't long before they took over.
Festival organizers - faced with such unexpected large crowds - hired the ax handle-wielding Pagans on the spot as extra muscle to control the crowd. Duncan estimated the group was paid around $10,000, not counting what the Pagans also confiscated in beer and ice, which were in hot demand in the August heat. They confiscated a lot, Duncan said, often taking coolers people had lugged on foot for miles.
In his mind, the crowd estimates were low. He guessed more like 300,000 people attended the festival, and he described a dangerous mixture of hippies and a rougher, more predatory element outside of the Pagans. "It was in the air. You could tell it was an explosive atmosphere."
In the end, it was the Pagans who kept the calm, he said.
"You've got to have some fear to hold people in control."
The group also helped transport the less serious drug-overdose victims out of the area. The more serious overdose cases were taken away by helicopter. "Pagans were riding on top of ambulances, clearing the crowd," Duncan said.
For cars parked in the road, they picked them up and moved them, or flipped them on their side so the ambulances could squeeze by.
It was a legendary event for the Pagans, probably the zenith of the group's unity and power, Duncan said.
Today, Duncan is 47, a federal parolee, who lives in Dublin and works at a machine shop in Max Meadows. Eighteen years later, perhaps his most telling impression of the festival's overall mood, however, is the man whooping it up on the top of a van, playfully wrestling with a naked woman and hollering out like a carnival barker an open invitation to join in their fracas.
"Fun seekers! Fun seekers! Fun seekers!"
Ann Collins was just one of 100,000 fun-seekers. She was 19 and part of a group of college students from Blacksburg who arrived at the festival two days early, didn't leave until after the bulk of the crowd moved out, and was fully stocked with the essentials during the five days in between.
Her group numbered 10, but they had enough tent space to accommodate 25. They brought coolers of dry ice to keep their regular ice frozen. Their supply, which they hid from the Pagans, lasted through the festival. They brought food that lasted, too. Milk, coffee, egg salad sandwiches and a seemingly endless amount of beer.
"College students," explained Collins, now 37 and living in Pulaski County. "We even had a sofa."
Dale Vest of Roanoke marked the event with the purchase of a Stompin' 76 T-shirt, which he has preserved for historical purposes by never wearing. "It was just something. I knew it was something when I was there."
Ty Davidson and his wife, Cindy, drove from Macon, Ga., to hook up with some hometown friends from Wytheville. Davidson, now a 41-year-old drilling contractor in Bedford, said, "I wouldn't take nothing for the experience, but I wouldn't give you 20 cents to go again."
The Davidsons walked five miles to the concert area and slept in their car each night. He said he saw about two or three acts perform. "Bonnie Raitt and John Prine were the ones we wanted to see," he said.
He remembers the trash more than the music.
"Nobody gave a [expletive]," he said. "It was, 'Let's just go get wasted. We'll be gone on Saturday. To hell with the place.' ... I felt sorry for a lot of those old people up in those hills. ... There was some good music and some good times. Unfortunately, some of it was not so good."
Residents of Pot Rock could only stand and watch as their yards and fields were swarmed with visitors. The crowd in front of Paul and Faye Mabe's house used their field as a public restroom and tore down a wooden fence to use as firewood. A man in a van backed over another fence and drove over the Mabes' corn stalks, which were ready to be picked.
"They tore down my little red gate and burned that, too, said Paul Mabe, who slept with a pistol by his side for three nights. He spent about $1,000 in repairs.
There were also reports of an elderly gentleman firing a shotgun at some young people on his property and later being tied up by the group as he defended his property. A grandmother sat on the front porch of her house, a .22-caliber rifle in her lap, and ordered festival-seekers to keep making tracks down the road. They did.
Other residents had more peaceful relations with their uninvited guests. Betty Hill, who lived just a short walk through the woods from the stage, said most were "good people." She gave away some hot peppers from her garden to some campers who were making chilli.
