This extract from Professor Paul Moon’s new book on Auckland’s 20th century looks at the city’s Redwood 70 concert in which the Bee Gees’ Robin Gibb had a tomato thrown at him before being attacked by a fan.
A grin must have spread across the face of Phil Warren — the Auckland music promoter, agent and manager — when the idea first came to him. Just a few months earlier, almost half a million people had converged at Woodstock, near New York, for a three-day music festival, which also became a parade of American counterculture in this period. Surely, Warren thought, Auckland could host its own music festival, trading on Woodstock’s success (and infamy).
In late 1969 he began to assemble a line-up and selected a venue for this event: Redwood Park, in Swanson. It was 16 kilometres from the centre of the city, in a rural setting that had been a favourite spot for the Avondale Presbyterian Church Sunday-school picnics at the beginning of the century (and was named for the redwood trees planted in the vicinity in 1934). Warren’s timing was out, though. For all its mass appeal, Woodstock signified — as much as anything else — the end of an era. The generation of peace, love and drugs was growing up, and Woodstock represented more of a final flourish of the period of free-living hippy abandonment than a movement in the first flush of its existence.
Redwood 70, as it was billed, took place on the weekend of January 31/February 1, 1970. The line-up of musicians was comprised almost entirely of local acts, but the “special guest star direct from London” was Robin Gibb from the group the Bee Gees, who was to be backed by a 17-piece orchestra (which was as much of a hint as was needed that this event would be far from the sort of radical countercultural outpouring witnessed at Woodstock).