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Alex
Cooley |
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Alex
Cooley is an international concert and music festival promoter,
and a household name among Atlanta’s live music fans. Born
and raised in Atlanta, he attended Georgia State University
and the University of Georgia before being lured into entrepreneurial
pursuits. From humble beginnings, Alex has become one of the
most trusted and renowned promoters in the world. His ability
to realize the cultural value of live music has distinctly
shaped Atlanta’s entertainment landscape. He has helped save
The Fox Theatre from demolition, turned The Roxy and The Tabernacle
into music landmarks, and filled downtown Atlanta streets
with the largest music festival in the country. The local
newspapers have charted his career calling him “The Mayor
of Music” and “the Guy who Brought Rock and Roll to Atlanta.”
With four decades experience buying music talent, promoting
concerts, producing festivals and operating live music venues,
he has deeply impacted Georgia’s entertainment industry.
In the late 1960’s as war and civil rights issues raged in
America, Alex found himself at the Miami Pop festival. With
a full roster of world class talent, the experience opened
his eyes to a new era of live entertainment. He instantly
wanted to bring this new phenomenon to Atlanta. Propelled
by a desire to affect the political and cultural isolation
of the deep South, Alex organized the Atlanta International
Pop Festival in 1969. Featuring a lineup of more than twenty
pop and rock acts, the festival occurred a month before the
famous Woodstock festival in New York. The 2nd Atlanta International
Pop Festival in 1970 was the largest gathering of people in
Georgia history until the 1996 Olympics. That weekend “Woodstock
Nation” descended on little Byron, Georgia in a stunning display
of common cause. By most accounts, those that came represented
a broad cross section of youth at the time. The Athens Banner
Herald reported on July 5, 1970 that “the majority of persons
around the festival [were] representative of middle-class
and up Americana,” but to Middle Georgia, Cooley remembers,
“Aliens might as well have landed.”
The festivals were a symbol of Southern mainstream youth's growing acceptance of rock and roll, and of the growing influence
of countercultural values. They also began a festival tradition
of offering a diverse lineup and aiding the discovery of new
music. The events showed a clear demand for new music in the
South, and Alex tapped the momentum. In the years to come,
he would host thousands of rock and roll concerts at nightclubs,
halls, theaters, auditoriums, stadiums, and public parks in
Atlanta and around the world.
As creator of internationally recognized Music Midtown Festival
and the historically significant Atlanta International Pop
Festivals, he has been a driving force behind Atlanta’s large
demand for live music. The first major concert promotion and
production company in the south was Alex Cooley, Inc. in 1970,
and in the 80's founded Concert/Souther Promotions with longtime partner Peter Conlon. By 1987 Alex had been inducted into the Georgia Music
Hall of Fame. He also set in motion some of the largest cultural
events in U.S. history. The Atlanta International Pop festival
attracted over 150,000 people. The Texas International Pop
festival drew 150,000. By some estimates, The Second Atlanta
International Pop festival drew 500,000 souls in search of
freedom and music. More recently the Music Midtown festival
ran for twelve years and brought upwards of 300,000 people.
In 2004, he was awarded a Grammy HEROES Award by the National Academy of Recording Artists
and Sciences (NARAS) and he also served
on the Board of Governors for the Georgia Chapter of NARAS. Alex represented
Georgia and U.S. entertainment industries at the G-8 Summit
by request of Georgia’s governor, in 2004.
“It’s not time to go sit on the mountain yet,” he laughs.
He sits back in his leather chair behind a large desk. Piles
of correspondence, financial statements, research, books,
movies, a computer, a cat and a dog vie for his attention.
His office sits in a separate building from his main house
on Lookout Mountain. “There are more things Atlanta can do
to enhance its identity as a music capital. I’d like to see
Atlanta grow and prosper in many ways, I would like Atlanta
to be a place for groups and musicians to do really innovative
great things.” In his Midtown office where Cooley spends half
of his time, he’s busy developing new projects and granting
speaking requests. His lesson from concerts and festivals
from The Atlanta Pop Festivals to Music Midtown is that live
music still has the ability to deliver ideas, and to build
communities and cultures. “Music is a molding agent. It changes
societies. In medieval times, touring minstrels spread new
ideas from castle to castle. In modern times, it can be very
powerful because people have more access to musical instruments
and more ways to record and distribute it.”
Over the span of forty years, Alex has adjusted to the expectations
of concert goers, and the ups and downs in concert and festival
markets. The amateur architect, technology buff, armchair
historian, activist, preservationist, and rock and roll impresario
lives by his world-view of “enlightened self-interest,” and
a core belief that there’s a lot more to life than money.
“I’ve tilted at my share of windmills. I guess if I’d gone
into all of this with just money on my mind I would be fabulously
wealthy…and I’m not.” His focus on the talent and the audience,
has shielded him from the many changes in the music industry,
proving that long-term success in live music requires a focus
on the experience. Through thousands of productions and across
decades Alex has never lost sight of his main objective: To
create a conducive atmosphere for artists and audiences, where
music can help make something even bigger happen. |
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September 23,
1989 |
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| Saturday,
February 2, 1980. Music Section |
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| Sunday
May 7, 1995 |
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| Saturday
November 6, 2004 |
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Alex would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this website: Christina Reyes, Robert Ramsey, Young Charles, Rick Diamond, Bill Dial, Joseph Johnson. "The creativity was all theirs. The mistakes are mine" -Alex Cooley
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