Researching Live Music

Gigs, Tours, Concerts and Festivals

Chris Anderton, Sergio Pisfil, Chris Anderton, Sergio Pisfil

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000476163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica e business

Researching Live Music offers an important contribution to the emergent field of live music studies.

Featuring paradigmatic case studies, this book is split into four parts, first addressing perspectives associated with production, then promotion and consumption, and finally policy. The contributors to the book draw on a range of methodological and theoretical positions to provide a critical resource that casts new light on live music processes and shows how live music events have become central to raising and discussing broader social and cultural issues. Their case studies expand our knowledge of how live music events work and extend beyond the familiar contexts of the United States and United Kingdom to include examples drawn from Argentina, Australia, France, Jamaica, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Poland.

Researching Live Music is the first comprehensive review of the different ways in which live music can be studied as an interdisciplinary field, including innovative approaches to the study of historic and contemporary live music events. It represents a crucial reading for professionals, students, and researchers working in all aspects of live music.

Part IPromotion

1Festivals, free and unfreeAlex Cooley and the American rock festival

Steve Waksman

DOI: 10.4324/9780367405038-2

What is free?

In the lead-up to the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, which was held over Independence Day weekend in 1970 (July 3–5), the Atlanta Constitution reported on preparations for the event. Writing for the Constitution, Suzanne Moore described the construction of the large stage, which would be 80 feet long and 50 feet wide. Even more imposing was the “giant fence containing 5,000 linear feet of plywood, surrounding the performance field, which is four acres larger than the one at Woodstock.” According to festival co-organizer Chris Cowing, the fence was necessary for security and crowd control: “It would be impossible to regulate that many people without it… Crowd control is one of the biggest problems in planning a pop festival” (Moore 1970, 13T). Later in the same article, Cowing expanded on the point with reference to recent conflicts over the staging of music festivals in the United States: “A lot of kids think festivals should be free until they come down here and see all the work and planning it takes to put it together. If it were free you would have no crowd control. It would be chaotic” (Moore 1970, 14T). Here too, Woodstock was a key if implicit point of reference, for Woodstock was the “free festival” that had not been designed to be free, the hoped-for profits of the festival's planners having been waylaid by the failure to build sufficient fencing around the site before the crowd began to occupy the grounds.

Woodstock, held August 15–17, 1969, has dominated historical accounts of US festival culture, serving as the central point within a trinity of events—preceded by the Monterey International Pop Festival in summer 1967, and followed by the Rolling Stones-headlined Altamont festival in December 1969—that demarcate a short-lived golden age of the US rock festival and its hasty decline. In this chapter, I explore a set of lesser known but impactful festivals staged during 1969 and 1970 to broaden our understanding of this pivotal era in the evolution of pop and rock festivals in the United States and more broadly. The first Atlanta International Pop Festival preceded Woodstock by more than a month and drew approximately 100,000 attendees. It was followed by the Texas International Pop Festival, held over Labor Day weekend (August 31–September 2) in 1969; and the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, referenced above. All of these festivals have as their common denominator the Atlanta-based concert promoter Alex Cooley, who would emerge from his work on these formative American rock festivals to become one of the dominant figures in the US rock concert industry from the 1970s forward. Drawing upon internal documents preserved by Cooley, mixed with reports from the mainstream and underground press of the period, I use Cooley's early career as a case study to examine the ideological imperatives of festival production during a time when the efforts of promoters to build a profitable business model existed in uneasy tension with the widespread demand for festivals to be free.

Music festivals have long held a sort of utopian aspiration linked to what George McKay has described as their status as a “pragmatic and fantastic space in which to dream and to try another world into being” (McKay 2015, 5). In early US festivals such as the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals, founded in 1954 and 1959, respectively, this utopian character was aligned with the creation of nonprofit corporations that complemented the suggestion that these events were not planned strictly as money-making endeavors. Some early rock festivals such as Monterey Pop emulated this nonprofit structure, but the majority of the high-profile rock festivals produced after 1967 were for-profit undertakings created by young entrepreneurs who viewed the expanding market for rock as an open field of opportunity. Amidst this expansion of festival activity, calls for festivals to be “free”—that is, to be offered to the public without any cost of admission—grew out of the countercultural belief that music was a resource of “the people” and should not be exploited for profit. Gina Arnold has traced this “free festival” philosophy back to the early days of psychedelic rock when bands such as the Grateful Dead routinely offered free concerts, giving rise to the notion that admission charges were a “rip-off.” (Arnold 2018, 46–47). Woodstock epitomized the conflict between the promoter-driven for-profit model and the audience-driven push for music to be free. John Roberts, one of the two principal financial backers of Woodstock, put the matter starkly: “On August 13 I was still under the illusion that gates could be erected, tickets sold, attendance controlled, food dispersed, and an over-all profit made. By August 14 I knew better. I understood that we were engaged in a last-ditch holding operation” (Rosenman, Roberts, and Pilpel 1974, 137).

For promoters like Alex Cooley, whose career maps precisely onto the Woodstock moment and its immediate aftermath, the growing expectation that festivals be free created multiple challenges. Festivals of a certain scale required significant financial outlay. Performer fees were growing markedly during this era, such that talent budgets alone were typically well over $100,000 for a major festival. When these costs were added to the expenses of staging, the provision of sound and lights, advertising and publicity, and the need to develop an infrastructure for everything from toilets to water to security, costs could move toward half a million dollars or more. To offset these costs, promoters of the largest festivals pursued crowds in the tens of thousands or more and set admission charges at a level that could generate sufficient revenue to cover expenses and provide a profit. At the first Atlanta International Pop Festival, advance tickets were $6.50 for Friday, $7.50 for Saturday, and $12.50 for the weekend, with slightly higher costs to purchase at the admission gate. Yet the desire for profit had to be at least partially masked given the politics of the era, and so promotional rhetoric and imagery skillfully employed countercultural values to portray the festival as an occasion for generational togetherness or even political consciousness raising. With Atlanta Pop, this appeal to countercultural values was evident in the festival logo, a giant hand flashing the two-fingered “V” peace sign, shrouded in a wreath. Meanwhile, the calls for free festivals posed a more tangible risk when audiences put their own desires into practice, crashing the gate at several major festivals and leaving promoters holding the bill.¹ Two of Cooley's festivals—the Texas International Pop Festival and the second Atlanta festival—fell prey to gate crashers despite extensive preparation, exemplifying that Woodstock was no fluke in this regard but the most visible instance of a wider pattern.

