New Orleans Pop Festival

New Orleans Pop Festival
New Orleans Pop Festival poster
Genre	Rock, pop
Dates	August 30 - September 1, 1969
Location(s)	Prairieville, Louisiana United States
Years active	1969
Founded by	Steve Kapelow
Attendance	25,000 - 30,000

The New Orleans Pop Festival was a rock festival held on Labor Day weekend (August 30 - September 1, 1969), two weeks after the . It was held at the Louisiana International Speedway in Prairieville, Louisiana, about 65 miles up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and 15 miles south of Baton Rouge. Over 26 bands performed during the three days of the festival, including 7 veterans of Woodstock. It had a peak attendance of 25,000–30,000 people.

The summer of 1969 saw a proliferation of the relatively new concert genre of pop/rock festivals. While the cultural highlight was undoubtedly the on August 15–18, 1969, near White Lake, New York, the New Orleans Pop Festival was among several major pop festivals held that year in the deep South. Unlike several other pop festivals around the country, the local citizenry and governmental bodies were tolerant though wary of such a large crowd. The experiences of other festival promoters having to fight local government ordinances and prohibitions was not shared by promoter Steve Kapelow and his sponsoring company, Kesi, Inc, with the result that concert preparations were complete upon commencement of the festival.

The fall of 1969 saw the beginning of court-ordered integration of area schools, and racial tensions were high. Because of several incidents of violence resulting from racial incidents, local towns were under a tight night curfew, although that curfew did not extend to the concert site.

Promoter Steve Kapelow, 27 at the time and a fellow musician, described the preparations for the festival by telling a UPI reporter, "We expect 15,000 - 20,000 in light of advance ticket sales, but we have prepared for double that." Kapelow explained that their extra preparations were costing more money than was likely necessary, "but we'd rather do that then have the industry suffer another disaster," referring to Woodstock where attendance was vastly greater than anticipated, and preparations were inadequate. Kapelow pointed out that he was confident in his attendance projections because the Louisiana population base was much smaller than that of the New York area, that there was another pop festival in the Dallas area on the same weekend that would compete for attendees, and that destruction from Hurricane Camille, which made its U.S. landfall on July 18 in the Biloxi/Gulfport, Mississippi area would likely reduce attendance from the Gulf Coast.