Every Picture Tells a Story: Fourth of July Concert at Washington Monument (1985)

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY:
JULY 4TH FREE CONCERT ON THE WASHINGTON MALL
WASHINGTON, DC (1985)

How Katrina and the Waves stole the show and the Beach Boys got sued

In the early 1980s, the annual Fourth of July Concert on the Mall at the Washington Monument began attracting rock and pop acts. That’s when attendance numbers, which before had been perhaps 50,000 or 60,000, mostly families in lawn chairs hoisting tiny American flags listening to patriotic music, swelled to 500,000 to 600,000 dope-smoking hard-core rock n’ rollers.

It would be hard to imagine a place *less* suited to host a massive rock concert. I mean, think about it. The entire population of Washington, DC at the time was 550,000, which meant the concert attracted the size of the whole city. This was madness.

Punishing heat and humidity. No access to food or water. And, restrooms? Oh, Jezus. What restrooms existed were hopelessly insufficient rows of blue Port O’ Cans, which of course, couldn’t possibly keep up the “demands” of disposing of human waste. If you didn’t smell the shit, then you certainly got stoned on the plumes of marijuana. Towering on each side of the giant crowd, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln must have been watching and then turning in their graves. The smells. The shit. The drugs. The horror.  Independence Day ’85.

It was a heavenly hell and if you were there, you loved every second of it.

The 1985 free concert was unusual, and also the last hurrah. It also attracted the largest turnout of any year, to this date. The crowd was so big and unmanageable, that it wrecked rock concerts on the Mall forever, triggering federal lawsuits and a huge backlash, especially from those who wanted a more “traditional” Fourth of July celebration in the Nation’s Capital.

Two years earlier, the Beach Boys were scheduled to perform at the 1983 concert. That’s when James Watt, who was then President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior created a media firestorm when he stated the Beach Boys attracted “the wrong element.” Seriously, the fucking Beach Boys. What Watt? Sec. Watt proposed Wayne Newton as a last-minute replacement since the bedazzled Las Vegas crooner had performed at the previous year’s celebration in a rainstorm. Well, the country pretty much went ballistic, and all of the sudden 100 million Americans suddenly knew the name of the U.S. Secretary of the Interior –not exactly the ideal way to achieve national fame. The name “James Watt” became a punch line. Even President Reagan, sensing the mood of the country, retreated quickly on the proposed Wayne Newton trade and said he liked the Beach Boys’ music. And so, the concert went on as originally planned.

By 1985, the publicity from the Watt fiasco had created a near-Woodstock mentality, though this was now the MTV generation on place of hippies. Every twenty-something on the East Coast wanted to show up in Washington to watch rock n’ roll (it also helped attendance that year that RFK Stadium hosted a Grateful Dead concert the following day). We knew the concert would be big. Just “how big” was the question.

On July 3rd at around 11 pm, some friends arranged to camp out the night before to secure a spot near the stage. We got to about 100 feet away — which if there were any chairs would be the best seats in the house. Blankets were spread out. Coolers were iced down. Even some makeshift ropes were set up as concertgoers elbowed their way into position for the next day’s concert. By early the next morning, the situation had already deteriorated way past the breaking point, as the blankets and towels were trampled, ice coolers were flipped upside down and then served as platforms to stand on, and the ropes dissolved into the mass throng of bodies.

From The Washington Post:

“A rollicking holiday crowd turned the Washington Monument grounds into a gigantic beach party yesterday afternoon as the nation’s capital celebrated the country’s 208th birthday with a 13-hour musical extravaganza…..Bathing suits, beach blankets and beer coolers were the order of the day in the festivities that honored America’s birth….U.S. Park Police estimated that the crowd yesterday reached its peak about 7:45 p.m. when approximately 565,000 persons filled the roughly triangular area stretching from the Capitol to the western bank of the Potomac River opposite the Lincoln Memorial and south to Gravelly Point near National Airport.”

The lineup of performers was smaller than in previous years, but still ridiculously strong for a free concert held in 1985. The show began with the Oak Ridge Boys, one of country music’s biggest acts in the 80s. Then, I think it was Christopher Cross (making a surprise appearance–he later performed with the Beach Boys in the close which was interesting).  Next, Jimmy Page — the former Led Zeppelin lead guitarist who had gone solo — did a set. Then, Katrina and the Waves took the stage (more on them in a moment). After that, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts performed (remember “I Love Rock n’ Roll”). There were some local acts, and then the show closed with the Beach Boys as headliners, which after so much heat, dehydration, and exhaustion ended up being something of a disappointment.

The Beach Boys are the most overrated, confusing, cringeworthy anomaly in rock history. Utterly talentless -aside from the creative force that was Brian Wilson (who deserves massive praise)- the rest of the group of lumps and loafs is a prom-night rent-a-band. The Wrecking Crew (famed studio musicians) actually did *all* of the classic Beach Boys recordings you remember and revere. The Beach Boy barnacles might even be less talented than The Monkeys, which is really saying something — given their songwriting abilities amount to a deafening bad vibration of dead silence. And their live “concert” consists of Mike Love, looking like the assistant sales manager of an insurance company at the office Christmas party, utterly the most boring schlub in the history of rock n’ roll wearing a flowery shirt, holding onto a microphone, parading around like he wrote all the great hits, and performing what amounts to a giant faux Karaoke act. Sure, the songs entirely written by Brian Wilson, who turned into a human cuckoo-whack are wonderful and fun all these years later. But the rest of the leech-clingers trying to squeeze out that wonderful sound 20 years later amounts to Long John Silvers calling a fish the “catch of the day.

The biggest surprise from that concert, which I don’t remember much in detail, was Katrina and the Waves. They were the quintessential British 80s pop band, an MTV darling fronted by lead singer Katrina Leskanich. When Katrina bounded out onto the huge stage in a multi-colored, flowing, gorgeous outfit and danced all over the stage for the entire set, the crowd exploded. Katrina and the Waves may be considered a “one-hit wonder.” What was shocking was how great they were from start to finish (and they appeared after Jimmy Page). Even the non-hits were fun. When they closed with “Walking on Sunshine” half a million people went into an absolute frenzy. I don’t know what exactly it was at that perfect instant, but watching and hearing “Walking on Sunshine” in that moment was one of the best live concert moments of my life. It just worked. You can’t explain it. You have to be there. Every experienced concertgoer understands what I’m talking about.

The concert and the night ended 24 hours after we got there with a fireworks show above our weary heads over the Washington monuments. By then, we were totally spent. Gassed. The following day, I think I slept 15 hours.

Incredibly, the Beach Boys were sued by the federal government over the mass chaos and the expensive cleanup after their free concert.  I know–this all sounds ludicrous [READ MORE HERE].  Afterward, the trash was so massive at the national park and the cleanup was such a mess, that the band was taken to court to try and collect the recuperation costs.  That’s when the Beach Boys basically said “fuck it,” we’re not performing here again, which perhaps was the objective.  That effectively ended the rock concerts on the Washington Mall.

Just nine days later on July 13, 1985, another concert spectacle occured that effectively shoved the Washington event into oblivion. No one knew then that very soon to follow, just two hours north in Philadelphia, and across the Atlantic in London at Wembley Stadium, Live Aid ’85 was about to shatter everything before it, destined to become the biggest pop music concert in history. Indeed, one of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t make that trip to Live Aid, still recovering from Fourth of July on the Mall. There are things you do in your early 20s that you’d never do many years later. And part of me regrets that fact. But at least, we have memories.

This photograph was taken at the Mall in Washington near the stage during that memorable Fourth of July concert with my friends. Oh, and there’s probably some alcohol in those cups.