Open Thread - 02-03-23 - Indianapolis Raceway Festival

Opposable thumbs and a large cerebral cortex. These characteristics drove mankind to the apex of the animal world.

It was 1972. I was 18. My best friend at the time and a traveling buddy were milling about our hometown in north central Illinois. I can't remember exactly where I saw the advertisement, I think it was either on the radio or an underground newspaper. It was an ad for a rock festival in Indianapolis, Indiana that was to be held on September 9. The festival was named the "Indianapolis Raceway Festival" and featured Chuck Berry, Fleetwood Mac, It's A Beautiful Day, The Siegel Schwall Band, Argent, McKendree Spring, Flash, Pure Food & Drug Act with Harvey Mandel & Sugarcane Harris, Danny O'Keefe, Foghat, and Limousine.

Since we had already planned a crawling trip to Memphis, we decided to jog a little bit out of our way and mosey on down to Indy to check it out. Back then, "crawling" was a slang term for hitchhiking, which I had already done much of even at the ripe young age of 18, and much of that traveling was done with my buddy, Lloyd. On September 8, off we went with opposable thumbs in the air.

Raceway-Festival.jpg

The trip to Indy was uneventful as far as I remember, but remembering things that happened when I was 18 is problematic in it's own right for various reasons.

We arrived in Indy and immediately began asking about the location of the Indianapolis Raceway venue. To our chagrin we quickly learned that the festival at the Raceway had been moved to Bush Stadium at the last minute because the festival would violate zoning ordinances. That was a curveball we weren't expecting. We found out where Bush Stadium was and off we went, opposable thumbs and all.

newspaper article.jpg

It was getting late when we found the stadium and we needed a place to crash. We were traveling with our backpacks and I happened to bring along my two man pup tent that I frequently carried when hitching. We luckily found a wooded area near the stadium and that's where we spent the next couple of nights, in the tent, in the woods, in busy Indianapolis.

We woke early on the morning of the 9th and headed off to the stadium. There was already a crowd there waiting for the ticket booth to open so we plopped down along side of the brick building. I was sitting right next to one of the overhead doors that you can see in this image:

bush.jpg

As we were sitting there the overhead door would open occasionally and men would carry stuff into the stadium from delivery trucks that pulled up to the doors. They'd then slam the overhead door down and it would latch. Having been familiar with the operation of overhead doors and after watching several deliveries the cortex kicked into overdrive.

Next to Lloyd was a short piece of 2x4 wood. The cortex was in hyper mode by then. I asked Lloyd to hand me the piece of wood. Not too long after that another truck pulled up and the overhead door raised again. After the truck was unloaded I waited. It took a few minutes but eventually someone slammed the door shut. As it was coming down, at the last second, I inserted the 2x4 under the door preventing it from latching. The door remained down. So far so good. The evolutionary gifts of opposable thumbs and cerebral cortex paid dividends that day.

I gave it a good 10 minutes or so in hopes that there would be no one on the other side. I jumped up and reached down and pulled the door open, no one was inside! Lloyd and I, along with several other people that were milling around entered the stadium through the door. We were in a maze of hallways and doors underneath the stadium bleachers, and it was pitch dark. We made our way through the maze until we saw a door that was open. We made our way to it and luckily it lead to the baseball field where the festival was to be held. There were already people milling about on the field so we meandered out and mingled in with them. It was getting close to music time.

Now I don't remember much about the festival, the, ahem, refreshments were everywhere and people were not shy about sharing. We were ripped to say the least! I do remember bits and pieces of the music but what really stands out in my memory was the strong storm that blew through that afternoon. We had our backpacks and weren't to keen on getting soaking wet, but luckily for us the folks next to use had brought a huge sheet of plastic and they allowed us to sit under it with them in an effort to stay somewhat dry. Folks were dancing and running all around us in the pouring rain as we sat beneath the sheet of plastic. I remember trying to entice some of the cuter dancers to sit under the plastic with us, to no avail.

