Celebration of Life

Hi, yeah, I was there, too. I'm afraid smart, stupid, or local had nthing to do with the river--it was soooooo hot, remember? According to the TIME mag article, it was the "end of what began at Woodstock" (archives July 12, 1971)

 

I went to both...fun days

 

I remember the Bikers with guns and then the police with guns...all trying to break it up and keep us out parked on streets for days.......but it did not work. I saw this one state trooper with a chrome plated tompson. That river was fun to swim in but what current. Was anybody part of the mud people on the river bank. When we were parked outside the night before they let us in ....do you remember the fire works and come crazy guy out in the streat with his fire works....and that one cop that was cool.

 

Wow...there so many of you good people still out there. Really tough finding pics or info on this one. Trying to show my kids maybe some photos of my black painted up mail truck like a keystone cop paddie wagon, that said United Freaks of America on the side. Inside was all Phsycidelic posters and colored lights. They got a pic of me from a time/ life anniversiery issue of woodstock but not my wagon. Came back to Cleveland .Ohio from a Pittsburg, Pa. Festival that didn't take place, riot cops came in line and
forced us all off the farm it was gonna take place at cause of legal injunctions...as we we leaving who ever was putting it on convinced another farmer to let us use his place, no concert, but one hellva great live in party for 2 days. They couldn't leagally stop it on the weekend. Anyway just before we got back to Cleveland I stopped for gas, heres this really good lookin girl fillin me up, checkin out my wagon, we got to talkin for awhile and she shows me two tickets for next week for the Celebration of Life Concert in Lo. Would I want to go? Are you kiddin me? Hung out for the week with her and had a ball. Grabbed another bud of mine and off we went. I called her " Lady" and she was! On the way down we got hungry and needed gas real bad so we pull over by Huntsville( Redneck at the time ) Alabama at a 7/11. Out front was sitting this long hair named Star and his girl Sunshine...we come out started talkin and they invite us to there pad for the night, Cool! we get there and their livin we about 14 - 18 others...well since I had a vicks bottle full of pure lsd 25 a chemist buddie made all the time, and a couple hundred bayer asperin tablets we blotted with me..( good way to carry it at the time and not get hassled by the man, In my wagon, the way we dressed, got stopped ALOT ! ) anyway party on all night...next day they decided to go with us...and now there were 5...we got there 2 days early and was about the 400 th vechile on the side of the road from the main gate. By the time we pulled up to that spot there were 20 I picked up along the way. That crazy dude with the fireworks was me... trippin away, me and Star were screwin around with them and a railroad flare and I caught a gross of bottle rockets on fire in my hand and just thru them to the sky...wow...what a trip and the crowd went crazy. We parked for 2 dys and nights there,waitin out the court crap, it was hot...there was a swamp along side the road there...nasty lookin and all those who couldn't wait to get naked went in...anybody remember a dead bloated cow floating out there, didn't matter everybody went in anyway. Next morning woke up and I don't know where everybody came from but it was happenin ! They were there and finally the word came the concert was on !!! Lady and me drove the wagon in with the 2 actual tickets and parked right at the end of Cocaine lane along the path. the rest of the gang got in their own ways and met us inside. The party was on !!! My favorite things I actual remember was the mud slide and swimming out to the boats with Lady and she'd hang her beautiful chest over the boats edge for the caukers. Even had a couple of locals come outta their boat and join us naked on the slide...they even got naked and had the time of their life. The music was awsome...didn't matter who played...balled to the dukes and afew other groups right ontop of the freak wagon...didn't matter, we were free, with all you life loving people there with us. The most outragious there was Ted Nugget...totally blew my butt away...awsome, awsome, awsome.!!! No I don't remember any of the bad stuff they say happened there...met alot good, good people livin and sharin themselves and whatever they had with each other...I think I ate sometime while we were there , but who knows...I miss those days alot..peace love and harmony on a large scale, people being themselves and expressing. We finally ended up leavin after who can remember the days it really was and dropped Star and Sunshine off in Huntsville, Al. my other bud met up with a chick and ran off with her to where everland and that was cool! Me and Lady headed back to Ohio, we made it, but the ol' wagon and I had to part ways, goin thru Kentuctucky she just couldn't make it up a hill and she blew her engine...grabbed a few things outta her and just pushed her over a cliff, stuck out our thumbs and a courious about hippies young straight woman picked us up and gave us a ride the rest of the way. Hung out a few weeks in Ohio, saw Lady once and a while. stopped to see her on a 750 ol' Norton I bought for some gas...what ja doin ? wanna go down and see Star and Sunshine in Al. sure and on the bike she got and off we went. got there and their people said they went to visit Stars uncle in Cocoa Beach Florida, looked at each other and so we went...stayed a couple weeks..ran outta cash so it was time to get jobs, she went to work in a store and I at a Cementary diggin graves. Hence bikes and diggin graves lead to the nickeroo name of Digger and that monicka as always stuck. Never ran into Star all the years I lived there...did catch Sunshine a couple years later there...and thats all I got to say about my last big feastival...concert... whatever you want to call it...I and all those I shared that lifelong experiance with Peace . Love and Joy! may they fill your entire lives as they still fill mine, thanks for all the memories posted here !.
"Don't just settle for a nice day, Have a great Life "
and thats what I'm wishing you who is reading this right now...peace and Love Digger

