HIGH FREQUENCIES: The continuing saga of the film of the Second Annual Atlanta International Pop Festival

In the summer of 1970, if you were a part of the Atlanta's music community or counter-culture, you either attended the Second Annual Atlanta International Pop Festival or you didn’t. It was that simple. You were either there or you weren’t, such was the cultural significance of the music event 93 miles south of Atlanta. Fifty-five years later those who did and those who didn’t share in asking the same question: when is the film coming out?

For over three days and nights in a field adjacent to the Middle Georgia Raceway, director Steve Rash and his camera crew filmed events onstage and off at the festival which, at the time, was the largest gathering of people in one place in Georgia until 1996 when the Centennial Olympic Games were held. According to the U.S. census, in 1970 the city of Byron, GA, had a population of 1,368. Yet over the Fourth of July weekend that year, that number swelled to between 150,000 to an unprecedented and questionable 600,000 people — depending on who you ask — when music fans descended upon the sleepy southern town to attend the second pop festival to be produced by the late concert promoter Alex Cooley. The locals weren’t ready for it.

For three days, their town exploded with music, drugs, and sex, the music festival attracting people from across the United States and countries beyond. And with them, the “long-haired hippies” brought their counterculture lifestyle, amplifying what was witnessed a year earlier at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in August of 1969. Knowing they were outnumbered, local authorities turned a blind eye.

Rash’s reels and reels of film shot over 55 years ago, have been stored in garages, in a barn, just about any place where the director could keep them, regardless of whether they were being exposed to the elements or not. It wasn’t because of lack of interest on Rash’s part that he never had them developed, but a lack of finances that prevented him from moving forward with the project. And, every time he was financially able to have a reel developed, it was black, the images devoured by time. Only recently has Rash, through a series of events and meetings with chemistry lab technicians and ex-Kodak developers, been able to see his reels developed, allowing them to come to life, exposing a time and innocence that has long passed.

In September, 2012, Rash held an invitation-only screening at Atlanta’s Plaza Theatre of a little over two hours of film, all that he had managed to salvage at the time. Titled “HOTLANTA: The Great Lost Rock Festival,” it told a story, as the ’60s turned into the ’70s, about a time in the U.S. when possibilities seemed endless, dreams turned into reality, and lofty goals were being realized. Music was not just the soundtrack of the time, but the cohesive factor in bringing people together, captured on film in a somewhat subliminal approach, with the music performances interweaving with documentary footage of the goings-on offstage, presenting them not as a sideshow, but equal with the performers onstage, including Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, Procol Harum, The Chambers Brothers, Spirit, It’s A Beautiful Day, Richie Havens, Grand Funk Railroad, Lee Michaels, Mott The Hoople, Mountain, Terry Reid, Poco, John Sebastian, the Bob Seger System, Rare Earth, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter, and other national acts. As well, a number of local Atlanta bands performed at the festival, including Chakra, Radar, the Hampton Grease Band, and a then relatively unknown group from Macon, the Allman Brothers Band. [It should be noted here that some of the artists advertised to play the festival did not appear, most notably Ginger Baker's Airforce, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, Jethro Tull, and Sly & The Family Stone.]

The screening garnered positive response from those in attendance, many of the viewers having attended the festival itself, while others there were the curious and curiouser of what had transpired decades earlier. Alex Cooley was in attendance, urging Rash to finish the project, “in my lifetime,” the concert promoter pleaded, half jokingly. Cooley died in December, 2015. Rash had still not completed the film, but was determined that one day all thousand pounds of film he owned would be developed.

Much has changed in the last decade. While people still go to theaters to see films, attendance is not what it used to be. People used to buy DVDs and blu-ray discs, now they use streaming services to view at home movies they once wanted to own.

Which brings us to now, or, June 20, more importantly, when a new immersive experience, That Seventies Experience, takes place for one day only at Pullman Yards.

Based in part on past immersive experiences that have taken place at Pullman Yards — think the Van Gogh exhibit and Imagine Picasso — “That Seventies Experience” will include live music and DJs, a vintage shopping market, food trucks, roller skating, and more. That “more” includes an immersive experience based on Steve Rash’s 1970 film footage of the Second Atlanta International Pop Festival.

WTF?

Exactly. I contacted Rash via email and he gave me some answers to exactly WTF, though I didn’t pose my question to him so bluntly.

