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The temperature was over 100 degrees on the weekend of July 19 in 1974, when the small town of Sedalia, Missouri, hosted a massive rock ‘n’ roll festival. It would never happen again.
The exact number of attendees at the Ozark Music Festival remains a mystery. But at least 100,000 people (probably more) flooded the Missouri State Fairgrounds for a three-day concert with popular headliners like the Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd and a couple dozen others.
“It was the best weekend ever,” says Tamra Pendell-Crouch, who was in the crowd.
Not everybody agrees.
“It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in Sedalia, Missouri, in my life!” a longtime Sedalia resident named Maxine Griggs told filmmaker Jefferson Lujin.
Lujin has spent more than a decade gathering bootlegs, reviewing government reports and interviewing more than 100 people to understand what actually happened that weekend and why his town is still talking about it 50 years later.
The summer of 1974
It was an era of culture clash. The Vietnam War was winding down while the War on Drugs was heating up. Congress was poised to impeach President Nixon for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. And the younger Woodstock generation was often at odds with their more conservative parents. All of that was on full display at the Ozark Music Festival.
Lujin was only three years old in 1974. But growing up, he could never escape the legend of that weekend.
“Teachers would reference this giant concert that went crazy,” he recalls. One time when he was in New York, the bouncer at a bar saw his ID from Sedalia and said the festival was the best party he’d ever been to.
Motivated by those stories, and perhaps a little FOMO, Lujin started working on the film and tracked down Chris Fritz, the mastermind behind the whole event.
A promoter’s dream
Today, Fritz is the president of Azura Amphitheater. Back in 1974, he was a young music promoter putting on small rock shows at Fairyland Park, a Kansas City amusement park run by the Brancato Family until 1977.
Dreaming of a bigger event, Fritz pitched the idea for the Ozark Music Festival to his Fairyland partners, Sal Brancato and advertiser Bob Shaw. The larger venue Fritz had in mind was the Missouri State Fairgrounds in Sedalia.
While Fritz started figuring out which musical acts to book, Shaw and other partners hammered out a contract with the Missouri Department of Agriculture.
The terms of that contract would later become a contentious issue, as would the promised genres of music.
To win local approval, Fritz and Co. initially pitched the festival as a bluegrass event.
“We were thinking, well, really, an extreme rock show probably won’t be what is on everybody’s appetite. Especially in the Bible Belt and Sedalia,” Fritz told Lujin.
But gradually, harder rock acts started joining the bill: REO Speedwagon, Lynyrd Skynyrd, America, the Eagles, The Electric Flag, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger and a few up-and-comers like Aerosmith. They even invited popular FM radio DJ Wolfman Jack to emcee and promote it.
As news of the lineup began to spread, locals started getting nervous.
“You know all they thought was, ‘OK, here comes sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll,’” recalls Tamra Pendell-Crouch. “They were just scared.”
Rock festivals had a bad reputation due to widespread drug use and even some fatalities at events like Woodstock and Altamont. In a letter to the editor of the local Daily Democrat, one reader, counting himself among the “God-fearing people of Sedalia,” said he was sure the whole thing would be a “wild, sinful masquerade.”
Can we cancel this?
On July 8, just 11 days before the Ozark Music Festival was set to begin, then-Gov. Kit Bond met with law enforcement officials to discuss canceling the event.
This was after undercover agents with the Missouri Highway Patrol observed flagrant drug use and inept security at a smaller festival on Chuck Berry’s Farm outside of St. Louis. Reportedly, many Chuck Berry attendees were heading west to Sedalia.
But after taking a closer look at the terms of the contract, they realized cancellation would be tricky.
The promoters, Lujin explains, “snuck in a bit that said this cannot be canceled until the day of the festival. Which, of course, by then everyone’s there.”
A sea of people
When promoters originally pitched the festival, they estimated a crowd of 50,000. In the week leading up to the event, local officials began to suspect that was way off. Thousands of festival-goers began arriving early and camping out near the fairgrounds.
And they were hungry.
Store owners closed up shop after crowds cleared their shelves. Farmers fretted over stripped cornfields. James Mathewson, who was a state representative at the time, told Lujin a frantic constituent complained that people had butchered and barbecued one of his cows.
When drug use became apparent at the campgrounds, law enforcement officials debated how best to intervene. Ultimately, they decided that security within the festival gates should be handled by the private agency procured by the promoters because the crowd size was just too daunting — though the Missouri National Guard would be standing by, just in case.
As the crowds swelled, organizers were too slow in opening the gates. At some point, someone cut a hole in the fence surrounding the fairgrounds and people flooded in. Organizers stopped taking tickets, so it’s impossible to know exactly how many people were there.
“I would guess 250,000,” Lujin estimates, adding that some people say it was 350,000. “You don’t know.”
The turnout was far larger than anyone anticipated. And by Friday morning, the Ozark Music Festival was essentially a free concert.
The music and the madness
On opening night, the Eagles dedicated “Already Gone” to the embattled President Nixon, who would resign less than three weeks later. The party was just getting started.
People took off their clothes because it was so hot. Some Sedalia residents were appalled by the rampant nudity and drug use. Medical personnel on site treated hundreds of drug overdoses.
A 20-year-old from Illinois, Allan Cragnotti, was rushed to an area hospital on Saturday, where he was declared dead of an apparent overdose. His was the only reported death that weekend.
While the negative stories linger, there were positive stories, too.
“A lot of Sedalians sort of stepped up, knew these were just kids, and made food for them, put their hoses out. For the most part, it worked out pretty well,” recalls Lujin.
Jim Cooper, who was at the concert, described it as “a couple hundred thousand people just having a blast.”
But as the festival came to a close, it left a literal and political mess.
“It was the last of the really big, silly, stupid outdoor shows,” stage manager Joe Maceda told Lujin. “Nobody was gonna let this happen again.”
The fallout
A group of state senators stood amid the sea of leftover garbage to hold a press conference to announce a select committee to investigate the Ozark Rock Festival.
During hearings later that summer, senators took testimony from state officials and medical personnel. They interrogated promoter Bob Shaw about the music played that weekend. Alleging they had been misled, they dissected the genres of rock ’n’ roll and bluegrass music in detail.
A grand jury issued warrants to promoters Shaw, Chris Fritz and Sal Brancato. None were convicted. But a year later, Gov. Kit Bond signed a bill giving county and municipal judges the authority to regulate big festivals.
And while the Missouri State Fairgrounds would go on to host other rock events, they would never again host a festival as big as the Ozark Music Festival.
“It really became the favorite thing for people to talk about forever,” says Lujin, who hopes to release his documentary in the near future to keep the legend alive.
He acknowledges that the moment marked a cultural clash, but says it also helped unite his town.
“In a weird sort of way it became part of the town’s identity,” Lujin says. “Because it was so intense, it affected everybody. Probably Sedalia never felt more like a community than it did then.”
This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced and mixed by David McKeel with editing by Suzanne Hogan, C.J. Janovy and Mackenzie Martin.
