MANITOBA'S MUD-FEST The
Niverville Pop Festival was a wild and
crazy time. By: John Einarson
The following article
originally appeared in the Winnipeg Free
Press publication, WINNIPEG BOOMER, June 2012. On
Sunday, May 24, 1970, Manitoba experienced its
very own Woodstock, complete with torrential
rain and mud. Lots of it.
Billed as the Niverville
Pop Festival, the multi-band event was staged in
a farmers’ field near the quiet rural community
of Niverville, some 25 kilometres south of
Winnipeg. What began as a sun-filled,
fun-filled day of music and hippie ambience (and
all that went with it) turned into a mud bath of
epic proportions, giving rise to a now legendary
experience.
For Manitoba’s budding
hippie community, the Niverville festival was
their coming-of-age moment.
Though the Woodstock
movie with its distinctive split-screen imagery
had yet to premiere in Winnipeg (it would open
at the Gaiety Theater, at Portage Avenue and
Colony Street, on June 18), the media excitement
of the three-day festival in upstate New York
the previous summer had fired the imaginations
of Winnipeg hippies. It was inevitable
that a pop festival would happen here.
All that was needed was
the inspiration. That came when teenager
Lynne Derksen fell off a hayride and suffered a
serious injury requiring a $30,000 oxygenator to
keep her heart and lungs going. Efforts to
raise funds for the machine had been relatively
slow until three of Winnipeg’s most respected
musicians, performing as the city’s one and only
supergroup – Brother – took the bull by the
horns.
“We figured we could make
some real money for her by putting on a pop
festival,” says Brother’s bass player, Bill
Wallace, “so Kurt Winter (guitarist), Vance
Masters (drummer), and I organized it with
another guy, Harold Wiebe. He was from
Niverville and got us the land donated for the
festival.”
Harold was well known to
the trio for selling 50-pound bags of sunflower
seeds in Winnipeg pubs.
“We called him ‘Harold the
Seed Man’.”
Once word of the
charitable event got around, dozens of local
bands offered their time, including Sugar &
Spice, Justin Tyme, Chopping block, Dianne
Heatherington & the Merry-Go-Round, and The
Fifth.
The eclectic roster also
boasted the Chicken Flat Mountain Boys, Billy
Graham’s Jazz Group and folksinger Jim Donahue.
My group, the Pig Iron
Blues Band, was also on the bill. DJs
Bobby (Boom Boom) Branigan, Charles P. Rodney
Chandler, and Darryl Provost were lined up to
host. Espousing the hippie ethic of the
times, everybody pitched in for free.
“We got everything for
nothing," Wallace remembers. “The only
expense was $34 to run the power line in.
Garnet Amplifiers supplied the PA and the stage
was a flatbed truck.”
Tickets were a bargain at
$1 and the show was set to commence at 3 pm on a
Sunday.
“There was no schedule for
the bands,” Wallace notes. “We kept
getting all these phone calls from more and more
bands who wanted to play.”
Organizers anticipated
5,000 attendees. By 2 pm, double that
number had taken over the festival site,
spilling onto adjacent fields and clogging the
roads in and out.
As at Woodstock, many
people simply abandoned their cars by the road
and walked the remainder of the way.
“Our whole band, The Weed,
minus one decided to go,” Alex Moskalewski
recalls. “We waited for hours on the
highway, then longer down some side roads,
finally parking in the middle of a field along
with a few thousand others. We barely got
near the stage before the skies opened up.”
Joey Gregorash and his
band, Walrus, kicked things off fittingly with
the notorious Fish cheer from Woodstock (“Give
me an F…”).
Brother made what would
be its last public appearance, as guitarist Kurt
Winter had been invited (along with another
local guitarist, Greg Leskiw) to join the Guess
Who the previous week, replacing Randy
Bachman. Brother’s set featured several
songs later to be recorded by the Guess Who,
including Hand Me Down World and Bus
Rider. By the time the fifth act,
blues-rockers Chopping Block, prepared to take
the stage at around 5:30 pm, the sun had been
replaced by clouds.
What began as a light
sprinkle quickly became a torrent of both rain
and hail. Like Woodstock, the Niverville
Pop Festival turned into a mud fest as more than
five mm of rain fell on the site.
“All I can remember,” says
Mongrels’ guitarist Duncan Wilson, “was hail a
bit bigger than golf balls and lots of mud.”
Surprisingly, the rain
failed to dampen the communal euphoria.