The man who pioneered music television in the 1970s with WATL-TV’s “The Now Explosion” and “The Music Connection” in Atlanta, before moving into feature films, garnering three Academy Award nominations and one Oscar for “The Buddy Holly Story”, followed by three decades of helming films including “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Queens Logic”, “Son-in-Law”, and sequels to “Bring It On”, “American Pie” and “Road Trip," provides some enlightening answers, but not before acknowledging his involvement in the precursor to MTV and revealing that his Atlanta Pop Festival film has not only been a labor of love, but a fifty-year-plus love story.

"In the summer of '69, I was a TV director in Dallas where Bob Whitney, a pioneer of Top 40 radio, came to produce a pilot of his revolutionary concept; basically MTV. I was assigned to build a music video of “Make Your Own Kind of Music.”  Raw footage had been shot by John Butterworth (the first cameraman for NFL Films) in New Jersey. His dancers were cast from a Philadelphia dance company and included Maggie Spadafora, who I fell in love with while editing film of her dancing on the beach in Ocean City.

“That video was in the pilot that sold, and “The Now Explosion” marathon Music-TV series began production in Atlanta in 1970. I was hired as director and Maggie as choreographer, and we met on the tarmac at ATL.

“By the end of the first and only season of the Top-40 TV series, I had seen Maggie’s organization and leadership, and promoted her to Assistant Director for the sequel, “Music Connection.”  During production, the pop festival fell into our laps and we did the best we could with little money and no time. The festival was a failure before the “Music Connection” series was cancelled, but Maggie and I had become a team and created nationally syndicated music TV specials. Our first movie was “The Buddy Holly Story;” then we worked together for a decade until her duties as AD conflicted with raising our new daughter. I stayed in the movie business and Maggie went into land preservation; eventually “directing" local government as Chair of the Board of Supervisors. We’ve been bi-coastal for over fifty years.

“John Butterworth was Director of Photography for “Music Connection”and actually came up with the idea to film the pop festival. Allen Facemire was a free-lance news cameraman from Jacksonville, with a lifelong connection to the Allman boys. Gary Jones was my fellow cameraman in Dallas; a gifted filmmaker whose composition is always perfect. Murray Campbell was another music video cameraman from Dallas, who brought his brother to volunteer as assistant camera. Alan Queveda was from Havana, through Miami, whose handheld camerawork is literally spectacular. Danny Lerner was an NFL colleague of Butterworth and has had a great career in sports photography. I was backup camera, and we had several local volunteers who would contribute with our semi-pro cameras.

“No one ever got paid.”

As for what was shown at the Plaza Theatre over a decade ago, “that was assembled from the footage that existed before restoration.”

He then starts to describe the technical side of the long, strange trip of his film.

“My investors bailed when the festival failed financially, leaving no money to process the film, which was then stored. In 1976, while shooting The Buddy Holly Story, I asked my Warner Brothers lab to develop a reel.

“‘It’s black, Steve; you have to process film before the latent image fades.’

“I moved the ruined film from Atlanta to Texas to California, and in 1980, to Pennsylvania, where it sat in my barn for another twenty years. Then my favorite D.P., Victor Fleming, asked how Maggie [his wife] and I met and through that he heard the story of the ruined film. When I told him it was Kodak Ektachrome, he introduced me to the chemist who invented that emulsion and had just resigned from Kodak in protest when Ektachrome was discontinued. He was an Allman Brothers fan and got interested:‘Reversal film is simply two negatives, Steve, back-to-back. You develop the first layer, then expose the second layer and wash away the first, leaving a negative of a negative. What’s happening is that, over time, the first layer has faded to almost transparent, which overexposes the second layer, making it look black. You might try only developing the first layer, wash away the second, then reverse polarity digitally.’

“But the reason Kodak discontinued the emulsion was that it required a chemical that was banned in 2000.  Except in Colorado, where a lab had been advertising in the back pages of Popular Science, ‘Did you find undeveloped film while cleaning out your parents’ house? We process old home movies!” I called the lab and confirmed they could develop 16mm Ektachrome.

“‘Yeah, we collect rolls all year until we get enough to pay for the chemicals to process a batch. How many rolls do you have?’ When I told him 50,000 feet, he said that would pay for a batch!  So the Kodak inventor in California, the lab in Colorado, and the digital imaging technicians at Technicolor New York collaborated for six months to find the best combination of time and temperature.

“The final half-developed negative is transparent to the naked eye, but laser scanners can find the faint image, and most of the film is salvageable, albeit frame-by-frame, for over ten years.

