Rusty's Blog

Atlanta International Pop Festival poster. Image from Wikipedia.

Most of what I know about Atlanta music history I read in the newspaper and heard on the radio growing up, which doesn’t amount to much. I have vague memories of hearing Alex Cooley’s name attached to radio ads on 96 Rock and Z93 for a lot of the big name acts coming through town.

Ever since I ran into this photo gallery from the Atlanta International Pop Festival, I’ve been doing some reading, listening, and catching up on lore I probably already should have been familiar with.

Inevitably, I found myself reading a lot about Cooley and his longtime business partner Peter Conlon. The two of them were behind almost every big music-related event in Atlanta and seemed to have a stake in every popular venue from the 70s through the middle of this decade.

Cooley had little music industry experience prior to the Pop Festival. He went straight from owning a pizza joint where doo-wop groups sang on the weekends to organizing a two-day festival attended by close to 100,000 drug-dropping hippies from The Strip and elsewhere, military servicemen, vagrants and more squares than you might think.

Like most of the massive music festivals put on in the late 60s and early 70s, the potential for the love fest to spoil into a deadly Altamont-like eruption of violence was palpable. The blistering heat, the lack of amenities, and the drugs combined could easily have been deadly.

Decades after the fact in this interview with WABE, the terror in Cooley’s voice is still fresh when he recalls the moment where he looked at the sea of cars coming into town for the second edition of the festival in 1970 (start listening around the 8 minute mark):

I went up in a helicopter for the second Atlanta Pop Festival on Saturday morning. [ . . . ] That was in Byron, Georgia [ . . . ] somewhere between 90 and 100 miles south of Atlanta, and traffic was backed up from Byron, Georgia all the way up The Varsity in Atlanta. And as far as I could see in that helicopter — later, Peter Conlon, who became my business partner told me that he ran into stop and go traffic at The Varsity. But at the time when I was up in the helicopter 75 was just a straight line straight up to Atlanta, and cars were just backed up the whole way. And I thought then, “My God, what have I done?” I guess I had gotten some perspective on it, and that’s when I really got frightened thinking all these people are here and do we have everything that’s needed for people to live for three days. I wasn’t so sure we did. But it’s just amazing. People cooperated and people that lived there were turning their hoses on and letting people get water. It was just an amazing thing.

The rest of it is well worth a listen, especially when he talks about Music Midtown and how he envisioned it as an urban festival, not something that would be hosted “in Alpharetta” and the obstacles the city put in front of him. There are also some great anecdotes about band riders (see The Smoking Gun if you don’t know what I’m talking about) and his parting with Clear Channel in 2004.

And search Google for “Atlanta International Pop Festival” to find hours of reading material.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 9th, 2009 at 10:22 pm. It was tagged 96 rock, alex cooley, atlanta, atlanta history, atlanta international pop festival, clear channel, History, interview, interviews, music, music midtown, npr, peter conlon, radio, wabe, z93. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.