‘We ran out of town’: Nor’Wester ‘76 promoter remembers fleeing after riots started 50 years ago

Johnny Brower, the accomplished concert promoter from Toronto who helped organize the ill-fated Nor’Wester ’76 outdoor festival, called the bands Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Heart personally to tell them to avoid Stateline 50 years ago.

“Once the fires started, I made calls to acts and told them don’t show, don’t come here, the place is burning to the ground,” Brower, reached by phone on Monday, said.

Brower, who by then had staged several successful festivals in Canada, including multiple collaborations with John Lennon, the Doors, and Sly and the Family Stone, was in a camper offstage at Northwest Speedway in June 1976. He saw concertgoers, who believed the lack of sound equipment on stage meant their $30 entry tickets were not being honored, riot and set fire to cars, buildings and more in a melee that occurred 50 years ago this month and created what one attendee called “a footnote in rock and roll history.”

It could have been much more than that. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Heart and Blue Öyster Cult, who played that Friday night after insisting on getting paid before their set, were at the height of their popularity as thousands descended on Stateline for the festival.

Brower, who could not be reached for comment in time for a story published last week, said Monday he was approached by the son of the founder of Penthouse magazine, Bob Guccione, to help stage Nor’Wester ’76 after one of Guccione’s friends moved to the area and wanted to put on a rock concert. That friend, whom Brower identified as Jack Butler, met Brower and Guccione’s son to show them the speedway, and the pair then returned to Los Angeles to book acts.

“Everything seemed to be going OK,” Brower said. “Then, the day of the show, Butler was gone.”

Brower said Butler promised free firewood for campers at the speedway, but never provided any. On the first night of the concert, June 4, Blue Öyster Cult played a set that began several hours late. Brower said the group pulled a “Chuck Berry” by asking to be paid before they performed, referring to the rock legend’s notorious demand for cash up front.

The request wasn’t typical of acts he booked for shows, Brower said.

“That doesn’t happen like that. Agents or the managers settle up with you when the band’s finished playing,” he said.

As temperatures dipped that night (the overnight low in nearby Coeur d’Alene was 36 degrees, according to climate records), festivalgoers began throwing things at the stage, Brower said. The sound equipment crews removed the public address system and other implements from the stage to protect them, which prevented organizers from shooting down rumors in the crowd the next day that the show had been canceled. Brower said he’d intended for Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Heart to play, as scheduled, on Saturday and Sunday.

“It would have been a great show,” Brower said.

Instead, he watched as chaos ensued and made the phone calls telling the artists not to come.

“It got really out of control,” he said. “People were blowing up propane tanks. They brought a Volkswagen on stage and set it on fire.

“I saw it all. We were there.”

Brower repeated a story he told Spokane Public Radio 15 years ago, that he fled the speedway with the unsold tickets that were demanded by people he identified as “investors.” He said those people caught up to him and held him and others at gunpoint, and only when he was able to surreptitiously phone the police and report the crime were he and other organizers able to escape.

He praised the police, who told him they’d hold the alleged kidnappers for 24 hours and advised him to get as far away from Spokane as possible.

“We weren’t run out of town,” he said. “We ran out of town. There’s a big difference.”

Newspaper accounts indicate the owners of the speedway sued Brower and others for the damage that occurred there, estimated at the time to be about $250,000. Brower said he was never served with any papers, and he continued his career without hearing from the folks in the Pacific Northwest again. To this day, he hasn’t returned to the site of the canceled festival.

But Brower gave his blessing to the current speedway owners, who are reviving the Nor’Wester name with a three-day concert series scheduled for later this summer.

“I think it’s a good idea,” he said. “I think if they do a good job, it will clean up some of the legacy of the bad job that was done.”