Let’s remember the first Sasquatch! Festival at the Gorge, on this day in 2002 (May 25)

This Memorial Day weekend will be the first one in seventeen years without a Sasquatch! Festival at the Gorge. Before it became the destination festival of choice for the with it and hip(sters) of the Pacific Northwest, it was, for one beautiful year, a festival for damn, dirty hippies.

As City Arts Magazine (RIP) wrote:

In 2002, a booking agent at House of Blues named Adam Zacks decided that the Pacific Northwest needed a destination music festival, something similar to Bonnaroo in Tennessee and Coachella in California, two other emerging, world-class festivals. Zacks reserved a day on Memorial Day weekend at the Gorge Amphitheatre in George, Washington. A three-hour drive from Portland and Seattle, the Gorge sits in a bend of the Columbia River, offering breathtaking vistas of Eastern Washington’s dramatic desert landscape.

Keeping with his booking sensibilities from when he was a student at the University of Oregon (and capitalizing on jam-band fans’ willingness to travel long distances to see their favorite bands), Zacks lured Ben Harper, Galactic, Blackalicious, the String Cheese Incident and a few other jam-circuit bands to his inaugural festival. More than 20,000 fans showed up. Sasquatch! was born.