 

But I was there! I remember the announcements that for some income tax reason, many bands weren't being allowed to come. I remember being in the river, mud, and all the usual stuff that goes on. Armadillos circling our campfire, wondering what we were...extremely cool for Bostonians! Our van broke down in Georgia, but met some nice people there. Got lots of GLARES when we stopped for gas in the southeren states...scary. Still got my shirt! I remember some of the music, but remember mostly a lot of confusion...but fun. My friend brought his dog with her nursing puppies along...what a trip. Love to you all!

 

I was there. First there was an injunction to keep the festival from happening and we were left in limbo for 3 days camping on a levi outside this giant soybean field where the Festival finally took place. It was advertised in Rolling Stone as 8 days on a beautiful island in a river. Not even close.Security was a biker gang out of New Orleans. One guy had an arm missing and every day he had a different attachment for a hand. We went without fresh water for 3 days once we got in there and the concert started. Music only happened at night because it was 110 during the day. Steve Stills,Eric Burden, War, Bloodrock,Potliquor,Glass Harp, It's a Beautiful Day and Chuck Berry are some of the acts I remember. I bailed early with my tail between my legs after I droped my soap in the river we bathed in, and came up with a turd insted of my soap. My Woodstock wanabe daze were over. Peace and Love

 

Christinalongago, my true love and I went down there from Boston too! Got real tickets at George's Folly before we left. I always felt weird about knowing I had a great time but being unable to remember much about the details. That seems like something most of us have in common. I remember HOT, and the eventual arrival of the tankers, and also the sudden drop off to the river bank. We got there a couple of days late so we heard the stories about it being kinda of rough at the outset, but by the time we got there it was just the heat that was the issue. You could convince me that we stayed 3 days or 3 months. I remember some of the mud people talking about not leaving. I remember Melanie and John Sebastian and Country Joe, and also the Chambers Brothers. I know what you mean, redflip,. I've never run into anyone who had heard of it when I would mention it. Thanx to rocnjava 'n ok_sure for the pics and posters. Looking at the White Cloud picture of the exit, wondering if that's me in the VW Beetle, I see a mail truck in that pic, but it's not painted like a keystone cops paddy wagon, dah dig, so I guess mail trucks (I had one too, but not this trip) and VWs were well represented. It's great to hear from all of you. Glad you are all well. Gotta go see what DeltaMusic put up on eBay. 1971....,huh, that was a while ago....
-JohnnyCake

 

