David Lee was 14 years old when his dad gave him $20 to make the trek from Columbus to Byron with his high school buddies for a three-day music festival in July 1970.
The event drew hundreds of thousands of people to the Middle Georgia Raceway in rural Georgia. Tickets for the three-day festival were $14. So Lee had to get by on $6.
“My friends and I brought miscellaneous chicken, potato chips, things like that,” said Lee. “There was a lot of watermelon there and peaches — and water was at a premium too. It was really hot.”
Lee, who now lives in Colbert and has a film and editing studio in Athens called Digima24, still has the ticket stub from that festival. It’s a treasured possession from a weekend with a myriad of stories. Lee has jotted down notes about the event over the years. And he’s now hard at work making a feature film documentary about Alex Cooley, the event’s organizer who viewed the massive festival traffic jam from a helicopter, wondering what he had done.
“He (Cooley) went up in a helicopter and he said traffic was backed up bumper to bumper all the way from the Varsity in Atlanta to the Byron Motor Speedway,” said Lee. “At the time there were approximately 400,000 people in that area. The infrastructure and the police force were overwhelmed. Fortunately there were no fatalities.”
The Byron festival came on the heels of Woodstock, the iconic countercultural music event of the 1960s. And Cooley aimed to give the South its own Woodstock, putting on two massive events in Georgia, one in Hampton and one in Byron, as well as one in Texas.
Lee is grateful. The memories of that weekend in Byron are still clear, still powerful.
For instance, the 14-year-old stood near the makeshift stage as Jimi Hendrix played for the last time before an American audience. The guitar legend died just over two months after the festival.
“It was about 2 o’clock in the morning on July 4th,” said Lee. “He had a huge fireworks display that went off. But apparently nobody had told him. So when the fireworks went off, he (Hendrix) jumped a mile.”
Of course, Hendrix’s 14 songs, which included “Hey Joe,” “Stonefree” and his version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” weren’t the only musical treats for the hundreds of thousands who traveled to the rural Georgia town. There was Procol Harum, the Chambers Brothers, B.B. King, Grand Funk Railroad, along with several others taking their place on the makeshift stage.
One new Southern rock sound was particularly well received.
“The Allman Brothers that was their breakout appearance,” said Lee. “I saw both of their shows. They were the only band to play two shows at Byron. They played Friday afternoon as the sun was going down. And then they played Sunday night to close the show out.”
Lee didn’t know festival organizer Alex Cooley back then. But he knew the festival was historic. And as the years passed, he wanted to keep its memory alive.
“I came away from that as a 14-year-old kid and in my teenage, infantile mind, I thought this has to be preserved some way for posterity,” said Lee. “And so through the years, I kept writing notes with the idea of writing a book on the festival.”
Lee’s friend Daniel Aguar, an Athens director and cinematographer, suggested making a documentary about Cooley, who went from a pizza maker to an internationally known concert and music festival promoter. They could talk to Cooley and to musicians who played his festivals. They could show rare music footage. They could tell the story of the old South being confronted with the hippie movement of the 1960s.
“He (Aguar) said a documentary would be a lot richer,” said Lee. “It’s got a whole visual aspect to it. I said ‘Sure, let’s give it a shot.’”
Within months, the two were having lunch with Cooley at his home on Lookout Mountain. And Cooley approved the project.
Since then, Lee and Aguar have been raising funds, conducting interviews and securing festival footage of musical acts, a process that includes a dense layering of entertainment licensing law.
“I am an executive producer,” said Lee. “My position is to finance this project. Now we’re having to super-tweak our promo material to go to deep-pocketed, credited investors. I’ve also been doing a lot of the pre-production research.”
Lee and Aguar have yet to secure rights to unreleased Allman Brothers footage from the festival, but if a price can be negotiated, the documentary will prove a major draw for Allman Brothers fans.
“It’s jaw-dropping good — three songs from the Friday afternoon set and one song from Sunday.” said Lee of the Allman Brothers footage.
The clear, up-close footage has a high-quality sound. A young Gregg Allman sits at a keyboard, wailing the words to “Dreams.”
“Cause I’ve a hunger … for dreams I’ll never see. Yeah baby … Ahhh … help me baby … ohhh … or this will surely be … the end of me, yeah.”
