While we’re in a Buffalo Springfield frame of mind: San Diego music stalwart, songwriter and radio personality Gary Ra’chac has generously shared backstage photos of Poco at the West Coast Gnurl Music Festival, October 12, 1969.
This event, which drew more than 10,000 people to Balboa Stadium, also featured Country Joe and the Fish, San Diego’s own Framework, Merryweather, and Chicago.
Gary describes the back story on the photos: “Gary Ra’chac (yeah, that’s me!?!) with the great Richie Furay (and what appears to be drummer George Grantham and Gram Parsons standing directly in back of us.
“Richie so loved the Western tie I was wearing that the next week in Los Angeles, I made it a gift to him. I was delighted when a few months later I was in London, reading a fanzine when I happened upon a photo of him wearing it! (Photo by Mick Garris).
Check out Gary’s radio work on “Vince Martell Rocks America”!
“Photos taken by Gary Ra’chac while I stood on stage with Richie Furay, Jim Messina and Timothy B. Schmit. Color shot from the stage; yes, this is the hallowed ground where the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors and Charles Lindbergh played … And oh, yeah, a local NFL pre-merger franchise team, too.
“You can just see the Coronado Bridge through the columns.”
Man, I LOVED the Gnurl Festival! What a great event for this 14 year old music fanatic. Chicago and Poco--how could it get any better than that combination? I’m somewhere in that color crowd photo but so far I can’t pick myself out…
I was 14 years old I went with some friends Alex Bareno Larry Lewis and Mr. Suggs and his wife an art teacher at Morse high school I remember the Hells Angels saw Mr Suggs take a picture of them grabbed his camera crushed it on the ground first time I ever took LSD not proud of that but it was memorable Alex Bareno, Larry Lewis and I climbed the back brick wall 50 ft. of Balboa Stadium because we didn’t have the money to get in when we got to the top the guys from country Joe and the fish were smoking pot and made us unload the trucks and set up the stage as our fee to not have them throw us out us three also hung the sign on the stadium that said Gnurl your girl and 69 now that’s history Dan Johnson 2014
Greetings from Australia. I’m a bit of a Richie Furay fan and a few years ago in L.A. purchased a 2nd hand copy of the 1970 self titled ‘POCO’ album signed by the great man himself. I finally pulled it out a couple of weeks ago to give it a run and to my surprise, inside the sleeve, is a signed copy of the ‘West Coast Gnurl Festival’ poster as pictured above. ‘To Michael. RICHIE FURAY’. Couldn’t believe it. Better than Christmas. Now time to do some research. Cheers.
My girlfriends and I cooked for the backstage area. We were paid with Comp Tickets. I had just made a beautiful little leather purse and had it stashed in hiding. Came back and it had been stolen. Learned my lesson. It was the first concert that I cooked for. Many more were to come.
I just moved from Detroit to San Diego from Detroit in 1969, and the Gnurl Festival was my first concert , let alone festival, in San Diego. What I recall the best was the surprise of the afternoon with Chicago in their first San Diego show. They were quite a bit more “progressive” in their sound in their early work, and featured a lot of guitar solos from the late Terry Kath. He was a blazing , two-gun soloist, slick, fast, ragged, very exciting. I recall Merryweather as well only as the band that had the guitarist/singer screaming in some grating approximation of Janis Joplin trying to sound like Erma Franklin (Aretha’s sister). Poco made an impression, a solid one, as this pioneering country rock band opened my ears to the bittersweetness of Southern music. Significantly, I recently got interested in playing harmonica ala Paul Butterfield (having seen him in 1968 in a no-age limit Detroit folk club named the Chessmate) and was given an incentive to learn to play the darn thing at the festival when I was the midst of a crowd of young people seated on the stadium lawn. Someone brought a set of congas to the show (I have no idea how they got them past security,which I imagine was lax considering the era), but a shirtless sailor next to them pulled a harmonica from his pocket from his pocket and riffed along with the rhythms the conga player created. It sounded to great to me and I wanted to make the same bluesy, wailing sound that sailor made. I still play to this day, and to say the least the instrument has given me much happiness, satisfaction and fulfillment in my 71 years of life.