Psychedelic celebration of Watkins Glen at the Bahr Gallery in Oyster Bay

A new exhibition is coming to the Bahr Gallery in Oyster Bay, featuring psychedelic poster art from the iconic 1973 rock festival “Summer Jam at Watkins Glen.” The exhibition is set to open on July 28, the 50th anniversary of the iconic New York music festival.

The Summer Jam featured three of the ‘60s and ‘70s best rock and jam bands — the Grateful Dead, the Band and the Allman Brothers, all three of which were at the peak of their cultural influence and popularity. Six hundred thousand fans attended the festival, 200,000 more than had attended Woodstock in 1969, making it for years the Guinness Book of World Records record-holder for “largest audience at a pop festival.”

Ted Bahr, the owner of Bahr Gallery, discussed how he has been working on this exhibition for several years, after inadvertently realizing that July 28, 2023 would be the 50th anniversary of Watkins Glen. In anticipation of it, he has been collecting classic posters of the three bands as well as posters specific to Watkins Glen itself.

“I typically plan exhibitions out, you know, a year or three in advance anyway,” Bahr said. “So I’ve been collecting a number of Allman Brothers and a couple of The Band posters in advance of this, and I have some other new Grateful Dead posters that have never been exhibited at the Bahr Gallery yet.”

Bahr added that the event will also feature some historical background on the concert, to explain its importance in the cultural framework of the 60s and 70s. He added that the event was in many ways a response to Woodstock, as an opportunity for anyone who had missed the musical milestone to come together and enjoy a similar experience.

Bahr himself referred to this desire to make up for missing Woodstock as a type of “FOMO,” or Fear of Missing Out. Roughly 150,000 tickets were bought for $10 each in advance of the day-long festival, while the rest of the 450,000 hippies and music-lovers were simply welcomed into the impromptu free concert.

“To be able to see these bands was a big deal, so if people missed Woodstock, they sure as heck weren’t going to miss Watkins Glen,” Bahr explained. “I think that historians have done population analyses, and based on that, if you were to say that the audience was drawn from the Northeast, and were between 17 and 26 years old, that it would have been roughly one-third of the population of people that age.”

The Summer Jam was for a long time arguably the largest public gathering of people in the United States’ history. Bahr also emphasized how prior to the concert, the small town of Watkins Glen only had a population of 2,700; by the time of the concert nearly all of the businesses were shut down for the event, and all of the food and beer available in the town quickly ran out.

Bahr added that the exhibition would feature several never-before-seen posters at the gallery, particularly of the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. He mentioned that some of his favorite pieces include an Allman Brothers poster from the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival, rare due to its featuring the Allman Brothers and Jimi Hendrix, as well as a 1969 Winterland poster of the Band, their first live performance, and a poster promoting the Grateful Dead’s performance at Nassau Coliseum in 1973.

The exhibition will run up to Dec. 30, and features more than 35 posters in total. Bahr added that this event will feature more Allman Brothers posters than have been featured in the gallery’s history, celebrating an iconic group that unfortunately has not remained in the American cultural memory as much as the Grateful Dead.

The exhibition will begin on the July 28 to commemorate the impromptu concert held the night before the Summer Jam when 100,000 concert-goers had already arrived at the concert. To attend the reception or make an appointment reach out to the Bahr Gallery at ted@bahrgallery.com.