40 Year Itch: GET OUT COCKER

 "If I had my way Joe Cocker and his drugged up group would be airlifted straight back across the Pacific." 
    --John Sorell, ATV News

    On October 14, 1972 Adelaide police arrested Joe Cocker after claiming to find "indian hemp" in his motel room.
 In an editorial  ATV's John Sorell says "I'd make sure their passports are marked, never to return. We don't want this type here, they are as welcome as a load of Argentine fruit fly!"
     Cocker is released on bail and performs that night. Five days later, Cocker arrives in Melbourne where a newspaper headline screams "GET OUT COCKER". Cocker tells the crowd that night: "In five years marijuana will be legalised in Australia, and the same cat who is trying to throw us out now will be smoking it himself ."
 That night Cocker and his girlfriend get into a fight at their hotel. Polica areested Cocker again an dthis time Immigration Minister Jim Forbes gave Cocker four hours to leave the country. Concerts in Brisbane and Perth were cancelled.

 
    Marijuana is still not legal, but Cocker has toured Australia another 10 times.
  His 1972 album Something To Say is so awful I'm not willing to post anything from it.

40 Year Itch : The Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival

Is this the rock fest that killed the Woodstock nation?

 The Erie Canal Soda Pop fest on Indiana's Bull Island certainly drew a huge crowd -- an estimated 200,00 hippies who came from all over the country Labor Day Weekend of 1972 to see Santana, Foghat, Canned Heat , Black Sabbath, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac, Joe Cocker and Nazareth.

 That's not who showed up though.

 Black Sabbath was a no show. So were the Allman Brothers. Nobody saw Fleetwood Mac. When Joe Cocker saw the crowd he reportedly asked for more money and left when organizers turned him down.

 The traffic was a nightmare.

So were the drugs. Somebody was selling bleach. Two people died. And it rained.

 One very entertaining blogger who claims to have been there writes:

 If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would swear that the festival was a set-up, a sort of psyops to put an end to the ideal of the Woodstock nation. If it wasn't, then it was the biggest f**k up in the history of rock festival promotions.