Rick Nelson’s Final Hours in Small Town Alabama Explored in New Film: ‘I Had This Eerie Feeling’

Four minutes into the upcoming documentary Rick Nelson: Guntersville, we’re shown a modern restaurant with brick walls, pizza-eating customers, wandering waitresses and a TV on the wall tuned to sports. This is a crucial location: the site of PJ’s Alley, where Nelson performed his final set, closing with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” before boarding his DC-3 at the Guntersville, Ala., airport, then crashing en route to a 1985 New Year’s Eve gig in Dallas.

The film, directed by Nelson fan Kenny Scott Guffey, an indie filmmaker who made 2022’s A Night of the Undead, illuminates the rockabilly pioneer’s career by focusing on Guntersville, a city of about 9,000 people, many of whom remain obsessed with the local tragedy. “‘Haunted’ is a good word,” Guffey says. “They had just seen him a few hours before, playing on stage, alive and vibrant and happy, and everything was good — then, boom, they had the rug pulled out from under them. It’s definitely something that still affects them, as a town.”

Nelson, who died at 45, is the film’s subject, but it’s not a traditional documentary. Early on, Guffey breezes through classic clips of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, the ’50s and ‘60s TV show that made Nelson a teen idol, before featuring footage of him as a country star with hits like 1972’s “Garden Party.” However, the film is far more interested in the Guntersville characters who encountered the star just before his death: bandmates of the late Pat Upton, a longtime Nelson collaborator who opened the fateful concert; the club owner’s wife; and several fans who attended. The film lingers on an actor wearing Upton’s gold jacket — stamped with “Rick Nelson” and “Capitol Records” — which Lynn Upton, Pat’s widow, loaned to the production.

The subjects of Rick Nelson: Guntersville remain shellshocked 40 years after the crash that killed Nelson, his fiancée, Helen Blair, and five musicians who performed with his Stone Canyon Band. “Nothing like that had ever happened to our small town before,” one interviewee says.

Guffey’s original idea for the film was an “almost cinema verite or voyeuristic approach,” in which he would travel to Guntersville and observe locations that were meaningful to Nelson in his final days. But after vacationing with his wife for their anniversary in June 2024, they detoured from Florida to their Somerset, Ky., home. They had an early dinner at Pizza Ed, formerly PJ’s Alley, and, Guffey recalls, “I happened to look over that main room, where they have all their tables and booths and everyone eats. A portion of the stage was still there in the corner, and I’m like, ‘No fricking way. That’s the stage. That’s the stage.’”

Later, Guffey contacted the editor of The Advertiser-Gleam, Guntersville’s newspaper, who put him in touch with reporter Sara Watkins. She introduced him to local sources, provided historical context and came onto the film as a producer. “It changed the game,” he says. 

“I envisioned it as kind of lame compared to what it turned into.”

The film’s most emotional moments come at the end, when Guffey juxtaposes 1985 media footage with new local interviews to piece together the chronology of Nelson’s plane crash. Some were present at the airport before the flight, like Tim Hammond, who played keyboards with Upton in opening band Headline, helped load the Nelson group’s gear onto the plane and hung around the airport before departure: “I had this eerie feeling that something… was wrong,” Hammond recalls in the film. Lynn Upton adds that her husband begged Nelson not to take the flight, then returned home and said, ‘I don’t feel good about this at all.” 

The plane’s two pilots were the only survivors. “The town was in shock for days afterwards,” one broadcaster says.

Adds Hammond, in the film: “That night was a very sad night. It’s something [that] weighed pretty heavy with me for a long time. Still does, when I think about it.”

Rick Nelson: Guntersville also contains a lengthy recollection with two non-Guntersville residents, Dorothy Knight, whose late husband was longtime Nelson songwriter Baker Knight, and their daughter, Tuesday Knight, an ’80s pop singer and actress who appeared in two A Nightmare On Elm Street sequels. They talk mostly about Baker’s own tragic life — although media outlets reported he died of “natural causes” at age 72, in 2005, Tuesday Knight says in the film: “He shot himself.” This segment has little to do with Guntersville, but Guffey found it so poignant that he kept all of it in the film for an alternate “extended cut” for YouTube.

Guffey will premiere the film Sunday (Sept. 14) in Guntersville, projecting it on the stage where Nelson played his final show. The film’s distributor, Bayview Entertainment, plans to release the film on streaming services “later in the year,” according to Guffey. He contacted reps for Nelson’s twin sons, Gunnar and Matthew, who were in the hit ’90s duo Nelson, about the film, and received a “hey, they let them know” response. “I was like, ‘I’m going to quit bothering them,’” Guffey says. The film uses snippets of Nelson video performances over the years, plus a clip of Bob Dylan covering “Garden Party” earlier this year, citing the fair-use doctrine in U.S. copyright law in the film’s closing credits.

As a teenager, Guffey, now 37, first learned about Nelson from a magazine, relating to the star’s Ozzie & Harriet beginnings as a “pseudo-reality show before there was reality TV.” He became a fan of the show, concluding the child star could have been far bigger had he not had the misfortune of coming out at the same time as Elvis Presley, and later the British Invasion. “His story had always fascinated me,” Guffey says, then adds of his film: “I hope that it gets Rick some more recognition that he deserves.”