Betty said she did have to yell at a biker who was trying to move her mailbox out of the way to let traffic go by.
"I told him to leave my mailbox alone," Betty Hill said. "People said I was crazy for saying something like that to a Pagan."
Coy Hill counted at least 50 people camped out in his backyard. A shirtless man passed out on the concrete steps leading to Hill's house and slept there most of Saturday afternoon.
When someone broke down his fence and a few of his cows got loose, some young folks helped Coy Hill gather them up.
Some young tourists stole some baloney and snack cakes from Knob Hill Grocery. Wilson Sharp, the store's owner, caught them. He made them apologize.
"Then I gave them the cakes and baloney for nothing," he said.
The sign in front of Mount Olivet Methodist Church read:
"PRAYIN 76
HERE SUNDAY"
By Sunday evening, Pot Rock's prayers were answered. Stompin' 76 was over.
"I went through the war, but I'll never go through anything like that again," said Paul Mabe. "If I ever hear anything louder than a bird singin', I'm gonna shoot it."
Pot Rock's relief was soon replaced by anger when residents finally saw the garbage and destruction Stompin' 76 left behind. The state spent nearly $3,000 cleaning up the road sides. Property owners were responsible for cleaning up their own land.
The worst mess was left on the music site itself. Boyd and Lourena Lawson's field was declared a health hazard by the state health department. The Lawsons felt their neighbor, Mickey Andrews, was responsible for the clean-up. Andrews said the cleanup duties had been contracted out to Cactus Productions. Cactus Productions and Hal Abramson were long gone.
Andrews and the Lawsons sued each other. Andrews won $10,000 in federal court, but the verdict was set aside. Andrews won a judgment in excess of $100,000 against Hal Abramson in 1983, but has not collected a penny because Abramson's whereabouts are unknown.
For 18 years, Boyd and Lourena Lawson have refused to speak about Stompin' 76. They denied interview requests for this story.
No one knows what happened to the money from ticket sales. Some believe the money was used up to cover expenses. Local legend has it the money was placed in suitcases, loaded onto the helicopter that shuttled the performers, airlifted away from the site and eventually flown to the Caribbean, where it was stashed in banks in the Cayman Islands.
Andrews, who estimates he lost more than $200,000 because of Stompin' 76, has heard this story. He, like many others, tends to believe it.
On Aug. 10, nearly 200 residents from the Pot Rock community attended a Carroll County board of supervisors meeting at the courthouse, the same one the Allens shot up in 1912.
The residents talked of shooting. If they come to Pot Rock again, a man said, "I'll give my life, but I'll take some with me."
Some residents felt there should have been more police at the scene. "I'll give you all the protection I can," Sheriff Semones shot back, "but I can't protect 120,000 varmints."
As quickly as legally possible, the board of supervisors passed an ordinance curtailing outdoor music festivals. The ordinance, which was passed Dec. 21, 1976, requires up to a $25,000 bond ensuring cleanup and that certain regulations will be met. Many other counties in Southwest Virginia, fearful that a Stompin' could take place in their backyards, passed similar ordinances.
There was no Stompin' 77 in Carroll County or anywhere else. Unlike the current Woodstock celebrations, there will be no Stompin' 96. At least not in Carroll County.
"We have an ordinance," said Faye Mabe, who keeps a stack of newspaper clippings about Stompin' 76.
She keeps them "just so people will believe it happened," she said.
\ Mickey Andrews occasionally makes it up to his mountain retreat in Carroll County. It's quiet there. It's clean. That's the way it was in Pot Rock before Stompin' 76 hit the area like a three-day-long hurricane. That's the way it's been ever since.
Still, it happened in his back yard.
"I surely would never take part in anything like that again," he said. "But like I said, when they write up the history of Carroll County, I'll be a part of it. That's something."
Staff members Robert Freis, Paul Dellinger, Gene Dalton and Ken Davis, and former staff members Russell Leavitt and Peter Davis contributed to this story.
by CNB