When I arrived there was a lone police car sitting atop the levy. The folks I had hitched a ride with had by chance, somehow found out about and followed a couple of vehicles carrying people who were with the production company that would put on the festival. We stopped within a few hundred yards of the sentry, I got out here within site of a small, brittle looking old store we had passed a short ways back. Satisfied that they had located the site, the people I had ridden with decided they would drive to the nearest town for supplies. As they departed I looked back towards the levy, I saw the cars we had followed drive up and over the levy stopping briefly to speak with the officer standing outside of his car. I threw my pack onto my back and headed in the opposite direction, back toward the store, to my left the levy stretched ahead seemingly without end, fading into the hazy horizon, along the way on my right were a few old houses, not much more than shacks really, sitting on stacks of rocks, placed at each corner and at other strategic points, which served as the foundations. I nodded greetings to a couple of curious residents as I passed by, sharecroppers I imagined, none of us realizing how this dusty, emptiness was about to be transformed. The store was located where the road on which I had come in formed a T with the road that ran parallel along the levy. It was similar in structure to the the neighboring shanties, slightly larger perhaps, an open front faced the road and the levy beyond, double screen doors on which a faded Colonial Bread logo was still faintly visible opened outward. As I entered, and though I doubt if he had seen too many of my sort, the proprietor seemed to take little interest in the longhaired kid, toting the huge orange backpack, that had just come into his somnolent establishment. A small antique oscillating fan hummed and rattled in a weak attempt to mitigate the stifling heat, it sat incongruously atop a large iron potbellied stove, which itself stood upon four clawed feet in the middle of the room, on an unfinished wooden floor. I shopped a bit, choosing from the sparsely stocked shelves a pack of chips and a honey bun along with an RC Cola from the cooler. As I paid for my selections I spoke to the expressionless face behind the hand that gave me my change, asking if he knew what was in the works just across the levy. If he did he certainly didn't seem to care but then of course there is no way he could have envisioned that this was the destination for tens of thousands of hippies who were at that very moment, converging on this very spot from all across the United States. I thanked him and went back out and sat in front to eat my chips and drink my RC. After a moment I noticed he had come and stood just inside the screen door. We spoke again and I offered my thoughts that there might soon be a huge crowd where now there were only a couple of lazy hound dogs laying about. I asked a few questions about the local population whereas he did become somewhat more talkative and I learned of an "old goat man" who, he said, lived in a camp just the other side of the levy, at the edge of the swamp. This, I decided, would be my next stop. Putting the honey bun into the front flap, I shouldered my pack, said my good-bye and began to walk down the road along the levy away from the sheriff who I felt sure must have been eyeing me this whole time, from his far away perch atop the levy. Once I felt safe due to the significant distance between myself and the officer I left the road and climbed up and over the levy, descending quickly into the woods below. Under this cover I doubled back up the inside of the levy and found the camp of the goat man just where I had been told I should expect to find it. Now you might think that the prospect of meeting a "goat man" on the edge of a swamp in the middle of nowhere would leave one a tad uneasy, but as happens while growing up in north Georgia I had become quite well acquainted with another "goat man" who traveled the roads of the state in an old wagon in which he lived and which was pulled along by his "family". They regularly passed through our town and would stop overnight not too far from my boyhood home. He welcomed visitors and whenever we had the chance we would partake of his hospitality. Well this goat man of Louisiana proved no less friendly, if not so worldly due to his stationary existence in this wilderness, than the goat man from back home. We sat together in his camp surrounded by his friends and sustenance. I did most of the talking, relating stories of my travels and of places and things I had seen and done. When I told him of what was soon to come to this place I could see the idea fascinated him which rather suprised me since I had imagined he enjoyed his isolation. I asked if he would mind if I were to leave my pack in his camp while I reconoited the area. I wanted to locate the festival site while avoiding the attention of the gatekeeper. To this end the old man used a stick to trace a map onto the ground, with directions and the path I should take through the swamp, using a huge fallen cypress tree as a bridge, past a stinking bloated dead cow then along the river bank and from there into the open fields where I did indeed find the nexus of what was to become the Celebration of Life.