The original Allman Brothers’ lineup is onstage. Tight camera shots on the super skinny Duane Allman show the slide guitar prodigy in action. Dickey Betts plays dual lead guitar. Berry Oakley is on stage, fingers moving over his base.
Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident the following October in Macon at the age of 24. Oakley died 13 months later, also at the age of 24, in a motorcycle accident just three blocks from Allman’s accident.
Lee, a guitarist, singer and flute player himself, said he plans to interview an ailing Gregg Allman about the Byron festival for the documentary. Betts could potentially be included, too.
The documentary maker is also trying to line up interviews with other acts, including members of Led Zepplin, the famous English band that played in Cooley’s Texas festival in 1969 during their first American tour.
If all goes well, the documentary could be a moneymaker, Lee said, noting that the 1970 documentary on Woodstock has grossed $100 million.
However, Lee said money is secondary to the spirit of the time, when FM radio emerged and would play whole albums commercial free. He noted that Cooley’s interest in music wasn’t about money.
“Alex after the ‘69 show, he and his partners made a $12,000 profit and they felt guilty about it,” said Lee, adding that Cooley took that money and used it to bring The Grateful Dead and other acts to Piedmont Park the following year.
Nowadays, any music event is full of corporate sponsorships. But that wasn’t the case in the 1960s and early 70s. And Lee chuckles, thinking about how things are different now. He recalls the haphazard way the Byron stage was constructed, how OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) would be appalled now.
“We have footage of them building the stage in Byron,” said Lee. “And these days you’d probably have OSHA and all these heavy duty inspectors. These guys (building the stage) are like no shirts, cutoffs and flipflops, hauling boarding up onto scaffolding with an old, strap-down lift mechanism. OSHA would just have a fit.”
Lee said Cooley’s aim in bringing the big music festivals to the South was idealistic, not materialistic.
“His (Alex’s) idea was to loosen up things back here,” said Lee. “He said there was a deep disconnect between the West Coast people, the post Haight-Ashbury people — the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane — and the South. They did not play the South at all. They were afraid to come here. And Alex began to resent that. You know, not everybody in the South has this take on racial segregation and small mindedness. He is a visionary as far as bringing these great bands and biracial music into the South.”
Lee said Byron represented a cultural clash.
“Basically, it’s the hippie thing meets the deep South,” he said. “It’s just a really interesting sociological, musical phenomenon.”
Of course, not everyone was thrilled with Cooley. The documentary will include a clip of a protest song from a man writing against the Byron festival.
And after the Byron festival, Gov. Lester Maddox formed a task force to study the countercultural movement. The documentary will include interviews with Maddox and other Georgia officials concerned with what happened in Byron.
“It (the task force) was formed after the festival to examine all these sociological ramifications of this phenomena,” said Lee. “And it’s a really interesting take on the ideas of the countercultural, hippie thing at the time.”
Following Byron, the Georgia legislature took action to keep such a big music festival from happening again.
“Gov. Maddox’s task force persuaded the legislature to pass legislation to allow these kind of gatherings only in enclosed areas,” said Lee. “So from that point on it became like all Fulton County Stadium shows, Grant Field shows.”
Lee said he and Aguar hope to have the documentary completed in approximately a year. Former Allman Brothers keyboardist Chuck Leavell, who also played with Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, has provided the narration for the documentary’s promotional film, which is being shown to potential investors. Leavell has also agreed to do the narration for the finished product. (The famous keyboardist will hit the stage Aug. 2 during the opening week of the newly renovated Georgia Theatre in Athens, which was gutted by fire.)
Lee said the name of the documentary, “Time Has Come Today,” comes from The Chambers’ Brothers hit song by the same name.
“He (Cooley) liked the Chambers Brothers a great deal,” said Lee. “That’s why we named the project this. Because it’s so apropos today, ‘time then, has come today, now.’”
Lee said he feels a great connection to Byron and wants to see a historical marker for the festival at the Speedway. He said he feels “honored” to make a documentary about the music of his youth.
“It ties up my life experiences,” said Lee. “I was a Georgia history teacher years ago and a photographer and archivist — plus I was at the Byron show.”
And he still has the $14 ticket stub to prove it.
— David Lee is interested in obtaining any archival footage related to the Byron Festival and other Alex Cooley festivals of the late 60s and early 70s. Anyone with information regarding such footage can email him at darolee@yahoo.com
