NOTE: This column was originally published on July 25, 2010.
WADENA, IOWA — This single-strip downtown, nestled among the rolling hills of Fayette County, 40 years ago boasted a grocery store, gas station, three taverns and two restaurants.
Charlie's Gas Gage Filling Station still pumps fuel here. But the only place left to grab a meal is Barney's. Patrons dine on signature "Barney Burgers" (double cheeseburgers) at the bar and grill, within view of a wall display of black-and-white photos of naked hippies.
Those photos, hanging alongside posters and other memorabilia, offer a rare sign to visitors that a humble farm southwest of this sleepy town once was the site of Iowa's milestone rock 'n' roll festival.
The Wadena rock festival, July 31-Aug. 2, 1970, overwhelmed this town of about 240 residents with an estimated 50,000 young concertgoers.
Former Register columnist Donald Kaul mused at the time that it was "like putting the Iowa State Fair in a bowling alley."
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Denise Blue, a bartender and fry cook at Barney's, said last week that she still fields a Wadena question "at least once a day."
It was Iowa's Woodstock — essentially a Midwest sequel to the iconic "three days of peace and music" the previous summer in New York, which drew a throng of nearly 500,000.
The Rolling Stones' festival at Altamont Speed-way in California followed in December 1969 and was marred by a homicide, among other deaths.
So northeast Iowa residents and state officials were jittery when faced with Woodstock Nation in their backyard.
Neighbor Daryle Fox, 86, recalled that as many as 13 planes circled overhead that weekend — sightseers gawking at the festival crowd, especially the nude bathers in the Volga River.
"I was milking at that time, and you could hear the noise above the milking machine in the barn," Fox said.
Like Woodstock, the Wadena fest had to be relocated from its original site. Authorities in Galena, Ill., prevented the promoter, Sound Storm Enterprises Inc. of Chicago, from staging the festival there. Hence, an alternative name for the fest: "Galena in Wadena."
Little Richard, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Everly Brothers, the Guess Who, Leon Russell, Mason Proffit and other music acts reverberated through the valley. But Wadena's performances — not immortalized on recordings or in films like Woodstock and Altamont — became incidental to the lore.
It was largely about the crowds and the unsuccessful court battle waged to stop it.
Even the Register's music review of the fest characterized the bands as just another symptom of the counterculture: "Like the freaky clothes, the long hair, and the drugs, the music separates and protects them from all the 'straight world.' "
I was born two years after Wadena. I first heard about the festival through stories in class from John Steffens, my science and biology teacher at Carson-Macedonia High School. Today he's retired and lives in rural Henderson.
"It was crazy — I mean flat crazy," he said last week. "Anything that you could think of was there."
Steffens was a student at Upper Iowa College on summer break in 1970 when he piled in a car with three buddies to go glimpse the spectacle.
Iowa's attorney general was still waging a legal challenge to the fest even as guitars began to squall the evening of July 31.
Ten state legislators formed a committee in the wake of Wadena to study rock festivals and devise laws to control them.
Robert Ray was less than two years into his first term as Iowa's governor when he made a beeline for northeast Iowa in a last-ditch effort to halt the fest on its first day.
"I was too late to stop anything," Ray said last week.
But he felt compelled to try: "What if something happens up there, and I have not made an effort? I would really regret it."
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Iowa Gov. Bob Ray visited the Wadena rock festival in the summer of 1970 to encourage the young audience to have a good time -- but not such a good time that they didn't remember what happened. (Photo: Register File Photo)
Ray also laments that he was misquoted for implicitly approving the audience's drug use.
"Gov. Robert Ray, who toured the site at about 1 p.m., encouraged the youngsters to 'have a good time,' " the Register reported in a front-page article on Aug. 1, 1970.
"We want you to remember you had a good time when you leave here," Ray said he told the audience — with an emphasis on "remember."
In other words, he was gently suggesting restraint.
Ray can help set the record straight when he participates in a Wadena panel discussion next Sunday at the State Historical Building.
Denny Naughton of Marion will be alongside the former governor, even though the Marion lawyer didn't attend the fest. He was too busy in the summer of 1970 clerking in a law firm in Omaha and getting married.
It's not easy to sum up Naughton's career. He's not only a lawyer but also a ventriloquist, as well as an inductee of the Iowa Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame for his 1960s band, the Uniques.
He left behind the rock lifestyle in the mid-1960s, "when the heavy metal and drugs entered."
Yet Naughton has spent the last few years writing a book on Wadena, which he plans to publish this fall. He can recite the details of the fest as if he had been there.
While working as a young lawyer in Dubuque, he began hearing tales of the fest, from some of the key players involved. He has remained fascinated by the drama.
"Every time you talk to somebody, you hear more funny stories," he said. "It had a 'Dukes of Hazzard' feel to it."
Stories are all that's left at the original farm site. It was overgrown with "chin-high weeds" just a year after the festival, according to a Register account. A "Schlitz beer can filled with wilted prairie flowers" was one of the only visible artifacts.
A rutted lane at 4824 Kornhill Road still leads back to the 218-acre site, where two mobile homes are situated. The original farmhouse, used as a headquarters by concert promoters, is a crumbling wreck, camouflaged behind giant weeds.
It's a relic of a different world, long before the 80/35 Music Fest took root in downtown Des Moines and Bonnaroo began drawing nearly 100,000 concertgoers annually to rural Tennessee.
The worst fears of elected officials in 1970 didn't come to pass: big-city crime syndicates producing orgiastic music festivals throughout the Heartland to push their illicit drugs.
But big fests did become big business, even if Wadena has remained more or less silent since the summer of 1970.
Naughton blames Beatlemania for changing rock 'n' roll "from a dance venue to a concert experience."
So I guess Woodstock, Wadena and their ilk taught the nation just how wild that experience can get when you plant it on a farm.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/s...s-70-wadena-rock-festival-persevere/93808782/