It was too bad that I didn't remain more coherent as there was some really great bands playing that day. The stadium field was packed and the crowd was great. And then it ended. It was midnight and we were flying. We made our way back to the woods and spent the night in the mud.

The next morning off we went with opposable thumbs in the air, and cortices muddled, on our way to Memphis. That trip from Indy to Memphis was eventful, but that's a story for another day.

Sources:

Indiana Rock History

Indianapolis Raceway Festival

Previous road adventure:

Open Thread - 11-19-21 - Misspent Youth

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I'm not sure what triggered those memories a few nights ago, but I thought I'd pass it on, opposable thumbs and cerebral cortex notwithstanding.

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Too bad your cerebral cortex ailed to retain memories of the music you crawled to hear, dear!

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@on the cusp
Chuck Berry (that was way cool), McKendree Spring and Foghat, but that was about it. Fleetwood Mac didn't show up for whatever reason. They were one of the main reasons for the trip, that was a bummer, but we didn't let it dampen our spirits, pun intended.

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@JtC "No Particular Place To Go"?

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@on the cusp
I don't know. Maybe. I do remember him prancing across the stage in his well known way of bending over and kicking his leg out with every step. That caused a roar from the crowd.

Sometimes the cortex works, other times not so much.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@on the cusp

inquiry. Wink

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

In the movie Even Cowgirls Get The Blues

Uma Thurman had super-sized thumbs.

[video:https://youtu.be/imbA6Nkb8e8]

Wicked cold up here. Thanks for posting!
or as orbufucan (sp?) would say: two thumbs up

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@QMS
I would hook up with some hippie chick on the road, always the best for thumbing rides. Uma would have been very welcome to travel with me.

We're finally getting some sun after 5 days of rain. It's supposed to warm up into the 70s in a few days, then rain again. Come summer we wont get a drop, that's Texas.

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@JtC

usually went solo, going where I do not know. Some serious stories there.
thumbing down the road used to be fairly reliable, except for those ghost areas
in the middle of nowhere where all there was just a interstate clover
oh, and the weirdos. Eventually graduated to truck stops to chat up the
truckers in the middle of the night, stopping in for fuel, food and convos.
Once that means dried up, it was onto the freights.

I still pick-up hitchers, mostly local. Usually fun and informative. Seems
peoples are too skeerd to even look at strangers these days.

[video:https://youtu.be/zeaO5UZ5OcI]

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orlbucfan's picture

@QMS If so, I'm flattered. Smile Wonderful diary. Man, I recall those music festivals: terrific, cheap, and plenty of "the spices of life" floating around. Rec'd!!

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Inner and Outer Space: the Final Frontiers.

enhydra lutris's picture

of a hypothesis (or conjecture) I once had to the effect that one acquires the taste for or habit of hitching a ride either at a young age or through dire necessity. As a corollary I suspect that it relates to cowrie. Being young and desirous of adventure,a type of acculturation found on the road,seeing sights and wonders and other things AND devoid of cowrie, the thumb is the obvious recourse. Also too, there is the propensity for activities and endeavors which can generate cowrie to be somewhat removed from one's usual hangout(s) and since it would be silly to waste one's precious, because minuscule, stash of cowrie in order to obtain mas cowrie, the thumb is again called into service. The intersection of these and similar mental and environmental pressures is somewhat more likely to arise early on as opposed to to very much later, because one won't make it to very much later without indulging in such behaviors while youngish. This is quasi empirical, but my sample size is embarrasingly small. Nonetheless:

be well and have a good one

edit, fixed of through ... to OR through ...
second edit - fixed empirical

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris
is the root of all evil, until one ages and then it's not so bad.

I would never think of thumbing a ride nowadays, too many predators out there. They were there back then too, but nothing like today. That cowrie thing again, among other reasons.

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enhydra lutris's picture

@JtC @JtC

starts, I was 6'4" and about 210# making me an unlikely target for most predators, I mean, there were plenty of smaller folk out looking for a ride.

be well and have a good one

edit - typo

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

enhydra lutris's picture

They opened for the Stones (Bridges to Babylon) in Oakland. Vedder walked up to the mike and proceeded to mumble incoherently through the entire set, I didn't understand one damn word.

be well and have a good one

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --

@enhydra lutris
will do that, old buddy.

