Rhino Historical Tours: San Francisco Pop Festival

48 years ago today, the San Francisco Pop Festival kicked off at the Alameda County Fairgrounds, located not in San Francisco, oddly enough, but in Pleasanton, California.

Why? Perhaps “Pleasanton Pop Festival” just didn’t have the same ring to the organizers. Or maybe they just knew that Pleasanton was a suburb of San Francisco and just said, “Eh, close enough.” Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, so let’s get back on track and start focusing on the artists who performed over the course of the two day festival.

If you were on the fairgrounds on Saturday, October 26 or Sunday, October 27 and played your cards right, you might well have seen performances by The Animals, Canned Heat, the Chambers Brothers, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Deep Purple, Jose Feliciano, Fraternity of Man, The Grass Roots, Iron Butterfly, The Loading Zone, Buddy Miles, Procol Harum, Rejoice, and Johnny Rivers.

While it hasn’t gone down in history as an iconic concert along the lines of the Monterey Pop Festival or Woodstock, you can tell from that list of names that there were plenty of future icons on the bill, and you can bet that those were in attendance found it be at least as awesome as any of the other concert events that went down during the late ‘60s.