The 90s Part 9: The Festivals

I don’t know if you realize this, but the music festival isn’t a modern creation…people have been gathering in fields to hear music for centuries…and in some cases, those original festivals are still happening…

Ever hear of Fiera Della Frecagnola?...it started in the village of Cannalonga, up in the mountains in the south of Italy…as far as we’ve been able to tell, the first gig was in 1450…and it’s still happening today…

There are other long-timey festivals in Germany, England, India, Latvia…so this isn’t a new thing…

The first modern music festival—the thing that would be recognizable to us today—would be Monterey Pop, which was held in San Francisco in the summer of 1967…that led to Woodstock, Glastonbury, Roskilde and a ton of others…

But the 1990s was the decade where the festival really came into its own with a series of regular events that reappeared year after year in the same spot—or ones that moved from place to place…

Europeans were pretty used to standing in fields in the mud and the rain and the heat…but we north Americans were late to the party…there was no tradition of us doing anything like that…we’d go to the occasional outdoor gig, but it wasn’t the lifestyle thing it had become in other parts of the world…

But by the time the decade was over, we had embraced the summer festival…now we have our own events and traditions…and it couldn’t have happened without the 90s alt-rock nation…