Disaster or best show ever? ‘Notorious’ Ozark Music Festival jolted Missouri 50 years ago

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For the last 15 years, documentary filmmaker Jefferson Lujin has been on a quest.

The native of Sedalia, Missouri, wants people to know more about the legendary Ozark Music Festival — a three day event that literally overwhelmed his hometown in July of 1974.

That was 50 years ago, and people are still debating its merits.

“I would say it was notorious,” Lujin grins. “And a hell of a lot of fun if you were the right age.”

That’s what Lujin (he was 3 at the time) has learned from dozens of interviews with those who attended it and others outraged by the whole affair.

Though more and more of the latter are no longer with us.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The festival was the brainchild of promoter Chris Fritz, who’d teamed with Sal Brancato and Bob Shaw for a series of concerts at Kansas City’s Fairyland Park dubbed “Carney Rock.”

The trio then turned their attention toward Sedalia’s historic Missouri State Fairgrounds . They signed a deal to stage a festival there the weekend of July 19-21 in 1974.

Exactly what kind of festival wasn’t clear. City fathers seemed to expect something with bluegrass and folk musicians — and indeed the bill included the Earl Scruggs Revue, David Bromberg and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

But ads that ran in Rolling Stone and on the brand-new KY-102 radio station indicated something very different. They touted groups like the Eagles , REO Speedwagon, Bachman Turner Overdrive (who canceled), Lynyrd Skynyrd, Joe Walsh, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger and even a young Bruce Springsteen (who didn’t make it either.)

“It was good programming,” Fritz says today. “It just wasn’t what they were expecting.”

Nor were they expecting the tidal wave of party-ready youth who descended on the town in pursuit of their own mid-Missouri Woodstock.

The promoters’ goal was to sell 40,000 to 50,000 tickets — a good deal more than the fair’s normal attendance of 20,000 to 25,000 per day. But the crowd of 150,000 or so that turned up (no one knows for sure since the fences fell on Friday morning) was something else altogether.

“And they came all at once,” Fritz remembers.

Chris Goss was 15 years old in the summer of 1974. His father was a groundskeeper at the fairgrounds, so the family lived on the site. Which gave the teen a front row seat for the madness that actually started the night before.

“People were piling up everywhere, eight-track tapes going in every car,” he recalls. “It was just like you would hear every song you ever knew in your whole life.”

Initially, Goss was excited about the musical lineup scheduled to appear on the two gigantic stages that crews had erected north of the grandstand. But by Friday afternoon, he saw things starting to run off the rails. Pandemonium was breaking out in quiet Sedalia.

‘There’s motorcycles and cars and people yelling … cops and drug dealers yelling. … And just everywhere you go, it’s like a giant three-ring circus.”

This mobile mass of humanity soon ate and drank everything the vendors and nearby restaurants had to offer. Glimpses of the chaos can be seen in footage that Lujin has been slowly accumulating, largely from crowd-sourced photos and video.

Professional quality documentation of the festival was remarkably absent.

But the spectacle unfolding for three days under 100 degree skies did make headlines in The Kansas City Star, the Sedalia Democrat and briefly on the national news.

“You know, everyone wants to compare it to Woodstock,” Lujin says. “But Woodstock had a political theme that’s more or less absent here.”

He believes that the Eagles dedicating “Already Gone” to Richard Nixon a few weeks before he resigned from office was one of the few exceptions.

“I think the main intention was to cut loose,” Lujin says. “And if that’s the case, then taking your clothes off is a perfect fit.”

Of course, some of the public nudity was a logical reaction to the relentless heat in a place where bodies were crammed together and ice was selling for $20 a bag.

Nonetheless, townspeople were aghast at all the bare skin. And the volume of drug sales that took place openly when police chose not to risk confrontations.

The tunnel that concertgoers passed through to get to the stage was like a “Middle Eastern bazaar,” Lujin says.

Eli Paul admits he saw a lot of things inside the gates that he hadn’t been expecting. A University of Missouri student at the time, Paul bought a ticket that he soon discovered no one was actually taking.

“The facilities were just overwhelmed,” he says. “People were looking for water and shade. And desperate to get some sort of relief. I didn’t mind the crowd. I minded the heat.”

But the music was what brought him in the first place. particularly acts like the Marshall Tucker Band, Leo Kottke and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band . And they didn’t disappoint.

Paul (who went on to become a historian) admits that his experience was considerably different from most. Because his family lived nearby, he went home each night to sleep in his own bed instead of a tent. The next morning he’d take the back roads into town and do it all over again.

“It was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” he says simply.

But not everyone felt that way. Health care workers, in particular, took the brunt of caring for countless overdoses and heat-stricken revelers. For them, Lujin says, “this was life or death, not good time rock ’n’ roll.”

One person died due due to drug-related causes. Trash piled up (and smelled bad) because trucks couldn’t get in to deal with it. Grass withered, dust swirled and one of the promoters was hospitalized with a heart attack.

But even as death threats began filtering in, Chris Fritz kept to the plan.

The festival would keep plugging along until the group America finished things up on Sunday evening.

“P.T. Barnum was my idol,” Fritz explains quietly at his office in Kansas City’s Azura Amphitheater . “He was the greatest promoter ever. So … you know, that’s what I was thinking. No matter what … the show must go on.”

That doesn’t mean it was smooth sailing. After the encores, with a modern day lynch mob hot on his heels, Fritz hopped onto a helicopter for a harrowing nighttime trip back to Kansas City.

A slew of hearings, lawsuits and a ban on coming back to Sedalia ensued. (Spoiler alert: Fritz returned anyway.)

But the firestorm eventually subsided, and the three partners netted about $5,000 each.

To observe the fest’s 50th anniversary, Lujin’s film, “The Story of the Ozark Music Festival: Three Days of Sodom & Gomorrah in Sedalia, Missouri ” will be screened July 19, 20 and 21 at Ophelia’ s and 3 Trails Brewing in Independence.

Some of the officials and political figures featured in the documentary have died since Lujin began assembling it. Others, like Chris Goss, will be on hand to relive and review one of the wildest events in modern music history.

“I went to all those Summer Jams and stuff,” he says of multi-band concerts at Kansas City’s Royals and Chiefs stadiums. They were good, but they were like eight hours. This was 72 hours. Jet fueled.”

Watch the video to see more on the legendary music festival.