Grateful Dead perform at Springfield Creamery benefit concert near Veneta, Oregon 50 years ago this hour #OnThisDay #OTD (Aug 27 1972)

1970s, Popular Music 1970s


Video: 'Grateful Dead - Sunshine Daydream Movie (Bonus Features) HD'

(Sunday, August 27, 1972, 4:00-7:00 p.m. PDT) — The Grateful Dead performed today at a benefit concert (forever memorialized in the film Sunshine Daydream) for the Springfield Creamery, which was owned by Chuck Kesey, the brother of novelist, essayist and countercultural figure Ken Kesey, and Chuck’s wife. Sue, at Temple Meadow, just outside Veneta, Oregon, about 13 miles west of Eugene.


Video: ‘Grateful Dead – 8/27/72 – Veneta, OR – Complete show, SBD’

The Dead played all afternoon and into the dark after an opening set by the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

The lineup of the Grateful Dead for this concert was Jerry Garcia on guitar and vocals, Bob Weir on guitar and vocals, Phil Lesh on bass and vocals, Keith Godchaux on keyboards, Donna Jean Godchaux on vocals, and Bill Kreutzmann on drums.

Concert organizers had predicted about 5,000 persons would attend. But estimates from sheriff’s deputies ranged from 20,000 to 30,000, based on the thousands of cars they waved into the three dusty parking lots near the site of the concert, which is also the scene twice a year of the counterculture’s Renaissance Faire (which became the annual Oregon Country Fair starting in 1978).

Many concert-goers were enjoying the music and sunshine half or wholly nude and drugs of various kinds were being offered for sale.

Springfield Creamery started in 1960 when newlyweds Chuck and Sue Kesey opened it in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. After a decade of delivering milk in glass bottles, the couple “kicked around the idea of a specialty product to help buoy the creamery financially.”

The natural foods movement had been gaining in popularity, and Springfield Creamery’s bookkeeper, Nancy Van Brasch Hamren, was an experienced home yogurt maker using her grandmother’s recipe.

Chuck Kesey added acidophilus, relatively unknown at the time, to their product, making their yogurt the nation’s first to contain live probiotics. People started calling and asking for “Nancy’s yogurt” and the name stuck.

Probiotics are thought to have great health benefits because they contain live microorganisms that contain “good” bacteria and can help with digestion and offer protection from harmful bacteria in your body.

By 1972, the business was “struggling financially” and the Keseys turned to a family member for help. Chuck’s brother was none other than Ken Kesey, author (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and leader of the Merry Pranksters, a group often “credited with launching the hippie counterculture movement,” and a friend of the Grateful Dead.

Today’s concert raised from $12,000 to $13,000, enough to stay in business.