Full house relives Bull Island Festival at Working Men’s

By Dennis Marshall

NEW HARMONY, Ind. — Nobody was in a hurry to leave the Working Men’s Institute on Thursday, Sept. 3, following Rick Johnson’s program on the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival — the Labor Day weekend 1972 rock show better known as Bull Island.

Johnson grew up in New Harmony and was 17 that September. After the program, people stayed to tell him what they remembered of that weekend. Some of those accounts were their own. Some had been passed down by a parent or an older brother.

“I’m not an expert but I was there,” Johnson said. “Conditions were awful. But people had the best times of their lives and would do it again.”

So many people showed up that the Working Men’s Institute is running the program again Wednesday, Sept. 9.

Bull Island was not the original site. Evansville promoters Bob Alexander and Tom Duncan followed a one-day concert at Bosse Field with plans for a three-day festival at a racetrack in Chandler. Counties in southwest Indiana won court orders blocking the show. With the weekend approaching, tickets sold and a full-page advertisement already published in Rolling Stone, the promoters moved the event to a peninsula along the Wabash River — land in Illinois, reached through Griffin, about two miles from New Harmony. Organizers planned for about 50,000 people. Estimates of the crowd that arrived range from 200,000 to 300,000. Joe Cocker and Black Sabbath were advertised. Many of the advertised acts did not perform.

The festival could not support the crowd it attracted. Water and toilets ran short. Reis Catering brought in food trucks, then raised prices as supplies disappeared. Rain turned the only dirt road into mud. Indiana authorities had no jurisdiction on the Illinois property, and White County sent only a small number of deputies. Indiana State Police officers entered in unmarked cars and dressed as festivalgoers. Eventually, the stage was burned.

Two people died — one in the Wabash River and another from an overdose. Promoter Tom Duncan later served eight days in the Posey County Jail. The promoters lost about $200,000 and spent years defending lawsuits, including one from a farmer who claimed he lost cattle to “marijuana inhalation.” The landowner eventually buried the festival’s trash with a bulldozer.

“[I] was a 17-year-old senior, and two other friends and I decided we’d use a farm truck to haul people in for a dollar each,” he said.

That decision put Johnson and his friends in the middle of a weekend that was already coming apart. What happened next took them farther into Bull Island than they had planned and gave Johnson a story that remained with him for the next 54 years.

Johnson said the performances most often remembered from the weekend were Black Oak Arkansas, Birtha, Foghat and Nazareth — with Birtha drawing particular attention from the crowd.

“Those were the big ones,” he said.

Some of the larger names connected to the promotional material, including the Doobie Brothers and Eagles, represented a different kind of rock. Johnson said the crowd was looking for harder rock and did not necessarily respond to the acts that later became more prominent.

Even the question of who played remains unsettled. Johnson said many people arrived with incomplete memories of the performances, and the confusion has only grown as stories from the weekend have been repeated over the years.

“A lot of people have fuzzy visions of these things,” he said.

Herschel Gossett of Madisonville, Kentucky, was there for two days in 1972.

He said he had little memorabilia of his own until a man mailed him an original ticket. He had a poster printed for a 50th-anniversary reunion in Mount Vernon, then mailed it to people who wanted to sign it. He said that poster traveled about 16,000 miles through 16 states. He later mailed an original August 1972 advertisement from Rolling Stone, which he said traveled about 65,000 miles through 27 states. He plans to frame both and donate them to the public library in Grayville, Ill.

“Nobody actually knows who all played, because everybody was so messed up,” Gossett said. “They just don’t remember.”

Gossett is friends with Dan Davis, whose book, The Bull Island Rock Festival, tells the story in Davis’ own voice. Gossett said members of the Facebook group received the book well, giving people who experienced the festival another account to compare with their own memories.

The book is now part of a broader effort to preserve the weekend’s local history. Space Monkey Records in Evansville maintains a Bull Island display featuring Davis and Gossett and hosted a reunion in June. A Vincennes PBS program credited three people with helping keep the festival in the public memory: the late Posey County historian Ray Kessler, Facebook group administrator Eric Benson and Gossett.

A 2021 YouTube documentary-style video describes Bull Island as one of the worst festivals of its time. A separate film project, first advertised in a 2023 trailer, included work with Davis and has not been released. Gossett said a crew spent time with Davis and tried to place the film with a television or streaming outlet.

Gossett said an entrance sign from Bull Island still stands on private property, near the road that once led into the festival grounds. He posted photographs of it in the Facebook group, though he acknowledged that getting close enough to take them was not exactly authorized.

“I had a good buzz one day,” Gossett said. “I happened to stumble up on it and I trespassed.”

He wants the sign moved somewhere the public can see it — and where people who remember Bull Island can stand beside it for a photograph.

“I think the sign ought to be out on the public side, where everybody could see it or get a picture with it,” he said.

For 54 years, Bull Island has lived in stories — stories that have been swapped, argued over, corrected and occasionally improved with age. The music gets harder to sort out. The memories get stranger. But the old sign is still there, holding its place after the crowds, the mud, the music and the mess have all disappeared.