Fifty years ago, the temperature was over 100 degrees, when the small town of Sedalia, Missouri’s population exploded as the Ozark Music Festival kicked off a three-day celebration of rock and roll, July 19-21, 1974.
Guitar heroes such as Joe Perry, Glenn Frey and Jeff Beck plugged 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.
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, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Joe Walsh, Ted Nugent, Eagles, Aerosmith, Blue Öyster Cult, Bob Seger, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, America, Marshall Tucker Band, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Boz Scaggs, Electric Flag, Joe Walsh, a young Bruce Springsteen (who didn't make it either), Spirit 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.
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 the source, 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.
Warsaw native Rick Fajen was an eyewitness to the festival back in ’74. He and local lawyer Bob Drake traveled to Sedalia to take pictures of the historic event.
“We drove up to Sedalia to see what was going on and take some pictures,” said Fajen. “It was really hot and people at the festival were walking around naked. Sedalia officials were not prepared for this large of a crowd and the streets were packed. It was almost impossible to drive through Sedalia.”
According to Fajen, the gathering was peaceful but there were so many people that the fairgrounds were not able to accommodate all the music lovers.
“Someone cut a hole in the fence on the backside of the fairgrounds and people just walked on in,” said Fajen. “The festival promoters were supposed to be in charge of security so the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the Sedalia Police were outside the fence trying to handle the crowd in Sedalia.”
Fajen recalled that Wolfman Jack was the emcee of the event and, at one point, he was in a helicopter hovering over the event telling people not to buy the dope being distributed because it was tainted.
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. Lujin met with Fajen and used some of Fajen’s film footage in his documentary.
According to Fajen, for the most part, the people at the festival were peaceful. They had come to hear the bands and party. Fajen said that because of the heat, many tried to find relieve in Flat Creek and other water bodies around Sedalia. Some festival goers even went to Warsaw to swim in the creeks and lake.
“We even saw people lying in the lagoon at the fairgrounds and of course that was full of human waste,” said Fajen.
During the three-day event, Fajen drove his parents to the airport in Kansas City to depart on a trip and they had a difficult time getting through Sedalia.
“The traffic had just stopped,” said Fajen. “I had to drive around several side streets to get back to the highway.”
Warsaw resident Suzie Brodersen was living in Sedalia at the time of the festival. She was only 4 years old but she remembered walking with her parents to the fairgrounds.
“We lived just three blocks from the fairgrounds and I remember walking there with my parents to see what was going on,” said Brodersen. “There were cars everywhere and the people walking around were barely clothed.”
Brodersen recalled that during that three-day time frame, a woman came to their house and begged to use the bathroom.
“My mother was reluctant to let a stranger in the house but she did, and then later that same woman came back and asked to use the hose outside to wash off so my mother let her,” she said.
Brodersen said that they saw people taking showers in the car wash and the local grocery store had food and carts stolen.
After the festival was over, crews had to be brought into the fairgrounds to remove the top layer of soil all over the fairgrounds in order to prepare for the Missouri State Fair in August.
“The ground was littered with waste and human feces so the entire top level had to be removed,” said Brodersen.
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 300,000 or so that turned up (no one knows for sure since the fences fell on Friday morning) was something else.
Lujin hopes to expand his film into an episodic documentary but, for now, takes inspiration and editing cues from audience feedback. He has a Sedalia show planned for this fall, to coincide with Mozark Festival, an event created to recall the former festival.
That event is scheduled for September 20-22 at the Missouri State Fairgrounds.