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here in town with mental health problems. She has to walk a mile or so from her home to get to a store. Every man who pulls over, picks her up to help her, gets accused of sexually assaulting her. Her family are all my friends. They have put out the word to everyone to just let her walk.
I gave a guy I know a ride home from the grocery store. He spilled his groceries, and blood from a meat package stained my car seat. He was drunk.
A friend and I were on a long drive to Dallas, and we picked up an elderly man who was walking along the interstate in that direction. The man was babbling non-stop about aliens and Jesus, wore a cap saying he was a Viet Nam war veteran, and we felt afraid. We had to pull over and let him out within a few minutes. At least he didn't stain the car seat.

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"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981

@on the cusp
I promise.

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@on the cusp

they tend to be mostly harmless
fighting demons inside more than
otherwise, a testament to their tenacity
to have survived this long, methinks

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were unique.

Adventure took on a new meaning as the baby boomers got old enough to do weird things like hitch hike.

I was in the middle of it, born in 1953, but was too uptight to join in the reckless abandon. I was very late to even appreciate marijuana as my best friend from the seventh grade on became a dealer of pot, psychedelics, and eventually, cocaine. He and his girlfriend and virtually all my buddies ragged on me relentlessly from our senior year in high school through college. I did give in and took my turn on the doobie passing around in the summer after graduation, but it was a big nothing for me for the first several dozen times. I was an enthusiastic boozer instead.

In hindsight, it is clear that alcohol was far worse for me in every way than cannabis. But my head was stuck in an already passe image of cool -- the James Bond, Rat Pack, Ladies' Man.

One reason for my disjunction from the counterculture of music festivals, camping out and hitch hiking was my family background. My father and grandfather were union representatives and from my toddler days until now, I have been in opposition to the main stream, especially as it existed in Texas where I grew up. I saw the hippie revolution as a lame version of resistance to the oppressive structure of capitalism.

This naive arrogance eventually yielded at least to marijuana one night in 1973, at my apartment in Austin that I lived in while a student at the University of Texas. I became the impromptu host of a gathering of my dealer buddy and his soon to be wife and a bunch of her girlfriends. Over a couple of hours of music and chit-chat, a dozen or so doobies passed around the room. After they all split, there was a pile of roaches in the ash tray. I used a pair of pliers as a roach clip and burned through the lot of them. I finally got off and became a regular toker for the next five decades. Before edible boogie became available in the last decade or so, I would occasionally make pot tea out of about a half lid and get really off.

Another adventure from them days that I was too uptight even to consider, was the sudden road trip. Another of my friends somehow came to own a VW hippie van during the summer after his graduation in 1969. Along with another long-time buddy of his that I barely knew, he took off from Dallas to San Francisco. The surprise for him came when they got to The City, when his traveling partner came out of the closet and got a job dancing in the chorus line of a drag show. By today's standards, my friend's reaction was very homophobic, but relative to the mores of Texas fifty years ago, he was pretty damned respectful. He parted company on pleasant terms and drove the hippie van back to Dallas.

Them days when anything was possible. Thanks for evoking the memories

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I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.

@fire with fire
was a rite of passage back then. Where I lived a hitch to Texas was a thing. Why Texas I don't know. I made my journeys there in '69 and '70. Dallas both times. It was pretty wild, lots of shit going down.

Thanks for the memories, fire. At least they can't be taken from us, yet.

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he had this cool Sony reel-to-reel, which we would play with, making absurd jokes,
fooling around with sound-on-sound and reverb stuff. Listening to the Beatles,
doing commercials and whatever recordings our expanding minds could produce.

Didn't do much to prepare me for these futuristic realities, but it was fun at the time.

[video:https://youtu.be/Rt75y38J00s]

the smoker you drink, the player you get!

