http://gotriad.news-record.com/content/2010/07/14/article/remembering_nc_s_woodstock
July 15, 2010
By Parke Puterbaugh
Everybody knows about Woodstock, especially after last year's 40th
anniversary media blitz, but relatively few are aware that North
Carolina had its own supersized rock festival one year later.
The Love Valley Rock Festival was held July 16-18, 1970, and this
weekend marks its 40th anniversary.
The site of the festival was the Western-themed community of Love
Valley, 15 miles north of Statesville. Over a summer weekend, this
small town became a big city, swelling from roughly 100 full-time
residents to perhaps 200,000 youthful pilgrims.
The lineup of bands did not rival that of Woodstock or the two
Atlanta pop festivals the second of which took place just two weeks
prior to Love Valley. There were few big-name performers because the
bands weren't paid anything.
What they got in return for showing up and playing was a huge, rapt
audience and public exposure. Consequently, it was mostly regional
and local acts hoping to break through.
Love Valley was practically a free festival all the way around. Mayor
and festival organizer Andy Barker charged only five dollars per
ticket for the three-day event, and many who attended found ways to
evade paying even that small fee.
The festival was not without controversy, as surrounding farmers and
Statesville residents were unamused by the massive infestation of
music-loving hippies and drug-taking weirdos.
Barker says that 43 bands played during the three-day festival. The
headliner was the Allman Brothers Band, who barely a year old and
with just one album to their credit weren't all that well-known.
However, they were as tight and inspired as they could be, and they
blazed through a couple of memorably lengthy sets over the weekend.
"They were awesome," recalls Chuck Eldridge, who served as Barker's
right-hand man at the festival. "I saw them dozens of times
afterwards, and the music I heard at Love Valley was some of the best
I ever heard them do."
Other recognizable acts at Love Valley included British
singer-guitarist Terry Reid; the Hampton Grease Band and Flood, both
from Atlanta; and future Southern-rock mainstays Wet Willie, who
hailed from Alabama. From the West Coast came Big Brother featuring
Ernie Joseph (not to be confused with Big Brother and the Holding
Company). From the Triad, Mitch Easter's psychedelic high-school band
Sacred Irony performed, as did Greensboro's own Kallabash.
Because of its size, the Love Valley Rock Festival made headlines.
Beyond the initial buzz, the festival served notice that the
counterculture was beginning to invade formerly resistant corners of
the hippie-hating South.
"We all felt we were re-creating Woodstock," says Marilyn Wolf, who
attended the festival with a group of friends. "That was the hope."
In fact, Love Valley did become a little counter-cultural hub for a
few years after the festival. Among those who stuck around or
returned from time to time were members of the Allman Brothers Band.
In fact, Andy Barker claims the Allmans' ties to Love Valley run so
deep that they offered to perform for free on the festival's 25th
anniversary and wanted to do something this year for the 40th, too.
Barker, however respectfully declined. One Love Valley Rock Festival,
apparently, was enough.
"I told 'em I like 'em and they can always come visit, but I don't
want no damn concert in here," Barker said, with a resolute chuckle.
"I've had all that I want."
Here are some recollections from a half-dozen folks who fondly recall
Love Valley and those high-flying times.
Marilyn Wolf, psychotherapist, Greensboro:
"It was peaceful. People were camping and sleeping in vans. I went
with a bunch of kids, and we pitched tents. People were sharing food.
My family was in Laurinburg. That's all agriculture down there, so we
took a van full of vegetables, and that's what we shared. Little
communities formed, like 10 tents would form a little village. We had
a truckload of watermelons and they were a big hit. They called us
the Watermelon Gang.
"My overall memory of Love Valley is that I felt very safe there.
People were smoking pot and drinking without any fear of getting in
trouble. And so it was this feeling of freedom. I was a 16-year-old
hippie girl attending my first rock festival, and I remember that
feeling of, 'We can do what we wanna do, and we're not going to get
in trouble.'"
