The musical acts went from The Four Preps to the Statler Brothers, The Platters, Johnny Cash, Charlie Byrd, The Temptations, Petula Clark and The Association. Over the next few years, it grew and migrated. The kinks presumably could be smoothed, and Jubilee was an instant tradition. The “salute to spring,” as that Jubilee was billed, was a blast, though. Some attendees in 1966 brought maybe just a little Kentucky Tavern whiskey. In another harbinger of things to come, the concerts drew noise complaints, and students left lots of litter behind. Also, only about 25 percent of Carolina students were women then, and a request to invite busloads from Woman’s College in Greensboro came too late to make arrangements. Curfew still applied to women’s dormitories, a bummer for those combo parties. However, hiccups and controversy regarding who was able to attend - an issue later pivotal to Jubilee’s demise - appeared in that first year. Put on by the Student Union, Jubilee essentially launched as a modest folk festival in 1963 on a makeshift stage on McCorkle Place: think college sweaters and glee club. Jubilee events were scattered across campus, no ticket was needed, and people could float from one party to another. From the start, Jubilee was intended to be more inclusive, relatively speaking for the South at that time. Jubilee was in one sense an answer to the Germans, big cotillion-styled dances sponsored by an interfraternity system that was not open to all students in the first half of the 20th century. What came later - a jazz big band on a Saturday afternoon smaller bands, known as combos, at late-night parties and films featuring Liz Taylor and Sophia Loren on indoor big screens - was, by comparison, cutting loose. The Four Preps headlined the first Jubilee before a crowd of about 4,000, capping a school year when some of the Union’s big attractions were a hypnotist named Hypnorama and Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain. But before gravity grabbed hold, it was one hell of a ride.ġ963: The Four Preps (Capitol Records/MCA) Like that hot-air balloon that kicked off the 1969 festival, Jubilee fell back to earth. It was all the excesses that accumulated over those nine years alongside so many colliding happenings in America - rock music and the festivals, drugs, peace, love, protest, the Vietnam War and the establishment’s responses to them all - that ultimately doomed Jubilee. It wasn’t even the trampled security guard, or Pacific Gas & Electric getting arrested on stage, or the Allman Brothers’ cocaine. It wasn’t even the hot-air balloon ride that a Wizard of Oz look-a-like crash-landed in University Lake, or the woman injured on the Whirly-bird ride, or the straw bales and foam rubber lit on fire. (See below for more on Black’s Jubilee memories.) It wasn’t that Chapel Hill sold out of brownie mix, forcing future comedian Lewis Black ’70 to make pot pudding instead of pot brownies. It wasn’t just a circus animal or Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen that signaled Jubilee’s end. And, following the last, “The rock festival phenomenon is dying at last,” Rod Waldorf ’71 wrote in The Daily Tar Heel. Jubilee’s epitaph was being chiseled from that first spring. Fortunately, there are archives to aid memory. Mind-bendingly fun and sometimes chaotic details.īut also a couple of not-so-fun ones. Once an elephant appeared and Joe Cocker melted Kenan Stadium in 1970, Jubilee’s days likely were numbered. Half a century later though, at least one thing is clear: Jubilee ended on a note so high it required no encore, as it seemed destined to do. It’s little wonder why some had to place lost-and-found ads afterward for their puppies (part Collie), kittens (calico-Siamese mix) and cameras (Kodak, 35 mm). But also, well, some of you probably had, let’s say, too much fun on those fields to conjure too many of the particulars. When it comes to the three-day outdoor music festival called Jubilee that was held on Carolina’s campus each spring from 1963 to 1971, plenty of reasons for both exist after 50 years.įor one, that historic period in the United States came into better focus as the decades passed. Whenever hindsight travels through enough time, objects may appear both hazier and clearer. One of Carolina’s - from Chuck Berry to Johnny Cash to Joe Cocker - was an unforgettable Jubilee. JAmerica crossed many cultural bridges between 19. Lend Me Your Ears and I’ll Sing You a Song
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