Documentary will tell the story of Marlin music festival that never was

MOSES LAKE — Fifty-five years ago, Grant County almost had a rock music festival.

“(The promoters) leased this land just outside of Marlin, started billing bands and everything,” said filmmaker Jacob Hoxie. “And then a few weeks before it all happened, the county took them to court and said, ‘You can’t do this.’”

Hoxie is creating a documentary about Sunrise 71, the rock festival that almost put Marlin on the map. Many of the people who were involved have passed on, he said, but he’s still collecting memories from those who are still with us and would like to hear from local residents who remember it.

“We're trying to find people who have little tidbits to share, no matter how big or how small they may be,” Hoxie said. “We want to show what people in the area were actually thinking at the time. We have the promoter perspective, we have the law enforcement perspective, but the people who were actually living in Marlin or in the area at the time, we don't have as many of those interviews as we'd like.”

In the summer of 1971, America’s music scene was still riding on the high from Woodstock and a group of investors in the Seattle area thought they’d like to have something similar in eastern Washington. Event promoter Ron Bozarth bought 1,800 acres south of Marlin and put out the word that there would be music from Black Oak Arkansas, Little Feat, the Pointer Sisters, the Doobie Brothers and the Allman Brothers, according to Hoxie.

That word reached about 1,000 young people in their teens and 20s who wanted to hear some music, according to a contemporary article in Washington State University’s Daily Evergreen newspaper. It also reached the ears of the authorities, who got a court injunction against the festival and sent then-Grant County Sheriff Ralph Hall to shut it down. Hall only had about 20 deputies, according to the Daily Evergreen article, but about 250 officers from various county and municipal police forces came to back him up.

“Dan Evans, the governor at the time, suggested that they move to Sun Lakes State Park because they had facilities there,” Hoxie said. “Obviously not for 1,000 people, but it was somewhere for them to go. That culminated in those law enforcement officers forcing them out of the park. There was a little scuffle there, a few arrests and tear gas and the riot squad coming in.”

The music might not have happened, but there was lots of drinking, drugs and nudity, according to the Daily Evergreen article. Fourteen arrests were made for drugs and liquor, according to the article, and one young man received a lump on his head and an assault charge, allegedly for trying to take a gun away from an officer.

The concert – or non-concert – story is intriguing in itself, Hoxie said, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg in a saga that encompasses embezzlement, mob connections and a drug-using narcotics officer.

Hoxie, who lives in Anacortes in northwestern Washington, first learned of Sunset 71 from a brief mention online, he said.

“Whenever we would travel across the east side to visit friends in Idaho or Montana, we would take the routes that take you through all these little towns in eastern Washington,” he said. “I was always fascinated by, you know, these little villages with 100 or so people … I looked at a list of towns in Washington and Marlin was at the very bottom, population-wise. I looked up the Wikipedia (page) and there was one sentence about how it was supposed to be host to this Woodstock size music festival 50-plus years ago that never happened. That immediately piqued my interest, and I started digging through newspapers and unraveling this crazy story.”

Hoxie tracked down Bozarth, now a retired attorney in the Seattle area, and got the story from him, followed up by visits to Grant County to interview residents. He hopes to have the film finished by next summer and let Grant County have the first peek.

“We'd love to have a showing of the film either in Marlin or somewhere in Grant County, and then have a couple bands play,” he said. “Just a little one-day affair to bring that narrative back full circle.”

Anybody with memories of Sunrise 71 to share can reach Jacob Hoxie by email at [email protected] or by phone at 360-708-7921.