Monty Campbell, musician, Greensboro:
"I was 18 years old, and I thumbed up to Love Valley by myself. I ran
into a guy I'd met a few times before, and I hung out with him and a
couple of his friends all weekend. On Saturday afternoon he said
something about going to a lake. A bunch of us piled on this car,
which was the thing to do that day, and they drove us down to this
lake. I just sat there and laughed my head off watching the local
cops take pictures of all the girls with their tops off. It was a
bizarre scene.
"The musical stage was set in this giant circle where they had rodeos
and horse shows. I remember the Allman Brothers and Kallabash, who
were from Greensboro. At the end of their show, Kallabash set off
smoke bombs, and when the air cleared, they were all standing naked onstage."
Pam Simon, family-law attorney, Statesville:
"After the festival, I lived in a teepee in Love Valley. Some of the
Allman Brothers were hanging out there, too. Dickey (Betts) and Butch
(Trucks) and Red Dog (an Allman Brothers roadie) were around a lot. A
handful of us hitchhiked to one of their concerts at the Fillmore
East in New York City (in 1971), and we stayed with them in their
suite on Park Avenue.
"I hitchhiked back to Love Valley afterward and was in my teepee
making breakfast when Dickey showed up. The band had played another
gig the night before somewhere on Long Island. But the first thing he
did after that was come back to Love Valley. So we had breakfast in
my teepee on the Monday morning following the recording of 'Live at
Fillmore East.'
"I was talking with Dickey backstage in Charlotte many years later
and he said, 'You're a lawyer. ... You must live in a three-story teepee now!'"
Rory Knapton, musician, Dahlonega, Ga.:
"I was in a band called Flood. We were playing the pop-festival
circuit, and we heard about Love Valley. We just drove up from
Atlanta, weren't even on the bill, and they said, 'C'mon and play.'
We played between the Hampton Grease Band and the Allman Brothers.
"We fell in love with Love Valley. We all rented cabins and stayed
there after the festival. We hung out for a year and a half during
the old hippie-culture time and had the best times of our lives. Just
a bunch of hippies doing hippie things jamming and having a big old time.
"One time we lost every bit of our equipment up at Love Valley. We
had a roadie whose name was Moon Unit, and he drove our equipment
truck up a dirt road to a place called Fox Lake with a girl to have
an intimate time with her. Well, during that somehow the brake got
kicked off, and it rolled down the hill, went right in the lake and
sunk to the bottom. Fox Lake was an old rock quarry, so it was deep.
We went up there to see what happened, and you could still see the
light shining at the bottom.
"We lost everything Hammond organ, drums, PA but we said, 'Ah,
well, we'll just work and do the best we can,' and we kind of got it
back again."
Butch Trucks, drummer, Allman Brothers Band, West Palm Beach, Fla.:
"Love Valley became kind of a focal point for the Allman Brothers
Band. We all just started hanging out there. Love Valley was where we
lived and hung out when we weren't working. Dickey built a house
there. That's where he was living with Sandy Blue Sky when he wrote 'Blue Sky.'
"It was such a cool place. You had to ride horses. It was just like
this Wild West town, and I can remember nights we were full of
moonshine and LSD, having fake fights and falling out of the second
floor of the hotel with one of the guys in the middle of the street
cracking a whip. It was nuts. I mean, it was crazy.
"The only negative thing about the festival was that it got so hot
when we were playing. Somebody decided to turn on the hoses, and they
just watered down the whole audience. But then people started
slinging mud at each other. Some of that mud hit Duane's Les Paul
gold-top guitar, and he got pissed. And he walked off stage, went
back to the Winnebago and said, 'I ain't playin' no more.' It took us
a long time to talk him into getting back onstage and playing. I
mean, that guitar was more important to him than just about anything.
"So finally, after about an hour, we went back out and got everybody
to agree to quit … well, they kept throwing mud at each other, but
they were very careful that it didn't hit toward the stage."
C.W. "Chuck" Eldridge, tattoo artist, Winston-Salem:
"I'd gotten out of the Navy in '69 and stayed in California long
enough for my hair to get long. I came back to North Carolina, which
is my home, and nobody would hire me because of my long hair.
