Powder Ridge Rock Festival

Powder Ridge Rock Festival
Melanie Safka was the only artist ignoring the court injunction banning of the festival, she performed on an improvised stage powered by Mister Softee trucks.
Genre	Rock music
Dates	July 31, August 1 and August 2, 1970
Location(s)	Powder Ridge Ski Area in Middlefield, Connecticut
Years active	1970 (cancelled)
Attendance	30,000

The Powder Ridge Rock Festival was scheduled to be held July 31, August 1 and August 2, 1970 at Powder Ridge Ski Area in Middlefield, Connecticut. A legal injunction forced the event to be canceled, keeping the musicians away; but a crowd of 30,000 attendees arrived anyway, to find no food, no entertainment, no adequate plumbing, and at least seventy drug dealers. William Manchester wrote: "Powder Ridge was an accident waiting to happen, and it happened." Volunteer doctor William Abruzzi declared a drug "crisis" on 1 August and said "Woodstock was a pale pot scene. This is a heavy hallucinogens scene."

Tickets were sold by mail at a price of $20 for the whole weekend. The announced line-up of musicians included:

Powder Ridge might have been a legendary hippie music fest had things gone as planned. In the year following , however, things often went wrong for hippie music fests, which went into “a long spiral of decline”. Thirty of the forty-eight major festivals planned for 1970 were cancelled, usually due to swiftly materializing local opposition. Powder Ridge, however, made national news because of the arrival of tens of thousands of ticketholders despite the event's cancellation. The New York Times followed its progress in about thirty articles before, during, and after the event.

Middlefield residents, worried about the impact of the crowd on their small town, received an injunction against the festival just days before it began.

When the owner of the ski resort tried to contact the promoters to tell of the injunction, they could not be found. It looked like the event was never going to happen anyway.

Local authorities posted warning signs on every highway leading to Middlefield: "Festival Prohibited, turn back".

By 1970, rock festivals were regarded as having a political dimension. Carol Brightman wrote that "Rock shows... such as the Powder Ridge concert... were increasingly being covered by the national media as civil events, one step removed from street demonstrations."

Promoters, however, kept hinting that there was still a chance that the concert would be held: "It's a total wait and see thing," a spokesman said and, after all, Woodstock had almost been cancelled too.

Approximately 30,000 people came to the site for the weekend. Most of the musicians, however, did not show up. Only Melanie and a few local bands actually performed during the three-day weekend. One of these local bands was "The Mustard Family" who, in the dark of night, hauled their instruments and equipment into the festival, by back roads and trails, and performed for the enthusiastic crowd. The official poster for the festival lists New York band, Haystacks Balboa, as the special opening act on Thursday night. The band's equipment was stopped by the authorities and the musicians gathered at a local cafe to await word as to their performance. After long negotiations, the band's manager advised the band to return home, there was to be no performance.