The Goose Lake International Music Festival did not make international headlines and wasn’t immortalized in a movie, unlike Woodstock and Monterey Pop.

Nor did it repeat the tragic circumstances of the Rolling Stones’ Altamont free concert.

But 50 years ago this week (Aug. 7-9), an estimated 200,000 fans trooped to a field in Michigan’s Leoni Township, near Jackson, for three days of mostly peaceful music and other counterculture activities. Hot new bands from the U.S. and the U.K. (Rod Stewart, Jethro Tull, Chicago, Ten Years After, the James Gang and more) mixed with then-local favorites such as Bob Seger, the Stooges, Detroit featuring Mitch Rider, Savage Grace, SRC, Third Power and others.

The duo Teegarden & Van Winkle served as emcees, and while it didn’t make much news outside the region, a half-century later Goose Lake reigns as a historical highpoint in Michigan’s rich rock ’n’ roll history.

“Goose Lake was like, ‘OK, you thought Woodstock was something?’ We’ll show you how we do it in Michigan!'” says Ryder, who recalls playing three times during the festival. “It wasn’t so much about peace, love and have babies but more like, ‘We know how to rock! We know how to party!’ It was that whole Detroit thing, which we’re very good at.”

Iggy Pop, who fronted the Stooges on Aug. 8 for the final performance by the band’s original lineup — captured on the new “Live at Goose Lake” coming out Aug. 7 — was particularly happy that his band and others were able to represent the Detroit and Ann Arbor scenes alongside the more celebrated and commercially successful visitors.

“I think it was a really great thing that so very many Detroit musicians, all of whom were very, very good, were able to take the same stage on the same day with these more polished outfits,” Pop notes now.

And for those on the other side of the stage, Goose Lake was its own kind of counterculture Nirvana.

“It was like a rerun of Woodstock — the same atmosphere,” remembers Jack Ashton, a then-recent Birmingham Groves High School graduate who had been working with Johnny Winter when he performed at Woodstock the year before. “People were just walking around with Ripple, Boone’s Farm, smoking a lot of pot. Everybody was high. Everybody loved everybody. Everybody was super happy. It was a real culture that was going on.”

Grande ambitions

Goose Lake was the brainchild of the late Russ Gibb, owner of Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. Gibb had promoted the Rock & Roll Revival festival at the Michigan State Fairgrounds the previous year, and Woodstock had given him the idea for a similarly grand statement on his own turf.

“When Gibb had seen the footage of Woodstock he counted heads and looked at the mess,” Grande manager and Goose Lake stage manager Tom Wright writes in his book, “Roadwork.” After the success of the Rock & Roll Revival, Wright says, Gibb “was ready to give it another, bigger go.”

Gibb went into partnership with Richard Songer, the 42-year-old owner of a road construction company frequently hired by the state of Michigan. Songer had nearly 400 acres of property near Goose Lake. He and Gibb, who initially expected a crowd of 60,000, envisioned the festival as the launch of a permanent outdoor music facility, constructing a stage out of bridge steel and concrete with a paved parking lot and a backstage area filled with amenities — including a basketball hoop, a horseshoe pit and a “groupie tent,” in addition to dressing trailers and a green room. “Very comfortable, almost posh,” Pop says.

Employing a Grande-style ethos for top-shelf production, Wright constructed revolving stage that let one act set up while its predecessor was playing, minimizing set changeover times. And Pop recalls that “the sound system was really good. It was loud as f— and clear, too.”

They controlled gate-crashing, which had plagued so many other festivals at the time, by using custom-made round chips from Las Vegas as hard-to-counterfeit tickets, and a 12-foot-high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire — “built so well it could have circled the Smithsonian,” Wright writes.

Those inside, however, were treated to free campsites, including firewood, an abundance of permanent and portable restrooms and showers, trails for motorcycles and dune buggies, medical staff, a beachfront with lifeguards and “the world’s longest slide” that attendees slid down on burlap sacks.

The White Panther Party and the Serve the People Coalition provided political credibility, while peace groups used the timing — the 25th anniversary of the atomic bomb drops in Japan — to forward their messages.

