Music | August 30, 2009 | 1 comment

Vintage Texas Hippies, Rock With The Blues

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Two weeks after Woodstock, hippies flocked to Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville

By MICHAEL E. YOUNG and ROY APPLETON / The Dallas Morning Newsmyoung@dallasnews.com
rappleton@dallasnews.com

LEWISVILLE – Memories fade over 40 years. Landmarks come and go.
Little wonder Angus Wynne III couldn't recall where the stage stood that Labor Day weekend in 1969 – when fear and loathing, peace and love, and the Texas International Pop Festival came to town.

"It doesn't matter," he said last week near a field of waist-high weeds, somewhere close to where Led Zeppelin, B.B. King and the other acts once played. "It's almost a contact high coming out here."

"Out here," near Interstate 35E and Hebron Road, apartment complexes and shopping centers dash memories of that three-day scene. Long gone are the fences and tents, the rock stars and young people, who gathered in harmony (some sans clothes) for one laid-back, good-time party.
"It's not as pretty as Yasgur's Farm, but it was certainly a great place to do this," said Wynne, a lead organizer of the event.

Yasgur's Farm, of course, is one of the hallowed sites of hippie-dom, where the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in New York drew some half-million people two weeks before Lewisville attracted crowds estimated at more than 120,000.

When America watched news reports from Woodstock, the youthful counterculture saw a celebration of their generation. But many of their elders saw an unimaginable horde of immoral, drug-abusing freaks.

The same lines were drawn when Woodstock came to North Texas.
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