A music lineup that good, yet it didn’t even make it above the fold.
“June concert to feature Nitty Gritty Band, Havens,” read the headline in the May 7, 1975 edition of The BG News. The item appeared in the bottom right corner of A1, underneath stories about an instructor suing the university for being denied tenure and a student acquitted of a charge of petty theft for having stolen copies of The BG News. (“My understanding,” the student told a sympathetic jury, “is that the papers are free and that you can take as many as you want to.”)
“It has been a long time in the making,” Kim Jakeway, the student government coordinator of cultural affairs, told the newspaper. “If this is successful, (concert promoters) will be wanting to do more shows.”
Such was the quiet introduction to one of the most infamous chapters in Bowling Green State University history: The Poe Ditch Music Festival.
The festival was announced for June 1 at Doyt Perry Stadium. It was to be organized by the BGSU Cultural Boost Office, with help from professional concert promoters Ross Todd Productions. Tickets would cost between $7-10 for an entire day of music featuring some of the top acts of that time period.
The lineup was announced as including Johnny Winter, Golden Earring, Montrose, Pure Prairie League, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Richie Havens, Styx, and The Outlaws.
This was to be only the second concert ever held at the stadium, which opened nine years earlier. Many prior concert efforts had fallen through, with promoters unable to obtain acts or finalize a contract to rent the stadium.
For Poe Ditch, the promoters were required to purchase insurance to cover any damages caused.
“However, I hope we won’t have any damages,” athletic director Richard Young told The BG News.
The festival proved controversial even before taking place. One student wrote a letter to the editor on May 23 to complain about the search policy planned at the gates.
“I feel that anyone who goes to the Poe Ditch Festival and lets him or herself become a victim of the search that the coordinators of the concert say ‘they have to do’ is nothing more than a cop-out in this slowly falling apart democracy,” the student wrote. “Either you let the concerts be run by the coordinators and their half-assed ideas or we put the power where it belongs. With the people!”
Another student wrote a response letter to The BG News. They sarcastically called for the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue of searches at concerts.
Student organizers on campus wrote letters of their own urging people to buy tickets. Rebecca Shoup of Cultural Boost said her organization wanted “to establish enough credibility to sponsor popular events next year.”
Mario Sansotta teased that if “the student response is good for this concert we will be allowed to have at least two more stadium concerts, with groups such as Bachman-Turner Overdrive and the Doobie Brothers.”
Sansotta concluded, “Do you want more big concerts of this type, or do you want to keep on saying you go to Boring Green?”
As the concert approached, it became clear to organizers that ticket sales on campus were falling way short of expectations. Promoters then turned their attention to surrounding states, pumping thousands of dollars into advertisements in Detroit, Chicago and elsewhere.
There was also competition in the form of another music festival scheduled the same day on campus. This was a free spring concert organized by WBGU-FM and WFAL-AM radio stations featuring local performers.
As popular as the Poe Ditch acts were, many students may have decided to stay away from the chaos to enjoy a casual listening experience before heading home for the summer.
The promoters had set a goal of selling 7,000 tickets to students. That’s all it would take to recoup the cost of putting on the Poe Ditch Music Festival.
They didn’t come close to that number. But tens of thousands of people descended upon Bowling Green from all across the Midwest. What followed was a legendary, raucous day of live music and mayhem at Doyt Perry Stadium.
When it was all over, BGSU President Hollis Moore Jr. made his opinion clear: “The large scale rock concert experiment will not be repeated.”
Our next blog will detail the day of the Poe Ditch Music Festival and the legacy it’s had in the decades since.
— By Tyler Buchanan, BG News class of 2013