Photo by Haynes McFadden. Bucky is left behind the projector.
Bucky Wetherell was at Atlanta School of Art when ‘the scene’ started, worked with early light shows at The Catacombs with The Electric Collage Lightshow. He then became part of STOMP. STOMP was a tribal musical like Hair, but actually created by hippies. It started in Texas, matured here, moved to New York and returned to be firebombed in Atlanta.
Mother David , king of Atlanta hippies according to the papers, was a model at the Atlanta School of Art by The High Museum where a lot of the ‘scene’ started.
Introduction to Bucky
The Strip
The Catacombs
Light shows
Light show techniques moved into movie making and into Atlanta’s Electric Collage Light Show. Lots of creativity tales centered around the High Museum area.
Hendrix
Filmaking
High Museum
Haynes McFadden
Stomp – on stage
Stomp arson.
Palinurus Gallery, 15th street
Bradshaws
Richards nightclub
Alex Cooley
The scene blossoms in 1969. People and places emerge.
From Atlanta and Environs: a chronicle of its people and events; years of change and challenge, 1940-1976: “In December, though, a twenty-seven-year old Atlantan who police said was the king pin of the LSD traffic at pop festivals was arrested while attempting to deliver fifteen pounds of marijuana and 900 LSD tablets to Cocoa, Florida. A long-haired man, he was known in hippie circles as “Atlanta Schroder.” When his apartment, which he shared with several others, was searched, 5,000 LSD tablets were confiscated. Schroder, being absent, was not among the eighteen arrested in this raid.”
Shroder was on the scene and has some great tales. Here are some adventures backstage at festivals and beyond for your edification.
Bongo, Peter Jenkins, was Atlanta’s digger who fed the masses in Piedmont Park, ran crash pads for transient kids, and mediated between bikers and hippies.
Miller Francis grew up in Anniston, Alabama in a working class family. He was in high school when a Freedom Rider bus was attacked and burned just outside of town.
Inspired by the example of Harper Lee and “To Kill A Mockingbird”, he studied fiction writing at the University of Alabama. There he watched as then-Governor George Wallace took his stand for racial segregation in the schoolhouse door, and met Vivian Malone and James Hood after they were admitted as students.
He joined thousands at a rally in the former capitol of the Confederacy to welcome those who had marched for civil rights from Selma to Montgomery. In 1967 he refused induction into the Army in protest against the Vietnam War. He married Kathy McLaughlin, once in the Catholic student center with family members, and second in a large, public Wed-In on the campus quadrangle on the day “Sgt Pepper” was first released. They moved to Atlanta, where he was later arrested and where the ACLU took his legal case. (The Army ordered a second physical exam in which it discovered a pre-diabetic condition; charges were dropped only two weeks before trial was to begin.) For several years, Miller did legal secretarial work for Attorney Charles Morgan at the Southern Regional Office of the ACLU, and the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, as well as free lance work for Angela Davis’ attorney, Howard Moore.
As forces for radical change gained momentum in the Sixties, Miller was drawn from fiction writing to another road. He became more active politically, writing only non-fiction, while continuing to demonstrate for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. At the height of the social upsurge, he lived for a time in an Atlanta commune called The Heathen Rage, and wrote music and film reviews for “The Great Speckled Bird”, a weekly underground newspaper. Some of his articles were reprinted by other underground newspapers, and he also contributed briefly to Rolling Stone and Cream (including a review of Music To Eat by The Hampton Grease Band). He covered national events such as the Woodstock Music Festival, the Memphis Blues Festival and the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival. His enthusiastic “discovery” article about The Allman Brothers Band’s first performance in Piedmont Park is still being quoted (Scott Freeman, “Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band”). As early as 1969, Rolling Stone Magazine called Miller “one of the best rock and roll writers the underground has produced. . .unique in his ability to place rock in the perspective of the revolution”. In his book “The Paper Revolutionaries”, Laurence Leamer called Miller “the most articulate of the cultural radicals. [He] maneuvers the symbols of cultural radicalism with the subtlety and sureness of Marx working with the tools of economic determinism.” As different social movements began to develop, Miller also wrote articles dealing with the oppression of women and homosexuals.
Changes come to The South
Atlanta calls!
Miller awaits the GBI with “Boy”, Tracy Shepard, at Heathen Rage on 14th Street
1967 caught in the draft
Miller and his first wife
Miller Meets The Bird
Movie freak starts writing movie reviews
Tracy Shephard, Lenden Sandler, Miller Francis, Dee McCargo on at Heathen Rage 14th
Draft resistors
Gay Declaration
About these photos
Heathen Rage – At the height of the social upsurge, Miller lived for a time in an Atlanta commune called The Heathen Rage, and wrote music and film reviews for “The Great Speckled Bird”, a weekly underground newspaper.
Joe Shifalo, aka Pig Iron, loved music and played guitar and harmonica. He was a lawyer and civil rights activist, and he retired as executive director of the Little Five Points Community Center. The unofficial ‘Mayor of Little Five Points’. (photo on right by Boyd Lewis)
RIP Pig Iron March 2009Toni Shifalo (aka La Banana
Joe’s partner Toni Shifalo is a local celebrity in her own right as La Banana.
