Summer Jam at Watkins Glen
| Summer Jam at Watkins Glen | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Jam band music, rock music |
| Dates | July 28, 1973 |
| Location(s) | Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway outside of Watkins Glen, New York |
| Years active | 1973 |
| Founded by | Shelly Finkel, Jim Koplik |
| Attendance | 600,000 |
| Website | |
| Photographs of Summer Jam at Watkins Glen | |
The Summer Jam at Watkins Glen was a 1973 rock festival which once received the Guinness Book of World Records entry for "Largest audience at a pop festival." An estimated 600,000 rock fans came to the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway outside of Watkins Glen, New York on July 28, 1973, to see the Allman Brothers Band, Grateful Dead and The Band perform.
The concert was produced by Shelly Finkel and Jim Koplik, two promoters who previously organized a successful Grateful Dead concert at Dillon Stadium, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1972. At the Dillon Stadium concert, the Grateful Dead were joined on-stage by Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, and Jai Johanny Johanson, members of The Allman Brothers Band. This impromptu jam planted the seeds that would eventually spawn the "Summer Jam" concert in Watkins Glen, NY.
Similar to the 1969 , an enormous traffic jam created chaos for those who attempted to make it to the concert site. Long and narrow country roads forced fans to abandon their vehicles and walk 5–8 miles on that hot summer day. 150,000 tickets were sold for $10 each, but for all the other people it was a free concert. The crowd was so huge that a most of the audience was not able to see the stage. However the sound from the stage speakers was doubled 200 feet from the stage by four delay towers, towers with speakers wired to the stage amps but with a 0.175 second delay built in, so that by the time the sound from the stage speakers reaches the tower area through the air, the sound from the delay towers will be synchronized with the stage sound. There were six more delay towers arranged radially 200 feet further from those towers - 400 feet from the stage - and six more towers 200 feet further out. Sixteen delay towers in all, plus the main PA. They were driven by about 24,000 watts of power.
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Wikipedia