Harrisburg Rock Festival (May 20, 1978) 

By Emily R. Pettet 

It’s May 20, 1978, the 8th annual Harrisburg Rock Festival. This time around there were a few prior events to get the students hyped up, while also providing some extra funds for the concert that included a raffle and kegger. Organizational meetings were scheduled and attended, and all that hard work paid off in the form of a satisfied audience. While the day itself was spectacular, looking back on it now you might find yourself feeling a pang of regret in the knowledge that this would end up being the last Spring Concert of its kind on Capitol Campus. While this was the end of a nearly decade old tradition, it would be immortalized in both the C.C. Reader and the blog posts of a particular Hanes Library’s website at Penn State Harrisburg.*

Perhaps the end of this concert was inevitable, but if that knowledge was well known, it was generally kept out of the student newspaper. It certainly was strange to see an edition of the C.C. Reader covering the Rock Festival without having an article about it on the first page, though perhaps they can be forgiven considering they included a few pictures of the Festival alongside the front page articles. Furthermore, a rather cheeky photograph from the concert could be found on the last page of the same issue, as well as here on the (whatever direction). So even though the written information on this year’s Rock Festival was limited, images remain to tell the story of the concert’s final year.

And it is quite a story that they tell! Photographs in the student yearbook, the Capitolite, show the massive crowd the Rock Festival has come to expect. As mentioned in previous years, the state of dress and undress varied between attendees; and there was plenty of drinking going on. A few banners could also be seen among the slews of visitors, possibly made to promote clubs or express some strong feelings, that read things like “Joint Effort” and what might be “Burn City.” Overall, these pictures represent the good times to be had at the free Harrisburg Rock Festival.

What is a concert without its performers though? Although there were not quite as many bands this year, they still came out to play for their soon-to-be fans (that part’s just speculation). Groups like Still on the Hill, Small Axe, and Slow Joe Krow performed that day with a few other new bands that day. There were no groups from previous years during this concert, but it seemed like there were no major complaints regarding the setlist. And we can’t forget about the food either. Once again, McDonald’s swooped in to provide sustenance to a hungry audience, though whether there was a change in the upcharge or not remains to be seen.

So that’s it for Good People Productions (GPP) and their concerts then, they disappeared just like that. Except they didn’t. While the Spring Concert was officially canceled during the leadership conference at Stone Valley that year, people remembered it and loved it. There were rumblings of an underground movement that hoped to bring it back in ‘79, and even though that didn’t happen. GPP continued to produce mini-concerts for the students of Capitol Campus for the next couple a years until the school’s social committee took over. The Harrisburg Rock Festival may have come to an official end, but smaller spring concerts continued on in fond memory of Pennsylvania’s own mini-Woodstock.

* A creative interpretation rendered based on facts of the event.