“I remember everyone
really having a lot of fun before the rain,”
local guitarist Ron Siwicki recalls, “and even
when everyone was sitting in their cars in the
rain, they were still partying and having
fun. It was pretty bizarre, like the
spirit of Woodstock transported to Manitoba.”
Vehicles became mired in
acres of thick, wet, sticky mud.
“It took four hours to get
fours miles through the mud to the highway,”
recalls Bruce Rathbone, a local music promoter
who went on to become a partner in Nite Out
Entertainment.
A Winnipeg transit bus
had to be towed out of the mud by a farmer’s
tractor.
“I had parked my
CKY-marked Montego station wagon in a field and
got out onto a road, only to slide sideways and
tip into a ditch,” Michael Gillespie
recalls. “The car was on its side.
About 20 people lifted the car out of the ditch
back onto the road. Unbelievable!”
Others simply abandoned
their vehicles.... which made for lots and lots
of mud.
“Roger Kolt went back two
days later to get his car and someone had stolen
the battery,” Wallace says.
My band, Pig Iron, was
slated to follow Chopping Block when the rain
hit. We never got to play but we did do
our share of pushing others’ vehicles. My
girlfriend gave me her pink raincoat and, with
my long hair soaked, I attempted to push her
little Datsun – only to have three strapping
young lads in the car behind jump out and
exclaim, “We’ll help you, miss.”
They were rather
embarrassed to discover their ‘miss’ was a
mister but nonetheless pushed the car until it
was able to get traction, and I left a pair of
shoes behind as I hopped into the now-moving
car. I arrived home late in the evening
and went straight into a hot bath.
The event made the front
page of both newspapers the following day.
According to Wallace, “we
never collected the money. The Derksen
supporters did and years later we tried to track
down where the $10,000 went. We found out
it had gone into this trust fund and nothing
ever happened with it.”
Even so, the cause was
noble and the effort both heroic and memorable. UPDATE:
February 15, 2014 Until a bitterly cold,
snowy afternoon in January 2014, no one involved
with the event had further information as to the
whereabouts of the monies raised that day.
And then Bev Masters came across a scanned
document in THE
MENNONITE MIRROR, published
March 1973. On page 30, there was one
small reference to the Lynne Derksen Oxygenator
Fund. Following that article, she traced
the final disposition of those funds.
Disposition of Funds Raised on May 24,
1970
Following a 40-year-old
lead in the Mennonite Mirror, we contacted the
Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg to inquire if
they had any information regarding the Lynne
Derksen Oxygenator Fund. With so many
years having passed, and knowing that record
keeping back in those days was nowhere near as
stringent as today, we were not optimistic that
we would even hear back from the facility.
But within 24 hours, a
Director replied, advising that she would try to
find out, through their Archives, if any
information was available. She engaged the
Archivist at Health Sciences Centre, and 2 days
later, we received the results of their
investigation. The fund has become a
lasting legacy to Lynne Derksen. With the
permission of Health Sciences Centre, we are
publishing the following information:
“The Fund was
established to raise monies to purchase a
Bramson Membrane Oxygenator for the Intensive
Care Unit of the Winnipeg General Hospital.
The earliest Terms of Reference (from 1990)
state that in February 1981, the Board of
Trustees/Board of Directors of the Canadian
Mennonite Bible College agreed that the fund
be used for the purpose of providing
specialized training for personnel in the
intensive care field at the Health Sciences
Centre.
The most current Terms of Reference (2007)
continued to state that the purpose of the
fund was to provide specialized training for a
professional working in the intensive care
field at HSC. The fund has been held in
trust, invested and its value sustained
throughout the years.
As of last year (2013), this fund was
amalgamated into an endowment fund with other
trust accounts to create a fund for the
education of nurses. The new fund will
continue to have the LYNNE
DERKSEN AWARD for a staff
person obtaining specialized training in the
field of intensive care.”
We
owe a huge debt of gratitude to Emma Prescott,
Archivist with the Health Sciences Centre, and
Rilla Edwards, Director, Organizational
Engagement, Health Sciences Centre, for taking
on this challenging inquiry, given we had
virtually no information from which they could
start the research. Thank you, for
bringing closure to what had been a question
mark all these years.
Had the oxygenator been
purchased way back then, that would have been
the end to the story of the Niverville Pop
Festival. Instead, the monies raised went
on to become an enduring tribute to a young girl
who lost her life so many years ago to a tragic
accident.
CBC
Interview with John Einarson May 24,
2020 marking
the 50th Anniversary of the Niverville
Pop Festival
