Never Forget the Amazing Texas Music Festival Called Texxas Jam

Without a doubt, Texas at one point had one of the BIGGEST music festivals around the Fourth of July weekend. Between 1978-1988, both Dallas & Houston were the home to a historic music fest called Texxas Jam. While it wasn't perfect, looking back on this concert, I'm bummed I wasn't around to see what was, no doubt, a huge piece of Texas history.

What exactly was Texxas Jam & who played this festival?

While the official name for this festival was the "Texxas World Music Festival", most people remembered it as "Texxas Jam". Over 60,000 to 85,000 music fans would travel to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas & the Astrodome in Houston to enjoy the shows.

At the very first Texxas Jam, you had acts like Journey, Heart, Van Halen, Aerosmith, even Cheech & Chong were at that first festival on July 1st, 1978. Aerosmith even uploaded many of their songs from that performance on their YouTube channel.

Other acts like Heart, Journey & Van Halen would do their retelling of that 978 performance too; there was even a fan-made documentary that made its way onto YouTube.

Other notable names who would play Texxas Jam included Rush, Deep Purple, Boston, Dio, even Ozzy Osbourne played the 1982 Texxas Jam.

It even made the news; national AND MTV News back in 1986.

The final Texxas Jam would happen on July 3rd, 1988 at the Cotton Bowl; Dokken, Scorpions, Metallica & Van Halen would be the main bands from that year. That's still quite the line up; you can even find Metallica's entire hour long set on YouTube here.

Will we ever see the return of Texxas Jam? It's very unlikely but if Texas wanted to bring it back, I think we can see a HUGE amount of rock bands from Texas and around the world alike who would love to play these huge venues again. You can also read about the Texas Woodstock festival here.

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