 

I rode up from Miami with some friends. I was 17, just graduated high school.
I remember lots of LSD, hanging out naked on the river bank, playing in the mud. It was the best mud i have ever seen in my life.
The first person i ever saved from drowning was in that river. he was calling for help, but i thought he was just joking, cause I had someone do that to me once before and when I swam out to save him he laughed at me. So I waited till this guy went under and didn't come up and I realized he was really drowning. I swam out and found him in that muddy water and pulled him to the surface. Some other people swam out and helped me drag hm to shore. he didn't die
The only bands I remember seeing, (i was quite high on acid most of the time) were The Chambers Brothers, Melanie, Bloodrock, Stephen Stills, Its a Beautiful Day (they were unbelievable) and they kept promising us this special surprise guest. Everyone was speculating who it would be. It turned out to be a band from San Fransisco called Stoneground. never heard of them and i was not impressed.
Didn't they have like the first showing of Jimi Hendrix's Rainbow Bridge also?
maybe it wasn't the best concert ever, but I sure had a great time.
I remember the dead cow that Edwin spoke about and probably used the same fallen tree to cross the bayou. We camped on a small island in the middle of the bayou just out of smelling range to the north of the dead cow. there was a fallen tree that we used as a bridge to get from our island to the festival area.

 

I was there. It was the year after the Atlanta International Festival wasn't it? I went to that one too.

Hey here's what I remember from it - First me and my girlfriend got there and they hadn't let anybody in yet and we were spending the night next to some levy or something. Cars parked everywhere. We tried to make love in the back seat but it was too cramped so I got the idea that since it was so dark we could spread a blanket on the hood of car and so that's what we did. Everything was going real good until somebody in a car up on the levy shined their flashlight down on us and shouted something like, "Hey look at them!"

Then some cars started up and rearranged themselves so their headlights shone on us too.

One by one other flashlights and car head lights turned on us. We started with a blanket on top too but I think it had slid off us. Both of us were pretty free so I asked her what she wanted and she said, "Let's just keep on" and so we did. Eventually most of the lights dimmed and left us to complete in more privacy.

It was one moment of love I hope I never forget.

The music was great and I remember being nude for a good part of the three days there.

A few years later I got into music production - about a thousand hours in studios recording and mixing.

You say you still have the masters of Celebration of Life? Wow - I'd love to just hear the mp3.

This is my first post - don't know if it shows my email or not but would love to hear from you or whoever was there and their experiences. This and also Atlanta the year before.

 

I went to the Atlant festival too. That was the best ever. None of the problems of Woodstock. there was plenty food, even tho it was hot there was a cool stream and a lake. It did rain to the first night. that was the best part. I was tripping heavy and the rain was refreshing and the lightning spectacular.
The acid was good, the music, the best. I was only 16 at the tiime. I wish i had a time machine. This is one of the times I would love to revisit.
Amazing thing is that only people from the south even heard about this festival. I bet it was bigger than Woodstock, and the lineup was amazing. Jimi Hendrix was like a god. I was about twenty feet from the stage for his performance. Chambers Brothers were amazing.

 

This is an enjoyable thread,,,,,

 

Was there at celebration of life down in the delta. Its funny i was looking for
info for my blog. could also use details.
I worked as a stage hand and was under the sound tower scaffoldling when that front blow in and badly hurt those four stagehands in the stacks.
One of my fondest and harshest memory's.
wavinmonkey

 

I was there, too! Forgot about the levee until I saw someone mentioned it. I thought the levee camp was the most fun. Melanie landed in her helicopter right at my camp site; I said to her "You look just like Melanie!" She graciously responded, "I AM Melanie." Can't remember the music; way too stoned out. I remember being HUNGRY. A guy was selling baloney sandwiches. There was a watermelon truck. Were there cows around there somewhere? I came in a truckload of people I didn't know, from the St. Petersburg, Florida, area, where I was visiting.

 

I was there. Hitched down from Omaha. It was a unique experience. Lots of drugs and nudity plus good people. It was hot limited food, water, no shelter, and yet did not see one act of violence the whole time. I attended several classes while there on yoga, level of getting high, and lectures on lifestyles. I still have the paperwork from it. I also have a Tshirt. Looks very small noe but I wore it a lot once upon a time. I remember only half of the music happened and all of it happened very late at night.