Culture and economy

Suspicion surrounded the promotion of rock festivals from their inception. Rolling Stone magazine began publication on November 9, 1967, with a cover story by Michael Lydon asking where the money from the nonprofit Monterey International Pop Festival had gone; and that tenor of skepticism remained prevalent in the magazine's coverage of music festivals throughout the next few years (Lydon 1967, 1, 7). While some of this suspicion was due to an idealistic distrust of commercialism writ large, it also arose as a pragmatic response to the repeated failure of festival promoters to follow through on their stated plans. Many of these nascent promoters lacked the experience and preparation required to do the necessary work, and so news of festivals throughout 1968 and 1969 was as often about failed efforts as it was about those that were successfully launched. Another Rolling Stone critic, Jerry Hopkins, summed up the prevailing sentiment in June 1969, warning prospective festivalgoers of the need to be cautious of the “inept and/or greedy promoters who've been leaping for the festival bandwagon the past year or so. Especially in recent months, increasing numbers of artists and groups haven't shown up for festivals, because their names were advertised long before deals were made” (Hopkins 1969, 11).

These concerns filtered into local coverage of the first Atlanta International Pop Festival through the city's primary underground newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird. The week before the festival, Miller Francis, Jr.—a regular contributor to the Bird—opened an extensive critique of the mission of the event with reference to the Hopkins article cited above, noting that in the summer of 1969 every festival was just as likely to be a “bummer” as a good time. About the Atlanta Pop Festival itself, Francis raised several concerns. The sheer expense of it gave him pause, as he noted that its budget had risen dramatically from an earlier announcement of around $40,000 to well over $100,000. More troubling, though, was the apparent cooperation between festival organizers and Atlanta officials in conjunction with the annual Fourth of July celebrations. Francis claimed that such an alliance suggested at least tacit support for a sort of virulent patriotic nationalism that was at odds with the ostensible values of the festival, signified by the peace symbol used by the promoters as the event's trademark. Channeling the spirit of the time, Francis raised the question of making music, and music festivals, free, announcing: “What cannot be doubted any longer is that the power of a free and freeing music—music which liberates the senses and opens our heads—demands a free people in a free setting. Our responsibility is to define the word ‘FREE’.” Here we see that the calls for festivals to be “free” were not just a matter of whether or not they charged admission but were tied to larger questions regarding the association between music and political or cultural liberation that were elemental to the counterculture. Summing up the contradictions he perceived in the design of the festival, Francis concluded: “The size of the game has changed all right. The V-sign and a $12.50 ticket to a pop festival are not peacefully coexistent” (Francis 1969, 10–11).

Reading through these remarks, it is easy to draw the conclusion that a fundamental antagonism existed between the money lust of festival promoters and the critics and journalists who set themselves up as the watchdogs and surrogate moral conscience of the festival scene. What this ignores is how much the tension between the pursuit of profit and the efforts to build a platform for community expression of shared values through music was internal to the production of festivals. Such tensions ran through the team of people that produced the Atlanta Pop Festival, according to Alex Cooley. An Atlanta-born entrepreneur who got into the business of festival production and promotion after attending the Miami Pop Festival of December 1968, Cooley was one of 17 people that comprised the investors and producers of the 1969 Atlanta festival. Describing his work on the enterprise years later, he not only characterized it as a “horse put together by committee,” but also explained that there were so many principals because that was the only way they could raise the necessary funds. Among the several figures that put in money, there was a marked disagreement as to how much of a priority it was to make a profit. Said Cooley: “There were some amongst us who felt like making money off of music was evil and bad. I have to admit, I was wavering on that myself. I later decided that wasn't true, but we made $15,000. That's after we all got our money back that we initially put in” (Cooley n.d., part one). To turn any kind of profit on a rock festival in 1969 was something of an accomplishment, but $15,000 divided among several investors was a relatively small return on an event that drew an estimated 100,000 people over two days and featured the likes of Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Johnny Winter, Booker T. and the M.G.s, and two bands that would become major arena rock attractions in the coming decade, Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad.

An internal production document circulated in connection with the Atlanta Pop Festival offers even stronger evidence that at least the most responsible promoters were mindful of the challenges they faced. Titled “Production and Crowd Communication,” the two-page memo typed on the letterhead of the corporation formed to produce Atlanta Pop—International Pop Festivals, Inc.—is like a condensed crystallization of the producers’ ideology of festival organization. The opening sentence laid the matter bare: “Reaching fifty thousand people can be as easy as reaching a thousand if the presentation is not hampered by needless and instantly fabricated paranoias of the promoter” (Alex Cooley Collection, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 20).² This paranoia was stimulated by the youth audience which, as the memo argued, was “arrogant enough to feel that their music is rightfully theirs.” The mounting calls for festivals to be free are in this instance viewed from the promoter's perspective, treated with a certain amount of dismissal but also taken seriously insofar as such demands needed to be addressed and tempered in order to mount a successful festival.

According to the Atlanta Pop producers, these expectations and gestures of resistance could be displaced with the right sort of advance...