‘A footnote in rock and roll history’: 50 years ago, concertgoers rioted in North Idaho at Nor’Wester ‘76

Scott James thinks it was Thursday, or perhaps Friday, when he and three buddies arrived in Stateline, Idaho, 50 years ago this weekend for a planned three-day music festival dubbed “Nor’Wester ’76.”

They set up camp at what was then called Northwest Speedway, with a cooler full of beer and food next to the Ford Galaxie the teenagers drove from Tacoma.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” James, now a retired Army and Coast Guard veteran living in Boise, said this week. “We were kids, dude.”

The thousands of concertgoers who arrived in Stateline half a century ago expected to see rock and roll royalty with planned sets from Blue Öyster Cult, Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Heart. Blue Öyster Cult, headed for success that summer with their most successful single “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” did in fact perform, but the weekend ended with the speedway smoldering and still-hazy explanations about why the festival was called off on Saturday just before rioters caused an estimated quarter million dollars in damage.

James believes he heard about the rock festival on the radio. He’d just turned 18, and the event was to be his first outdoor concert as he and his friends pondered the next chapter of their lives.

“It would have been my first time to see any of them,” James said of the headliners. While Bachman-Turner Overdrive had already scored hits including “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet” and “Taking Care of Business,” Heart had only just released their debut album, “Dreamboat Annie,” that Valentine’s Day, containing the classic singles “Magic Man” and “Crazy on You.”

A flier for the event promised “A Rock and Rollin’ Storm” with “No-Ripoff Prices.” Beer was to be sold for 50 cents a can (a little less than $3 in today’s money), and a three-day pass cost $30. Firewood would be provided for free, according to the ad, an amenity that later proved disastrous.

Concert promoters cleared sanitation plans with Kootenai County, and two security crews from out of the area – the Dinosaurs from Los Angeles and the Psychedelic Rangers from Tacoma – were brought in to handle the crowd inside the speedway gates.

The festival was to kick off at 3 p.m. Friday, June 5, but the start was delayed until 7:30 p.m. Co-promoter Jack Morrow told the Spokane Daily Chronicle the postponement was due to a dispute about money between organizers, sound technicians and Friday’s headliner, Blue Öyster Cult. The band and crew wanted to be paid in full before they took the stage.

“A rather restless crowd drank themselves to near exhaustion yesterday waiting for the first rock act to take the stage,” the Chronicle reported.

James, who grew up in Western Washington, remembers parts of the Blue Öyster Cult set. But mostly, he remembers the weather.

“It was freezing cold,” James said. “We were just shivering and waiting.”

Organizers, including Morrow and partner John Brower, said they needed to sell 6,000 tickets to break even on the show. The Chronicle would later report that sales in Spokane were slow, and ticket brokers in Canada and Western Washington were reluctant to release funds to organizers on the ground over concerns that they would have to issue refunds if acts didn’t appear. That left little cash on hand to pay performers and the roadies, anonymous sources told the newspaper after the riot.

Brower had already made a name for himself organizing the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival Concert eight years earlier. The event, held less than a month after Woodstock, featured the first live performance by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band.

“We expect the crowd to grow as the weather improves,” Brower told The Spokesman-Review.

Saturday dawned, however, and no bands took the stage to play. The concession stands were locked, James said, and he and his buddies piled into the Galaxie to make a beer run before the second day of the festival began.

Law enforcement, stationed outside the venue, let the car back in. But it was clear something was wrong.

“Everything kind of happened simultaneously,” James said. “It all happened in quick succession.”

Smoke billowed over the race track as five buildings and a pile of tires were set on fire by angry concertgoers who realized the festival had been canceled. James said the speedway became the stage for an impromptu race by attendees. He jumped on the back of a motorcycle driven by his buddy as he did laps around the track, watching as a crane was toppled and set on fire. Rioters turned over a dairy truck and it toppled down the bleachers, where it landed on its side. Members of the angry crowd then lit the truck on fire, the inferno aided by the free firewood that had been provided.

Matt Alexander, general manager of Stateline Speedway – the current name of the speedway, said the shell of that truck was used to build the facility’s walk-in cooler.

“It’s been re-done. You wouldn’t even know,” he said. Part of trusses supporting the destroyed stage still are on site in a rubble pile on the site, he said.

James, describing what he saw as like a scene out of the apocalyptic film “Mad Max” (released three years later), said he wasn’t afraid as the carnage unfolded.

“I will say that at 18, you feel invincible,” he said. “The thought did occur to me that we might get injured.”

No major injuries were reported, but the track’s owner, William J. Eberle, told the newspapers that rioters had caused $250,000 in damage. Looters walked out of Sunday with much of the remaining plywood. Eberle told The Spokesman-Review he was “through, finished with rock concerts.”

Kootenai County Sheriff Thor Fladwed said he’d ordered deputies to remain outside because of a lack of manpower and concerns that law enforcement would incite further violence. He said he feared “a Kent State type confrontation might occur,” referring to the deadly shooting of unarmed students at the Ohio university six years prior. Fladwed reported a handful of arrests on charges of disobeying law enforcement.

James said he wasn’t sure how long the rioting lasted, but that it couldn’t have been longer than an hour or two. He and his friends stayed the night and left Sunday morning, without any contact with police, he said.

“I think we just felt like we’d been ripped off,” he said. “I don’t think we recognized the significance of it.”

“It’s a footnote in rock and roll history,” he added.

Officials trying to piece together the weekend’s events tried to get in touch with Brower, Morrow and other organizers. The speedway sued them both for damages within a few weeks.

Brower, who would go on to promote other successful festivals that included a 1980 event in Toronto featuring several new wave and punk luminaries including the B-52’s and the Talking Heads, did not respond to messages left at a listed phone number this week. He told Spokane Public Radio’s Steve Jackson in 2011 that he’d been taken hostage by “investors” after the show and had sought help from the Spokane Police Department.

The ensuing legal battles convinced Spokane County commissioners later that June to nix plans for summer concerts at what is now Avista Stadium, home of the Spokane Indians. Commissioner Harry Larned told the team’s president “they could burn that thing down just as easily as they could that place in Idaho.”

Yet Alexander hopes the speedway can capture the positive energy of Nor’wester ‘76 with a three-date concert series at the venue this summer. Dubbed the “Nor’wester Concert Series,” the track will host headliners the Ying Yang Twins on July 23, Third Eye Blind on July 24 and Travis Tritt on July 25.

“We’re promoting an event that should have been the start of one of the greatest outdoor concert series in the Northwest,” Alexander said. Tickets for each show are available individually at the speedway’s website, raceidaho.com.

Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Heart did, in fact, play for the region’s fans that year. The two acts played a show at the Spokane Coliseum in September, though in the opinion of reviewer Diane Marshall, maybe they should have stayed at home.

“Although the concert was billed as top-line entertainment, the performance of all the bands was disappointing,” Marshall wrote the next day, criticizing the bands’ penchant for “jamming” and the leisure suits worn by Bachman-Turner Overdrive, who looked “like they were at the wrong party.”

Blue Öyster Cult returned in November, just as “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” reached its Hot 100 Billboard zenith, at No. 12. They played with Bob Seger, also at the Coliseum.

James didn’t go to any of those shows. He returned home to Tacoma and joined the Army after Nor’Wester ‘76, eventually performing in swing bands as a vocalist and saxophone player. To this day, he’s only seen that one set from Blue Öyster Cult of all the bands on the original lineup.

“I think we all had to begin adulting,” he said.