ABSTRACT
The first Atlanta International Pop Festival preceded Woodstock by more than a month and drew approximately 100,000 attendees. It was followed by the Texas International Pop Festival, held over Labor Day weekend (August 31–September 2) in 1969; and the second Atlanta International Pop Festival, held July 3–5, 1970. All of these festivals have as their common denominator the Atlanta-based concert promoter Alex Cooley, who would emerge from his work on these formative American rock festivals to become one of the dominant figures in rock concert production from the 1970s forward. Drawing upon internal documents preserved by Cooley, mixed with reports from the mainstream and underground press of the period, I use Cooley's early career as a case study to examine the ideological imperatives of festival production during a time when the efforts of promoters to build a profitable business model existed in uneasy tension with the widespread demand for festivals to be free.