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Tonight: Mostly clear, with a low around -2. Wind chill values as low as -27. Windy, with a northwest wind 23 to 28 mph, with gusts as high as 46 mph. (southern new england, not Siberia)

Already lost power, burning the hell out of logs in the wood stove. Sounds like runaway
freight trains out there. Cooking drumsticks and rice, hauling water. At least it's dry.

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@QMS
and you won’t mind waking up to reload the beast every few hours.

No power outage here, so our wood stove is a relationship of voluntary servitude to The Beast. I surely hate paying big winter oil/gas/electric. Good oak warms you twice, once working it up and once burning it, all paid in advance.

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Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

@ovals49

house is groaning and creaking
might as well feed the fire since I'm up

thanks for the well wishes -
yeah, 'tricity and oil bills are steep
even propane has doubled

have we won Ukraine yet?

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@QMS
proxy war in Ukraine is now effectively over.

have we won Ukraine yet?

Joe and the folks over at State will probably need about six month to understand and make up some absurd narrative explaining how Ukraine’s defeat on the battlefield is actually a great victory for the West. In the meantime, even more Ukrainians (and Russians) will die needlessly.

Well, at least all the aging inventory of weapons of war in NATOstan will have been disposed of on the battlefield, insuring great demand for the manufacturing of new war gear. What a racket!

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Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes

usefewersyllables's picture

was at our sound guy's house after a gig. I was just a boozer at the time, hadn't got into my polydruggie phase yet. I had always, and still always, refused to smoke anything, coming from a house of 2-pack-a-day chainsmokers. I'd already lost pretty much all the members of the older generations of my family to smoking-related illnesses, even way back then, and that certainly ended my parents a few years later. My sister and I are the last ones standing, as a result of that shared refusal.

But our soundman and his roommates had cooked up a big batch of brownies. And he came over to me with the tray of these tasty-looking gems, and asked me how much I weighed. I told him, and he simply said "eat two"... and went wandering off.

I did. And about 3 hours later, I had no idea what *species* I was. I was even hallucinating enough that I could taste the insoles of my shoes through the bottoms of my feet. Now, I have to also observe that his and his roommates were pretty good chemists, as well, so I can't say for sure that there was nothing other than weed in those brownies. But boy howdy, they did the trick. Youbetcha...

Whoa. And so began my search for the perfect edible.

The sound guy was the designated buyer for the house, and they'd go in together to buy whole cards of acid at a time from the organic chemists at our school. He was also a distance runner, and a very dedicated Deadhead. So when they'd get a new card in, he'd drop 2 tabs and go out for a run. Just to calibrate the batch, you understand. Quality control, as it were.

If he came back within the hour, they'd know that it was shit and they'd got ripped off. On the other hand, if he didn't come back within 3 or 4 hours, they'd know a) that it was good acid, and b) that he'd crashed with a friend 20 or 30 miles away...

Good times.

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Twice bitten, permanently shy.

While in Africa we decided to try our hand at “catching a hike”/hitch-hiking in Namibia. So up to the main road to catch a hike. It was also a check point and the guards got into helping us. So our first leg was in an 18-wheeler hauling frozen fish to the Congo. Got us to Botswana…first country border crossing. Now to onward passage because were heading eventually to South Africa. A man with a boat he was hauling to Lake Malawi gave us a ride to another town in Botswana where we caught the local border bus to South Africa. Were dropped in Pretoria, South Africa with no rand but with help of bus/combie guard got on bus heading to Kempton Park, Johannesburg. The driver dropped all of the local workers off and then drove us to the hostel where we were staying. Had to money so Divine Order went inside and got the owner’s wife to come help us. She was black African and she explained to the driver in their common language that we were “crazy’” and paid him and then shook her head at us. But it was a memorable experience!

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Life is what you make it, so make it something worthwhile.

This ain't no dress rehearsal!

Shahryar's picture

Going from San Francisco to Oregon. I was in Arcata (home of Humboldt State University). Oh...I guess it's now called Cal Poly Humboldt. Anyway, there was another guy hitchhiking who'd been let off at the same place. It was getting late. A young hippie type stopped and suggested we stay at his place overnight. We get into his car and the other hitcher says to me "you look like Abe Lincoln", which I don't in any way. I mean, think of what Abe Lincoln looked like, think of any characteristic (other than male) and I don't and didn't look like Abe. I quickly sussed out that the guy was...well...nuts.