“Now, instead of two hours, the story is over eight. Every single act is now in the cut (except for a few who would not sign the permission-to-film release).

And how was the audio and video captured?

"We had one ‘single-system’ news camera that shot mag-stripe sound, a ‘double-system’ setup using a portable Nagra quarter-inch tape machine for documentary recording, and under the stage, two Nagras recording the live stage mix and audience mics. Time-code had not yet been invented and nothing was synced until post-production (a nightmare.) We had a joint-venture with Columbia Records to record multi-track with their remote truck and share the recordings in audio-visual products, but no one has paid for mix-down except the Allman Brothers for their live album audio-only product.

Over a decade ago, Rash was hoping to get distribution for an Atlanta Pop Festival documentary, or, at least have it made available through a streaming service. But presenting the Atlanta Pop Festival footage as an immersive experience? That was never part of his plan. Yet with such immersive experiences extremely popular with younger generations around the globe, it makes sense. What will “That 70s Experience” at Pullman Yards include? Will there be an actual screening of a long-form film, or will people walk around to different kiosks where they focus on different portions of the film?

Rash continues, “As a theatrical release, I’ve learned that this documentary only works in a four-hour format and that isn't appealing to theaters. Blu-Ray was wonderful, but physical media is dead.

“I have completed two 10-episode streaming series: 9 hours with all the hits; 7 hours without expensive Top-40 songs. (A surprise: the historical connection is better without the hits; with decades of marketing exploitation, those songs have become timeless; without historical context!)

“I see the immersive experience as an opportunity to preview and promote the film, hopefully generating awareness and interest in the content when available online.

“I’m not in control of the venue, but my understanding is that the more historical documentary footage will be in rooms focused on the story, with a larger concert venue featuring a giant screen portraying the headliners.”

Much of what many people have been eager to see, the Jimi Hendrix concert footage, has already been made available via the Experience Hendrix release, Electric Church, documenting the guitarist’s performance at the festival, marking not only his last major U.S. appearance before his untimely death two months later, but the largest U.S. audience to which Hendrix ever played. “That is not a problem,” Rash says, acknowledging Experience Hendrix’s use of his footage, as he has “a reciprocal rights agreement, when there’s a release,” to include that footage in a project of his own.

How many reels of this mythological footage was shot those three days and nights in Byron, GA, and how much of it is there still to be developed?

“We shot 75,000 feet of 16mm film. Everything has been developed, and most of it restored to acceptable quality (the most important aspect of the screening you attended years ago was the focus group that showed me not to worry about image quality; just get it out!).”

With Rash acknowledging that "everything has been developed," Atlanta music fans will want to know if any footage of Radar, Chakra, or the Hampton Grease Band — three seminal bands in Atlanta's vaunted music history — has emerged.

"We did restore footage of Radar, but Chakra and the Hampton Grease Band would not sign our ‘permission to film release;’ rather, they allowed someone else to shoot their performance. I’ve seen the HGB footage and would love to include it, but there’s no sound (they wouldn’t let us record either.)

For all Rash’s work pulling together this Atlanta Pop Festival project over the past five decades, there’s still the financial hurdle. Even though the film has been developed and restored use of the songs demands payment. Music may be free online, but that’s not the case when it comes to record labels, song publishing, and copyrights. As he notes, licensing the material of the artists performing at the Atlanta Pop Festival hasn’t been a problem in his seeing this project fully realized. It’s the financial restraints of affording the licensing fees that play the important part. Much of the music performed at the Second Atlanta Pop Festival has become the soundtrack to the lives of many of the people of the era. To use the songs in a film come at a high cost. “That specific period of music has endured for over 50 years and is too expensive for anything other than ad themes and jingles. Licensing is not a problem; cost is. And licensing fees must be paid in advance. Potential investors need confidence that the product will sell. Hopefully, this day of preview and tease will generate that confidence” to those who may see fit to investing funds to bring one of the two aforementioned ten episode streaming series to your screen. —CL—

A limited number of “Early Bird” tickets for “That 70s Experience” are on sale now at the original, 1970 Atlanta International Pop Festival ticket price of $16 (before fees) for Pullman Yards subscribers. Fans can purchase general admission tickets through the link in Pullman Yards' Instagram @PrattPullmanDistrict. “That 70s Experience” is an all-ages event. Visit www.PullmanYards.com for the most up-to-date information on this and all experiences on the Pullman Yards complex. Pullman Yards is located at 225 Rogers Street NE, Atlanta, Georgia.