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.
— Parke Puterbaugh