Everybody said, "If you cut your hair, we'll give you a job." I was
still a young man waving my freak flag, so there was no way I was
gonna get my hair cut for these crummy jobs.
"I was sitting at a little coffee shop in Elkin reading the paper and
I saw a little ad that said Love Valley was making plans to have a
rock festival. I thought to myself, 'There's my job.' So I hitchhiked
to Love Valley, told Andy Barker why I was there, and he hired me on
the spot. Immediately there was a job for me. I kind of became the
face of the festival. Because of the long hair, I had the look. So
whenever the press would come around and want to know what kind of
rocks we were gonna have at our mineral show you laugh, but
literally, I answered those kinds of questions I was the person who
dealt with them.
"That was kind of my job, and of course there were many other jobs I
did along the way and I stuck around afterwards. It was certainly a
good memory, one of the high points of my life."
--
Contact Parke Puterbaugh at parkeputerbaugh@earthlink.net
--
Q&A WITH ANDY BARKER
Andy Barker founded Love Valley in 1954 as a "Christian cowboy
community" a bit of the Old West in the foothills of North
Carolina, complete with horses and a rodeo ring. The Love Valley Rock
Festival was just a blip in its 66-year history. It may have been an
unforgettable three-day event to the many thousands of rock fans who
attended the 1970 festival, but for more than a century Love Valley
itself has been a stable community and way of life to Barker and the
hundred or so who call it home.
With a twinkle in his eye, the 85-year-old town patriarch answered
questions about the town and festival from his perch at Andy's
Hardware, the old-fashioned store he owns and operates.
Why did you throw a rock festival?
My kids said they were going to a rock festival (the second Atlanta
pop festival, in Byron, Ga.). I said, "What in the devil is a rock
festival?" They tried to explain it to me, and I said, "Well, hell,
I'll just have one here." They said, "Daddy, you don't know what
you're talkin' about." I said, "Hell, I don't care. We'll do it." So
I decided to do it.
What is the best estimate of how many people were here?
Nobody knows. I sold 59,000 tickets for five dollars, that's what I
got for 'em. Another fellow a Greensboro boy, in fact
counterfeited 10,000 more and sold 'em. We were sellin' 'em for $5,
and he was sellin' 'em for $4. A lot of people walked through the
woods into Love Valley and never paid a dime. We had estimates from
200,000 to 250,000. At one time, the arena was full, the camping area
was full, and the mountain behind the arena was solid people. We have
found areas as much as two and three miles from here where they camped out.
Drugs were always an issue at rock festivals. How did you deal with them?
Oh, we had one joker that got on top of the building down there, he
said he could fly. We had a hell of a time gettin' him down. I sat on
one for about two hours until he calmed down. He was crazy, I mean
wild. The people that was sellin' the LSD and everything, there
must've been about 20 of 'em. And we had the Iron Cross out of
Atlanta, who later became the Outlaws, the bike boys. They had about
75-80 people here. I went to the chief, whose name was Surfer, and
said, "Look, Surfer, I want these drugs out of here. Go take every
damn thing you can get your hands on and run 'em out." They started
doin' it. Well, in a while, a bunch of these young fellows come to my
house and said, "We want this motorcycle crowd to leave us alone or
we're gonna burn this town down." I said, "Well, just a minute, boys.
Lemme see if I can talk to somebody." I went in and got my sawed-off
shotgun. I said, "I'm gonna shoot every one of you (expletive)," and
man, they scattered like quail. I didn't have any more problems outta them.
What did you make of the counterculture? What did you think of the kids?
Oh, the kids were great. All of them. In fact, I bailed some of them
out of jail. They were good kids. I mean, they were just havin' a
good time. They still come see me all the time. I had one here last
week. I never know when they're gonna show up. And they'll tell me
what I did for them. I tried to help the kids, really.
Did you become a fan of rock music as a result of the festival?
No, I didn't change. I still liked Guy Lombardo and Tommy Dorsey and
that crowd. That's my kind of music.
.
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