Watkins Glen 1973, Six Hundred Thousand People and a Field

On July twenty-eighth, nineteen seventy-three, an estimated six hundred thousand people descended on a six-hundred-acre farm outside Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. They came for a one-day concert. The headliners were the Grateful Dead, the Band, and the Allman Brothers Band. According to contemporary press estimates, it was the largest single-day gathering of people for a music event in American history to that point, larger than the peak attendance at Woodstock four years earlier. That "largest ever" title is widely cited but rests on crowd estimates that were never precisely counted, so take it as widely described rather than certified.

What is certain is that the logistics failed immediately. Traffic on the rural roads around the farm seized up for thirty miles in every direction. Most of the six hundred thousand people who showed up heard not the concert itself but the soundcheck rehearsals the night before, which ran for several hours and which the bands played in full because there was nothing else to do.

The concert happened. It was not recorded for release. There was no film, no documentary, no record contract to come out of it. The event produced no commercial artifact beyond the memories of the people who were there, and many of those people were too far from the stage to see the performers anyway.

It has been almost entirely forgotten. The Finger Lakes farm outside Watkins Glen is now a racetrack. A marker notes the event. The summer of nineteen seventy-three was a particular kind of American summer, and the Summer Jam was its particular kind of monument.