We got to the hippie's house and this other hitcher starts talking about ripping the heads off kittens. uh.....

I slept with one eye open. Sometime around 2 am the guy left. 8 hours later I was on the road and saw him hitching within 5 miles. So somebody picked him up and let him out quickly. Yikes!

Other than that I was never too concerned hitching.

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dystopian's picture

Incredible great stuff JtC. Too cool man. Those festivals were awesome, socal had some. Music was big, as in, THE thing, for lots of us. And oh those crazy thumbin' days...

PeeWee's Big Adventure - 1 min. hitch hike scene... funny

I once got a job maybe at 18 as a construction site labor grunt, and the last question was 'how are you going to get here?' My reply was 'thumb'. I didn't think anything of it and apparently that was an acceptable mode of transp. PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway in socal was rich thumbin' in the day. As one that got around like that at first PC, pre-car, I picked people up all the time once I got wheels. Until it started getting sketchy and dicey out there maybe late 70's.

My wife and her girlfriend as 15 year-olds, early 70's, would thumb a few miles to the mall, pier (Redondo) or beach. That was in Torrance. I was in Huntington then, and lots of girls did it there too. Everyone always picked them up, and there were no incidents. It was very normalized along the coast of Cal methinks. Later, I had one of those VW Hippie vans, Microbus they were called, mine a '64, 6-volt, in the late 70's.

Also normalized was recreational experimental chemistry for mind, body, and spirit. Not to brag, but which I graduated from with flying colors at the top of my class. At one time was the guy that color-coded the cubes, or grew the mush. It was another life, but it was a great one.

The big festival that I went to was April 6 1974, California Jam. At Ontario Motor Speedway. ELP, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, the Eagles, Seals & Crofts, Earth, Wind & Fire, Rare Earth, Black Oak Arkansas, wasn't $15. Lots of Cal Jam vids of it all on youtube, Keith's flying piano gag was impressive! There is a Cal Jam club it was so big! It was huge in socal. I heard the re-make attempted 4 years later was bush league. Cal Jam was 300,000 and no arrests. Pure music and camaraderie.

Became significant personally as this was probably the last big gathering of 'the gang', since high school, where we were all together, all twenty of us. The splintering began shortly after. It was a big event for us. I get emails every April 6 from one of them, too many are gone. Lysergic was the best thing for max recall on concerts. IF you were totally bonkers about the band's playing musically, instead of looking to sail away. Alcohol, barbs, pcp people (mint leaves there then), no recall.

Sweet Hitchhiker

Hitch Hike

Great memories, thanks JtC!

be well all!

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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein

@dystopian

all we brought to eat were bongo brownies, which gave us the munchies, so ate more ..
an amazing array of music, people and fun. How we ever found ourselves after the
concert, I have no idea.

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dystopian's picture

@QMS Too cool Q! Awesome! Another Cal Jam brother! I find them in the weirdest places. Wink What a day! Small world (but I'd hate to have to paint it - especially under the eaves).

I had just seen the ELP Brain Salad tour full show at Long Beach Arena, and the Sabbath full tour show there too. So at Cal Jam those were the short fesitival sets, and only half of what they were doing at their own shows on their tours at the time. But still awesome. And Keith held back the flying piano for Cal Jam. But inside L.B. Arena he had an instrument he played that looked like a piece of 2 x 4 a couple feet long with keys on the side of it. Out of which whilst playing it, HE FIRED ROCKETS! INDOORS! He did not use it at Cal Jam.

Best I ever did was with a glass slide, shattered it right off my finger while playing, apparently hitting that proper frequency the right way. But it blew my mind so much apparently I could not figure out how I did it. Thought if I could develop and control that, it would be potentially cool. Smile

Rock on brother!

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We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
both - Albert Einstein