Among other accomplishments she founded the Groundhog Day Juggler’s Festival. She was interviewed a year after Joe’s death and gave an interesting counterpoint to Pig Iron’s story. Amazing how they parallel.
All recordings copyright the strip project
Coming to Atlanta – Joe
Coming to Atlanta – Toni
Living on 15th Street – Toni
Walking The Strip – Joe Shifalo
Toni on The Strip
A headstart trippin’ through the delta – Joe Shifalo
Shifalo Druid Wedding on 15th Street
Druid Wedding by the High Museum – Toni
Leaving The Strip area
Toni’s bad experience
The Allman Brothers in Piedmont Park
The Piedmont Police Riot – Joe Shifalo
Rebellion in the park and the streets – Joe Shufalo
Toni on Piedmont Park
Music in Piedmont Park – Joe Shifalo
Toni on Richards
Toni’s Woodstock Tale
The Woodstock album cover – Toni Shifalo
Little Five Points – Toni
Acid Sun – Toni
Joe on Toni
Robert ‘Joe’ Shifalo, musician, ‘mayor’ of Little Five Points By HOLLY CRENSHAW The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday, March 29, 2009
There were too many forces pulling at Joe Shifalo — too many battles to fight, too many songs to sing, too many passionate pursuits to take up — for him to settle into a predictable life.
The unofficial mayor of Little Five Points, Mr. Shifalo was a lawyer with a beat poet’s soul. He battled poverty, spun blues records and folksy Southern tales on the radio, and championed the underdog whenever he could.
“If he could have made a living from music, he probably would have done that,” said his wife, Christena Bledsoe of Atlanta. “But he often said that then he would have missed out, because he also was very much the social activist.”
Robert M. “Joe” Shifalo, 65, died of a heart attack March 22 at his Atlanta residence. The body was cremated. Memorial service plans will be announced. R.T. Patterson Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.
The Florida native lived in New York City in the late 1960s, where he fell in with Dave Van Ronk and other Greenwich Village folk singers. He sang, played guitar and harmonica and performed jug band music and blues songs for the rest of his life.
Most Atlantans knew him under the stage moniker of Pig Iron, but after a bout with lung cancer, he jokingly referred to himself as the bluesy-sounding “Half-Lung.”
He recorded two albums and six CDs, appeared at festivals, coffeehouses and blues clubs, and often performed with his former wife and still-close friend, Toni Shifalo, holding down the beat on her washtub bass.
When the listener-supported radio station WRFG launched in 1973, Mr. Shifalo served as one of its original on-air personalities and launched its long-running “Good Morning Blues” program.
He persuaded the Atlanta Board of Education to rent an abandoned school building for $1 a year and transformed it into the Little Five Points Community Center. The building now houses WRFG and a handful of other arts and community nonprofit groups that help give the neighborhood its bohemian character.
He volunteered with the Atlanta Planning Board, spearheaded neighborhood groups and helped save the Candler Park golf course, on top of his career as an attorney and civil rights activist.
Armed with a degree from John Marshall Law School, he fought poverty through his work with Economic Opportunity Atlanta and battled discrimination as executive director of Metro Fair Housing Services.
“Joe was a child of the ’60s,” said Foster Corbin of East Point, the current executive director of Metro Fair Housing. “He thought all people should have equal access to housing and to the law and to all the things that white, straight males get in this country.”
Mr. Shifalo was free-thinking, unconventional and unconcerned with how people dressed or looked, his wife said. He created folk art paintings and loved to study the exotic birds near his second home in Cedar Keys, Fla. He gravitated to science-fiction novels, she said, because they made him think about the future.
“Joe really believed in social change,” his wife said. “He thought by now we’d be further ahead than where we are, but he loved to talk about how much things had changed since his childhood.”
When he retired in January as executive director of the Little Five Points Community Center, his send-off was a sprawling, sentimental shindig. When his death was announced on WRFG, admirers lit up the phone lines.
“Joe was a performer, but on a private level he was very tender,” his wife said. “After they told me he had died, I was touching him and could still feel all of this love coming out of him, because he had so much love for so many people.”
There are no other immediate survivors.
You survive in the folks of Little Five Points, Pig Iron.
Alex Cooley opened Atlanta to the music world, and vice versa. He also brought MidTown Music Festival to The Strip!
He has some very interesting things to say.
Thanks Alex for all the great music over the years.
Thanks especially for bringing The Grateful Dead to Piedmont Park.
Hello, Welcome to our oral history freak parade. We want all the old freaks, as we so self identified ourselves in the daze, to get their story on record.
Have your own story to record? Contact us.
Interviews around town
[All recordings are under copyright of The Strip Project and remain their property. Please Respect the rights of the owners and enjoy. All views expressed are those of the interviewee.]
[All recordings are under copyright of The Strip Project and remain their property. Please Respect the rights of the owners and enjoy. All views expressed are those of the interviewee.]
