THE THIRD TEXXAS JAM DALLAS 1980

 The third Texxas Jam(real name: Texxas world music festival '80) was held June 21st 1980 at the Cotton Bowl at Fair Park in Dallas Texas. The lineup for the all day festival had The Eagles as headliner with Foreigner, Cheap Trick, April Wine, Sammy Hagar, Christopher Cross, Point Blank and Le Roux preceding them. It was a hot day but not bad, and not anyway near as bad as the first Texxas Jam in 1978. I was working on an oil pipeline near Beaumont Tx that summer and drove to Dallas early that morning with a co-worker. The tickets cost $16.50 each and were printed in a large, multi-color format. I'm going to try and include a photo of my ticket in this blog. It's really artistic for a concert ticket. The Eagles show(including Joe Walsh and Don Felder) was definitely the highlight of the festival. They came onstage after dark and opened with "Hotel California". I was surprised by this being an opener instead of an encore song, but it worked out great. Before they took the stage there was a huge trash fight at the southwestern end of the stadium between fans in the upper level and field level below them. Someone in the upper level started throwing junk at the lower level and  the fans below started throwing trash back at the upper level. Before long everyone in those areas joined in and the trash was flying fast and furious. It was hilarious to watch from a distance. The upper level won because they had gravity on their side. As far as I can tell no one got hurt, and I didn't see any fistfights(there may have been some I didnt see). Foreigner was good and Cheap Trick and Sammy Hagar really put on high energy sets. Christopher Cross had a tough gig though. He was soundly BOO'ed during his act and actually cut his set short after throwing up on stage due to heat exhaustion. I'm not sure why he was billed on this festival. He was a talented musician with several radio hits at the time, but was not a Rock and Roll act!!! Point Blank and Le Roux were good, but I was not familiar with their songs at that time and spent most of their sets obtaining beer and weed.
Found alot of both. Yum Yum...... All in all a great festival and lots of sunburned fun, but the drive back to Beaumont in the early morning hours was less fun... There's always some price to pay.......