“It was very comfortable,” says Mary Beth Kocsis, who journeyed to Goose Lake from Bloomfield Hills with her brother and two sisters. Having attended concerts at the Grande Ballroom, Kocsis, who now lives in Plymouth, says that, “I thought it was so cool to be with a bunch of people that were our age, listening to music and hanging out, and there were no restrictions. Nobody was telling anyone what to do or anything, and people got along great.

“And it was the first time I ever drank beer for breakfast.”

Sex and drugs with rock ’n’ roll

Richard Blondy and a friend drove a camper up from Birmingham and parked near Goose Lake itself. A hobby photographer, he notes with a laugh that “the nice thing was all the people swimming in the lake were nude. I got a few pictures of that.” Blondy was also struck by the drug traffic at the site — “people were selling drugs out of vans, using bullhorns” — but he was really at Goose Lake for the music.

“They had an incredible array of people,” he says. “And there were so many of our local heroes. It was really cool to see them playing in a different place.”

Chris “Rockhead” Haeini, who snuck into the festival by volunteering for and then ditching a work crew, remembers some particularly tasty fruit. “Every watermelon was spiked with psychedelics,” he says. “Guys would be like, ‘Here, help yourself’ and you’d reach in and grab a watermelon slush ’cause it was nice and old. I did a lot of tripping that night.”

Haeini also recalls “just constant wandering” around the grounds, as well as motorcycle riders “driving around on Harleys, with three or four (women) on the handlebars and seats, standing up, topless, going through the crowds at night.”

Chicago keyboardist Robert Lamm considers Goose Lake as a “quite well-run event … incredible energy.” The fans were “quite responsive” to his band — riding high on two hit albums and its Top 10 hits “Make Me Smile” and “25 Or 6 To 4” — but he, too, felt the strong local flavor of the lineup.

“I thought the Goose Lake artist lineup was well thought out, in that there were many Michigan based artists featured,” Lamm says now. “A number of (other) pop fests were unorganized, and actually ill-advised ventures.”

Rod Stewart, meanwhile, had so much fun that he claimed sickness to call off a show in New York and stick around at Goose Lake, according to Wright. Pop remembers having “a jolly good time” with Stewart and guitarist Ron Wood, “in the green room, drinking Mateus Rose. … They were pickled pink!”

There was some national media in attendance too, according to Wright. But those reporters were so unhappy about not being granted backstage access that they chose not to write about the festival, denying it a brighter spotlight.

A documentary that was made about the festival, meanwhile, has never seen the light of day though has been bootlegged and can be found online. 

Everybody must go home

The Goose Lake festival was not welcomed with entirely open arms, however. Some local officials sought a temporary restraining order to prevent it from happening, but were denied in court. Wright remembers that the local and state governments “saw Goose Lake as a too-large-for-comfort conflagration of hippies” and accused Gibb and Songer “of creating an outdoor drug market.”

And while law enforcement did not hassle attendees in the festival grounds — though there rumors of an imminent National Guard invasion — there was a fear of what lay outside.

“Getting out of there was scary,” Haeini says. “We knew if (police) weren’t going to come in and bust us up inside they were gonna try to get us on the outside. We didn’t know what they were going to do to us as we left.”

Blondy also recalls “a rumor that when it was all over they’d be busting people for drugs outside the grounds. Some of my friends were collecting enormous amounts of drugs they had to throw out.”

About 160 attendees wound up being arrested by the Jackson County Sheriff’s office, according to reports, while Songer was indicted for promoting the sale of drugs — and acquitted nearly a year and a half later.

Despite the festival’s success, Goose Lake never became a permanent music site. An injunction barred mass events from taking place on the property and Songer eventually developed the property for other uses. Nevertheless, Goose Lake’s legacy has remained strong for 50 years, as Michigan’s indelible first contribution to the rock festival community.

“It was a good experience,” says Savage Grace frontman Al Jacquez. “There was none of that Altamont bull—- or anything like that. I remembering thinking, ‘This is cool. This is huge! This’ll be as big as Woodstock!’ It wasn’t, but that’s not because it wasn’t great. It was.”