The free yogurt didn’t last long.
Chuck and Sue Kesey expected about 5,000 people to show up for the benefit concert they hoped would save their small, Oregon dairy.
No one knows for sure how many music fans ended up at the big open field in Veneta 50 years ago this week, but this much is certain: it was a whole lot more than 5,000.
The event was promoted as a “potluck picnic,” with the Keseys bringing a tranche of the creamy yogurt Chuck had spent years perfecting.
That yogurt, Nancy’s, is now Springfield Creamery’s signature brand, deemed “iconic” by Forbes magazine. But at the time it was new. And besides, in the early 1970s, only weirdos ate yogurt. Nancy’s Yogurt didn’t draw anybody to that big open field west of Eugene.
The Oregon masses turned out to see the concert’s headliner: The Grateful Dead.
They were rewarded with an experience that has taken on mythic status among Deadheads everywhere.
Chuck and Sue, with a ragtag collection of volunteers, quickly realized on Sunday, Aug. 27, 1972, that they had miscalculated the public’s interest in the concert.
The Eugene Register Guard would report on a “monumental traffic jam” that saw cars backed up for miles on Highway 126.
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The estimate that’s typically been offered up for the concert’s actual attendance is 20,000 souls. Ken Babbs, the show’s emcee, doesn’t think that comes even close.
“It was a couple hundred thousand,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive last month. “The place was packed. It was a huge field, and it was full.”
Yes, these concertgoers came for the Dead, the San Francisco-based rock group that epitomized the 1960s counterculture at its most sweet-natured and chill. But some also came for the locally beloved Chuck and Sue – and for the Merry Pranksters, the psychedelics enthusiasts led by Chuck’s brother, the novelist Ken Kesey, and Ken’s best pal, Babbs.
Chuck and Ken had grown up around the dairy business, helping out their father, the manager of a large Eugene dairy. Chuck never lost his taste for the work.
Chuck met Sue when they were students at Oregon State, and their connection was immediate. They married in 1960 and launched Springfield Creamery.
More than 60 years later, they’re still going – and so is their dairy, now with their children helping run the business.
“Chuck and Sue are the perfect couple,” Babbs, 86, said. “They are made for each other – so harmonious.”
Springfield Creamery scored early success, supplying milk to the pioneering Willamette People’s Co-Op as well as the Springfield school district. Establishing their quirky bona fides, they made deliveries in three 1939 Divco milk trucks.
“You may have seen them, white with blue stars, tooling around Eugene and Springfield,” the University of Oregon’s student newspaper wrote in the late 1960s. “Each has an assortment of whistles and horns, and none of them move too fast. Just fast enough to get the milk through.”
Running a small family dairy was fun, but it wasn’t easy. “We were running on optimism,” Chuck told The Oregonian/OregonLive recently.
Chuck’s brother regularly assisted Chuck and Sue in those early days, sometimes working through the night bottling milk with them. But that turned out to be a bit of a problem.
Some of the dairy’s institutional customers didn’t particularly want to be associated with Ken Kesey, the famous novelist known for launching the druggy Pranksters and their “Acid Tests.”
Then the dairy was hit with a small fine for operating a still. Chuck had decided to make use of an overabundance of apples on the family farm by making apple wine.
“Chuck was just fooling around – he doesn’t even drink,” former longtime Springfield Dairy employee Nancy Van Brasch Hamren said. “But everybody was very straight back then.”
Soon the dairy lost its contract with the Springfield schools – its lifeblood.
“The creamery was broke,” says Hamren, for whom Nancy’s Yogurt is named. (She and Chuck invented the product after months of experimentation with acidophilis, a digestion-aiding culture.)
As the company fell deeper into the red, someone came up with the idea of the Grateful Dead putting on a benefit concert for the dairy. After all, Chuck and Sue knew Jerry Garcia and the other band members through Ken, had hosted them at the farm. They were all so harmonious.
Chuck drove down to San Francisco and pitched the idea.
