Coventry Street Fair

I worked on music for the Coventry Street Fair twice, 1981 and 1982. At some point during the summer of 1981, some loser appeared in my yard, at 7 AM on a Sunday morning, blasting some awful noise from a boom box, apparently thinking this was the way to get booked for the fair. I tossed the tape in the trash once I got rid of him. These were big events, drawing 50-60,000 people over two days.

 I ran the middle stage in 1981, in the Coventry Beverage parking lot. There is a cliff that overlooks the back of this lot, once it got dark that Saturday, kids were throwing beer bottles at the back of the stage. There was a bit of distance from there, the bottles were all smashing about twenty feet from the back of the stage, but it was a bit annoying. There was no way to contact anyone in those days. There was a runner that would come by every fifteen-twenty minutes to check up on what was going on. I was eventually able to pass word along to the Cleveland Heights Police, and they got rid of the kids, hope they had to sweep up all the broken glass. There were some good groups on the center stage that weekend, John Bassett and Kaya on Saturday, I-Tal and Mr. Stress on Sunday.

The back of the list has a bunch of handwritten notes, where the parties were going to be afterwards were of utmost importance then.