 

This is a real time warp here. I can't wait to tell my buddy, Lil John, who was my traveling friend to this concert. If anyone here remembers us, I was Big John and Lil John and I were in a blue and white VW bus that was parked off the road about 4 cars from the medic tent and the levee. We were the ones that were selling the ELECTRIC YO-YO'S, in 4 different colors. we sold 400 of them in one night. Better explained would be that I sold 400 in one night 'cause lil john was stoned on "pick one" and trying to sell them for $400 each and I was selling them for $2. Lil john said if he sold just one he could take the rest of the night off. He didn't sell any!!

What an experience!! I'll tell you my version and hopefully entertain one or two of you that can remember what I think I remember.

We were also heading to the island in the river...had a still have the brochure which prompts this whole thing here. My son saw it and suggested you tube or google...alas. We were in MS. and it was canceled and to be moved or?? and those stories and had just stopped in a small bar , I think was the pink kitten or something like that and a liitle tension with us two being white and about 5 blacks including the owner. Things got great when lil john put a nickle in the juke box and played a Sly tune as he played with an electric yo-yo on the dance floor. had a great time there and actually gave one of the guys a ride to the concert and a couple of free yo-yo's to the patrons.

We luckily ended up right near the heartbeat of this mess, maybe by accident. Problem was we had 400 yo-yo's and no batteries. we needed 800 aaa batteries, so we pulled out the bus, had a few cars and friends we made there move the cars to insure a spot for us upon our return. We hauled ass into Baton Rouge and bought every battery that town had at about 3 or 4 electrical suppliers warehouses. But, on the way out the traffic was a mess and the cops had 2 roadblocks set up stopping anyone from coming in. we got some food and drinks and headed back. lil john was in the back putting together yo-yo's as i drove...but we had a plan. we took cardboard and marked big red medic crosses on it and stuck it in our window as we approched the first roadblock. I had boxes of batteries in the front and I told the cop that we were returning with batteries for the medics walkie talkies, and with some suspicions he let us through...remember paranoia...had it big time. Went through the same thing at the second roadblock, but this cop wanted to give me red lights and sirens back to the HQ, but i told him thanks but no thanks. The plan was near perfect, cars moved back, we squeezed in and the party began. WOW, what a trip as the saying goes.

I remember so many things and this blog jogged many others. I too recall the truck of watermelons and the guy with the machete slicing them in two. Dirt floor cropsharer's houses with kinder than expected people living in them, so poor...killing their chickens and making chicken salad sandwiches sold for 35 cents, while whitie brought in uhauls selling a can of beans for a dollar or more. It all became more thought provoking for me after I left, and many things still have an affect today. No water...no food...Hot! So much good and so much bad. Then it was tough to figure out.

That night after we or I sold all the yo-yo's and had a cardboard box of torn wet dollars, people that bought them or people who were trying to buy one kept me awake all night knocking on the bus windows. I finally got out and slept under the bus. Anyone remember the guys selling weed out of their van? $5 a handful or something like that. It was midwest wild grown HEMP that had no HIGH value. Things change and so have I. Could go on with this nonsense but I need to go call Lil John and have hime come to this site. He'll probably have a totally different story but I'll tell you now that He is full of shit and this is exactly how it happened.

 

some Celeb of Life color pics:

http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/1133153288041025963CDlDHJ

 

and s'more pics, map, article

http://www.geocities.com/southern_rides/Katrina_Ride_5.html

http://www.southernfineprints.com/3.html

http://www.novapalooza.com/contributions-alex.htm

http://www.superseventies.com/sdmc_18_Jun_71.html

 

I was there. I took a bath in a stream and as I was finnishing up I saw a dead cow floating next to me. I still have the advertisement that came with my ticket to Celebration of Life.

 

wow, i found this site by accident and here are all these people that went to the same festival back in 71. I went with two girls and we hitched from st. louis. the bikers watching the gates were from st. louis too, so we came and went through with no problem, we camped in the woods next door. sometimes we would just push a log into the river and float in that way as well. I saw some crazy folks there, and it was a blast being one of the naked mud people for a day. my kids just got back from rothbury fest in michigan. what a difference when you compare the two. thereaderlf