“We should do it,” chief roadie Johnny Hagan – a Prankster from Pendleton known as Ramrod – declared. “They’re good people.”
That was that. The Dead were doing it.
Now Chuck and Sue realized they had to put on a show – and they had only three weeks to pull it together.
They secured a nearby fairgrounds for a day and recruited volunteers to build a primitive wooden stage. To save money, they printed the tickets on unused yogurt labels.
This all went relatively smoothly, though they forgot to bring in stage lights. But then came the day of the concert.
As soon as the music started – New Riders of the Purple Sage opened for the Dead – the volunteers taking tickets abandoned their posts and headed toward the sound. Not that they could have stopped the hordes of music lovers heading for the scene.
People just kept showing up, all day long. The free yogurt disappeared quickly.
And it turned out to be hot. Brutally hot – almost 100 degrees.
Dead bass player Phil Lesh, shuffling onstage with his fellow band members, thanked Chuck and Sue “for setting it up so we could play out here.”
He added:
“This is where we get off the best.”
They weren’t the only ones. “Few, if any clothes on” was the norm, the University of Oregon’s student newspaper wrote. “Good times.”
Not that everything went smoothly.
Chuck and Sue’s volunteers had mistakenly built the stage facing west, meaning the Dead spent the afternoon squinting into the sun, increasingly concerned that the extreme heat was pulling their instruments out of tune.
And there wasn’t nearly enough potable water to go around.
The crowd seemed happy anyway. They were blissed out by the music, the yogurt and beer while they lasted, the seemingly endless supply of dope.
One naked hippie scaled a massive beam near the stage to get a better view. Thousands of his fellow Deadheads certainly got a better view of him as he – and all his various parts – bopped to the music.
“The Grateful Dead said there were more naked people there than at any concert they’d ever done,” Chuck said with a laugh.
All of this, by the way, was being filmed.
Fledgling filmmakers John Norris, Sam Field and Phil DeGuere had asked the Dead if they could film the benefit concert. Garcia’s response: “Why? We just stand there.”
That sounded like a yes to the wannabe documentarians.
Their work that day, however, remained a mystery for years.
The footage ended up stored away on a shelf, becoming a much-speculated-about Dead totem.
As the speculation about it grew, many fans insisted the benefit concert represented the band at its very best. They raved about the rumored 30-minute version of “Dark Star,” as well as the welcoming, libertine atmosphere that showcased the hippie vibe at its zenith, all these young people seeking a new, truer way to live.
Amazingly, the actual result, when it finally was released in 2013, lived up to the decades-in-the-making myth.
“The stuff of legend,” Audiophile Review wrote of the movie, “Sunshine Daydream.”
The concert film provides “vivid testimony of why the Grateful Dead were so endearing and so enduring,” another publication wrote, adding that it “allows the viewer to stand almost shoulder-to-shoulder with a very young Bob Weir, age 25, strumming a cherry-red hollow-body guitar; a bushy-haired Phil Lesh, dressed more like a surfer than a bassist and belting unexpected harmony vocals; a fuzzily bearded Garcia, age 30, smiling, not a gray hair in sight; and a tough-looking Bill Kreutzman, sitting squatly on his drum stool, chewing gum and wearing a railroad conductor’s cap.”
Offered one fan in a recent comment on a YouTube clip from the documentary:
“This show is pretty damn flawless.”
Not flawless in the technical sense, of course. The Dead never were about musical perfection. They were about a mood, a feeling, a moment. The moment.
Babbs agrees with this point of view.
“The spirit of the place,” he enthused, half a century later. “All these long hairs, everybody half naked or naked. We need that spirit now.”
Almost forgotten in all this: the original point of the concert.
Because of the sheer number of fans who descended on the Veneta field, with no discernible way to buy tickets on site, the proceeds proved somewhat underwhelming.
And yet the Springfield Creamery survived, allowing it eventually to thrive.
The reason: The Grateful Dead.
“They gave us $12,000 at the end of it,” Sue Kesey said. “The compassion of Jerry Garcia.”
— Douglas Perry; dperry@oregonian.com
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