I wrote three weeks ago about Jimi Hendrix’s two concerts at San Bernardino’s Swing Auditorium, in 1968 and 1970. The June 20, 1970 concert included, at no extra charge, a riot.
That broke out when ticketholders who couldn’t get inside battered down a door and police responded by spraying tear gas.
I had most of the story, but speaking of things that make you cry, after publication two more eyewitnesses surfaced. Still, their versions of the concert experience were detailed enough to be worth sharing for posterity.
Bob B. Blue was a disc jockey for San Bernardino’s KFXM (590), the popular Top 40 station with the now-mysterious motto “The California ‘Tiger,’” featuring as mascot a cartoon tiger in spectacles. Perhaps someone can explain that.
Blue helped promote the concert by restocking ticket sellers and hiring off-duty cops as security. “We were the hippies, they were the pigs. There was a lot of friction,” Blue said in a recent YouTube interview about the concert conducted by Mike Kunert, who sent me the link.
That friction set off sparks that night.
“We had 7,500 people inside Swing, which was only supposed to hold 6,500 according to the Fire Department, but we had another 3,000 people outside trying to get in,” Blue said.
Outside, some kids grabbed plywood beams and rammed them against a wooden door to try to gain entry. One pierced the door and hit a cop in the back.
“Now San Bernardino, they had been waiting for this moment,” Blue said of police, “because they had never used their pepper spray, tactical force, whatever, before.” Jeeps were deployed with “cannons” that could shoot tear gas projectiles, he said.
“So the kids are rioting outside, the police are shooting these canisters into the air, and it’s 110 (degrees) or more… Inside it had to be 120. The tear gas was seeping in through cracks in the doors. You could see the tear gas floating in at eye level inside Swing Auditorium,” Blue said.
Let’s switch now to one S. Williams, who emailed me a personal account and signed off as “one of the last surviving hippies.”
As Williams recalled it, police and fire officials closed the doors because the occupancy level had been reached, even though fans outside had tickets. In a Sun-Telegram story about the melee, the police chief said the concert had been “oversold” by promoters, meaning more tickets were sold than there were seats.
Fans outside were understandably upset by their now-worthless tickets and stuck around in hopes they might still be let in rather than disperse, said Williams, who was inside and saving a friend’s seat.
“He returned from the restroom with cherry red face and tears streaming down his cheeks. He told me, without knowing what it was, he picked up a canister that was rolling toward him and it exploded in his face,” Williams said. “He also mentioned the large amount of people running in through the doors and large police presence. As you rightly mentioned, most of us inside had no idea that anything was going on.”
Williams said many fans never noticed the tear gas because it mingled with clouds of marijuana smoke. Heh-heh.
I’m picturing a TV meteorologist making swooping motions in front of an animated map: “We have a front of tear gas coming in from the west, but it’s going to run into a high-pressure mass of pot smoke lingering overhead. So if you’re going out tonight, go ahead and wear your sandals, but cover your face.”
“Throwing tear gas canisters into the back hallway was a futile attempt to punish those that entered and with total disregard for others that were not involved,” Williams said. “It would be impossible to capture more than a few of what you described as rioters… Besides that, the people they caught most likely would have valid tickets in their possession.”
After the 45-minute Hendrix set, people left the auditorium and were confronted by police who wanted to disperse the crowd.
Police had “canisters the size of helium tanks but filled with tear gas loaded on at least one truck that I saw,” Williams recounted, “spraying with the type of wand I remember seeing used to spray citrus groves.”
Let’s pause for a moment to let that visual sink in.
“There was a thick cloud that covered the entire parking lot, Arrowhead Avenue and the parking lot on the other side of the street. People with tears and poor vision caused by the assault rushed to their vehicles,” Williams said. “A traffic jam made our escape slow, and when people finally were able to exit onto Arrowhead they sped away in the toxic blinding fog as many concertgoers were trying to get to the parking lot on the other side.”
Some 80 officers and reserves were at the scene, according to the Sun-Telegram, and a dozen were slightly injured by rocks and water-filled bottles. “Crowds leaving the grounds damaged plate-glass windows of about eight E Street businesses and then caused control problems at a Mill Street drive-in restaurant,” the paper wrote.
Talk about a hot time in the old town tonight. And Hendrix performed fewer than two dozen more concerts before his death that Sept. 18.
Williams’ account does match what another reader had told me. Tommy Carrasco said a man in a gas mask was spraying tear gas from the back of a truck.
But I still can’t get over that image of using an agricultural-type wand as in the citrus groves. It’s a shame police didn’t turn to an even older form of technology to get fans to leave.
Officers could have set up orchard heaters and smudged them out.
Hey, pilgrim
Recent chatter about dropping John Wayne’s name from Orange County’s airport reminded me of an informal survey conducted by my doctor in Upland about four years ago. He asked patients if they knew who John Wayne was.
Of 78 patients, only six knew Wayne was an actor. Of the 72 who didn’t, five who were more attuned to hip-hop than westerns asked: “Is he Lil Wayne’s brother?”
David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, pardners. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
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