August 1970

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Saturday
  1
Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell's film Performance premieres in New York City, featuring Mick Jagger in his screen debut as a decadent rock star. The soundtrack includes performances by the Rolling Stones, Randy Newman and proto-rap group the Last Poets.
2
 3
A four-day strike by NFL players requesting improved pension payments and other benefits from team owners ends as players' demands are met.
 4
The Medicine Ball Caravan, featuring the Grateful Dead and hippie-scene people like Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney) of the Hog Farm, becomes rock's first and last movable festival as it leaves San Francisco on a cross-country trek, pulling seven tie-dyed tepees along with it. The caravan will eventually reach the United Kingdom, document itself with an album, and its own rock band, Stoneground, will emerge from it.

Canadian Woodstock, Quebec's first rock festival, ends disastrously: only 10,000 people show up, and only one of twelve scheduled performers appears.
 5
 6
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of America's dropping of the atom bomb in Hiroshima, 20,000 people paying from $5.50 to $8.50 apiece gather at New York's Shea Stadium for an antiwar rock festival that lasts twelve hours and includes performances by John Sebastian, Janis Joplin, Paul Simon, Paul Butterfield, Steppenwolf, Johnny Winter and the cast of "Hair." The attendance is well below expectations, and a similar concert planned for the same day in Philadelphia never comes off at all because of legal hassles concerning the concert's length and the rental fee for JFK Stadium.
 7
The Soviet Union launches Venus probe Venera 7, which lands four months later, becoming the first man-made object to transmit data from the surface of another planet.
 8
Thousands of American youths are refused entry to Canada for the Strawberry Fields Rock Festival in Mosport, Ontario, on grounds that they "failed to produce adequate monies to support themselves" ("a fairly routine action," says an Ottawa immigration official). Over 8,000 Americans make it there anyway.

Bessie Smith, "Empress of Blues" and prime inspiration for Janis Joplin and countless other blues singers, finally gets a stone for her grave in Philadelphia's Mount Lawn Cemetery. Smith died during a tour on September 26, 1937, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, bleeding to death after she was refused admittance to a whites-only hospital for treatment of injuries she sustained in an auto accident. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Mount Lawn. Her tombstone, which Joplin paid for, fears an epitaph written by John Hammond, an executive of her label, CBS Records: THE GREATEST BLUES SINGER IN THE WORLD WILL NEVER STOP SINGING.
9
 10
In Miami, Florida, Jim Morrison's public lewdness trial opens, 17 months after he was charged with exposing himself onstage. Eventually, he will be found innocent of "lewd and lascivious behavior" but guilty on separate charges of indecent exposure and profanity.
 11
The Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival in Michigan opens with performances by John Lee Hooker and Big Mama Thornton, as well as unscheduled appearances by Johnny Winter and Buddy Guy. The festival's producers pass collection baskets through the audience, hoping to alleviate their estimated $20,000 deficit.
 12
Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliot and others appear at a Woody Guthrie memorial concert held at California's Hollywood Bowl.
 13
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 15
ESP Disk, the adventurous avant-garde jazz label that printed liner notes in Esperanto, buys exclusive manufacturing and distribution rights to recordings by Charles Manson, currently on trial in the Tate, LaBianca murder case.
16
 17
Christine Perfect McVie joins Fleetwood Mac, the band co-founded by her husband, John McVie, two months after announcing that she would retire from performing.
 18
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 21
 22
Elvis Presley announces the six-date itinerary of his first tour since 1958, to start in Phoenix, Arizona, on September 9 and to end September 14 in Mobile, Alabama.
23
Lou Reed, frontman and founder of the Velvet Underground, performs with the band for the last time before leaving the group, at Max's Kansas City.
 24
 25
British singer and pianist Elton John makes his first U.S. appearance at Los Angeles' Troubador, kicking off a seventeen-day tour.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer make their world debut at Plymouth Guild Hall, Plymouth, England.
 26
The Isle of Wight Pop Festival begins in England. Jimi Hendrix makes his last public appearance here. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richie Havens and Joni Mitchell are among those who appear. Hundreds of fans shouting "Music is free!" force their way in, joining the 250,000 already in attendance. During Joni Mitchell's set, a man jumps onstage, grabs the mike, and shouts, "This is just a hippie concentration camp!" Mitchell bursts into tears. The festival ends on August 31.

Marking the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage, a national women's strike brings thousands of marchers to the streets of New York and other cities. In Washington, D.C., where govenment works are not permitted to strike, women march on their lunch hour.
 27
Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios in New York City (the first to offer 24-track recording facilities) opens for business. Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder are among the first artists to record there.
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