Fifty years ago this weekend in Sedalia, every amplifier dial went all the way up.
The volume was literal, with once and future guitar heroes such as Joe Perry, Glenn Frey and Jeff Beck plugging in to split the Midwest sky with sound. The event these rock stars played also "amped up the drama" in the modest-sized Missouri city, as one documentary filmmaker put it, with hints of the squalling feedback still discernible today.
The Ozark Music Festival, mounted July 19-21, 1974, featured sets from the Eagles, Aerosmith, Blue Öyster Cult, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Seger and many other heavy hitters. The event exists as a singular entry in the long, storied, often chaotic annals of music festivals — and not simply on the strength of its lineup.
To read accounts of the time is to know that some in Sedalia viewed the festival as a Trojan horse of debauchery. Detractors insist they were promised a bluegrass festival, not a rock free-for-all. An expected crowd of around 50,000 ballooned to anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000, depending on the report. Compound all this with scorching summer heat and readily available drugs, and a completely different experience emerged.
And depending on who you ask, the festival was either the best or the worst time of their lives, filmmaker Jefferson Lujin said. His documentary "The Ozark Music Festival: 3 Days of Sodom & Gomorrah in Sedalia, Missouri" captures the sound, the spirit and aftermath of the event.
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Lujin and his collaborators have spent more than 15 years on the film, which he showed locally last year at the State Historical Society of Missouri and will screen elsewhere around Missouri in the near future.
Even after all the dogged research, Lujin thinks perhaps the "story" in the film's title should be pluralized.
"There is no one story — everyone who went there has a different version," he said.
A Sedalia kid tells the tale
Lujin grew up in Sedalia, but was just 3 years old when The Ozark Music Festival opened up to rock fans. He heard casual references to the festival in his youth, but thought little of it.
Later, as an adult entering a bar in New York, a bouncer checked Lujin's ID, noticed he was from Sedalia and rhapsodized about his own experience at the festival. It was then Lujin knew something more interesting had taken place in his hometown.
“I hope, if I was of age, I would’ve went," he said, putting himself in a moment he missed. "I was kind of a square kid. ... I think my friends would’ve talked me into it."
After more than 15 years studying the festival, Lujin quite literally dreams about it, he said. And in his dreams, he's filming scenes he couldn't find on the record. But what he has is impressive.
Some who sit for the film expect a "Woodstock"-style film, revolving around the music and shot with intention, he said. Lujin takes more of a "Frankenstein" approach, he said, gathering and assembling 8mm film, news footage and contemporary interviews. Lujin mingled in as many musical performances as possible, but the film widens its lens to consider the continued impact on festivalgoers and the town itself.
The film features unique footage of the Eagles dedicating their loping country-rocker "Already Gone" to President Richard Nixon. And interviews with longtime state lawmaker Jim Mathewson exist like the "star" and the "glue" of the film, Lujin said.
"He’s my Shelby Foote," he joked, comparing Mathewson to the historian driving Ken Burns' legendary Civil War documentary.
The film also casts a spotlight on lesser-known bands whose music Lujin has come to love. Among them: Bloodstone, a Kansas City R&B band that experienced some degree of racial animus at the fest, Lujin said, and Chicago's The Electric Flag. The latter band joined some of the era's great players, including guitarist Mike Bloomfield and drummer Buddy Miles.
Talking with viewers, Lujin sometimes finds surprising how time has shaped and reshaped perceptions of the festival.
"A lot of times I’m filling in the blanks for everything they don’t remember, either through time or drug use back in the day," he said.
And, as cultural attitudes toward rock 'n' roll have undergone serious shifts in 50 years, it's typically younger generations of viewers expressing shock over what their parents and grandparents were up to, he said.
How the Ozark Music Festival is still making history
Today's major music festivals often take shape as curated experiences with corporate sponsors. The Ozark Music Festival was a product of the unexpected.
And the festival remains distinct among other controversial peers. Woodstock '99, for example, is known for its darkness and danger. The more recent Fyre Festival was a true con, Lujin said.
Sedalia's story is made by a real collision of time and place, unique in part because the fest dropped a major American city's worth of people into the middle of town, Lujin said, and not some farmland at the fringes.
The festival changed the way the town sees itself even today, Lujin said. And, again, that picture arrives from multiple perspectives.
Some residents treated the town like a Mayberry, and the festival as a precipitating event that corrupted its youth, he said. But some of those who were youth at the time say their countercultural activities went below everyone's radar until the festival brought more sets of eyes, Lujin added.
Lujin invoked Southern novelist Walker Percy's "hurricane theory" to describe the way Ozark Music Festival changed Sedalia. Often, a storm of the literal or musical sort is seen as a catastrophic event, Lujin said, but can deliver a strange sense of rejuvenation and create new plots of common ground.
"Sedalia was only talking about this for weeks. It gave the town a new kind of identity," he said.
And, he added, if you hold your ear up to the town's coffee shops and gathering places, someone probably is talking about the festival right this minute.
What's next for Lujin's film
Lujin hopes to expand his film into an episodic documentary but, for now, takes inspiration and editing cues from audience feedback. He'll screen the film Monday evening at Scandinavia Place in Independence, and has a Sedalia show planned for this fall, to coincide with Mozark Festival, an event created to recall the former festival.
That event, Sept. 20-22 at the Missouri State Fairgrounds, features a lineup with Locash, Starship, Molly Hatchet, Christian rock cornerstone Petra and bands covering the catalogs of Santana, the Eagles, Queen and Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter/X @aarikdanielsen.
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