The Road to Woodstock (11 page)

I also wanted to let the audience know that this wasn’t all about money. As far as money goes, we all do what we can to get by. But if you can get by and also do some good, that’s where it’s at. I was single, had simple material needs at the time, and was living my dream. But I knew that John should make a return for the investment and his and Joel’s hard work, and that Artie and I deserved something for all our work.

After about four hours of discussion, the two hundred or so people at the seminar voted that Woodstock should remain as we envisioned it: three days of peace and music. Politics, while represented in booths and in distributed literature in an area called Movement City, would not be part of the onstage proceedings.

Being hammered from the right and the left, I clearly saw the road we had to travel: It was the place where art and commerce could coexist, where opposing ideas could coexist, where our humanity would come first and our differences would just add color. Elements of the festival were deeply grounded in the underground movement but without the overt politics—the focus would remain peace and music.

Around the same time, Stan had contacted a group with experience setting up and running the campgrounds and free kitchens. The Hog Farm was—and still is—an entertainment/activist commune that formed in Los Angeles in 1965. By 1969, they were living in New Mexico when not presenting their free “Hog Farm and Friends” road show. (They got their name babysitting a pig farm in Sunland, California.) One of the founders, Hugh Romney, had been a Beat poet in the
fifties and, backed by jazz players, used to give readings in the Village. He opened shows for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and in the early sixties was poetry director of the Gaslight. His wit and subversive one-liners impressed Lenny Bruce, who became his manager for a while.

The Hog Farm included Hugh’s wife, Bonnie Jean (the subject of Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country”), and several members of the Merry Pranksters, who cooked up the Acid Tests with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead in the Bay Area. The Pranksters’ psychedelic bus further inspired the Hog Farm’s own bus, Road Hog. Stan first contacted the Hog Farm back in April when they were marooned in New York following an incident in Pennsylvania. They’d been driving through in their bus and were pulled over by the cops. One Hog Farmer had been busted when the cops found a pipe with cannabis ash in it in his sleeping bag. The others were doing odd jobs in New York to raise money to pay his bail. Stan met with them in a loft on Houston Street that belonged to Calico (aka Elizabeth Zandermee), a friend of the Hog Farm and the Grateful Dead. Stan told them about the festival and that we’d like them to participate. They seemed dubious but agreed to meet me.

A couple of days later, Stan and I met Hugh and Bonnie Jean and some of the others at the Cauldron. An unforgettable character, Hugh was missing most of his teeth and was wearing a straw cowboy hat with a big feather in it. He struck me as some sort of cosmic clown/word slinger. Today, everyone knows him as Wavy Gravy—B. B. King gave him that name at a Texas festival a short time after Woodstock.

That day at the Cauldron, over bowls of brown rice and steamed vegetables, we talked about what Woodstock was going to be and the role I envisioned for them: mainly to run the campgrounds, free stage, and free kitchens. The conversation turned to their experiences dealing with people having bad acid trips and OD’ing on drugs, and I realized how important they could be in helping us accomplish our goals. “How would you deal with a fight breaking out in the campgrounds?” I asked. When Hugh answered, “With pies in faces!” I was totally sold.

We agreed that a small group of Hog Farmers would drive the Road Hog to New York in July to help Mel and his team build a children’s playground and clear trails around the camping areas. When Hugh asked how the rest of the eighty or so Hog Farmers would get to New York, I said, “There won’t be time for you to drive, so we’ll bring you in by plane.” They were blown away by that, but I had the feeling they didn’t believe I was really serious. For their services, we came to a fee of $8,000, plus all the leftover supplies and equipment bought for the kitchens and campgrounds.

Stan and I sat down with Wes Pomeroy and discussed the role we had mapped out for the Hog Farm. He was a bit skeptical, thinking they might cause more problems than they would solve. He wanted the Hog Farm to be checked out. That made good sense to me, so I sent Stan to New Mexico on June 21. He arrived as the Hog Farm, the
Pranksters, and others were having a summer solstice celebration in Aspen Meadows, outside Santa Fe.

Soon after Stan got back from New Mexico, I traveled to Denver to check out the three-day pop festival at Mile High Stadium, June 27 to 29. There I ran head-on into everything I wanted to avoid at Woodstock.

From the outset, there was tension between the police and a large group of dissidents called the American Liberation Front, who were in town for a big Fourth of July protest. They were agitating the kids, saying that the festival should be free. By the time I arrived on Saturday, there were several squads of police—maybe 150 men in full riot gear—placed in the stands to the left of the stage. I guess they thought a show of force would serve as a deterrent to the gate-crashers and protesters, but I had the feeling it would do just the opposite.

A few hundred people started rushing the gates, and to stop them, more squads of cops in riot gear showed up. A melee between rock-and-bottle-throwing kids and billy-club-wielding cops resulted in lots of injuries on both sides. Then, during the middle of Johnny Winter’s set, the cops started spraying tear gas to clear the area by the entrance gates. The wind came up and blew it as far as the stage, affecting everyone. Finally, the police had the promoter open the gates, and thousands flocked inside the stadium in time for Creedence Clearwater Revival’s closing set.

I thought I should get back to New York Sunday night, but I really wanted to check out Joe Cocker and the Grease Band. As it turned out, Sunday saw more violence than the day before. Thousands showed up without tickets, expecting another free concert, and were greeted by vicious police dogs, mace-spraying machines, and hundreds of cops suited up for battle. It seemed obvious to me that the confrontational
approach taken by the police provoked the violence. I had a lot to think about. I decided we would not have a uniformed police presence within our event. I’d do whatever it took to prevent something like Denver happening at Woodstock.

As for the music, Joe Cocker and the Grease Band were amazing. I’d signed Cocker after Artie gave me a tape he’d gotten from Denny Cordell, Joe’s producer. He was virtually unknown then. When we first heard him, everyone assumed he was a black soul singer, but he turned out to be a skinny English guy who hopped around the stage like he had Saint Vitus’s dance. He could wail!

By the time I flew to Denver, the relationship between Joel and John and Artie had completely deteriorated. Since Artie had left Capitol, he was no longer prevented contractually from being signed into the company. I had been holding his shares and we needed to legally transfer them. I had been getting increasing pressure from John and Joel not to sign him in because they thought he was getting further out of it. Almost daily they would call and report some new travesty they said Artie had committed or complain about a responsibility he was ducking. My offhanded attempts to keep the lid on both sides had not helped matters much.

“Look, we’ll make this right,” they said, “but we just can’t see bringing him into the company the way things are. We’ll split his shares among the three of us.”

As far as I was concerned, Artie’s shares were his from day one and I was certainly not in a position to take them back. I had enough on my plate, and I did not have the time or the skills to change the dynamic of their relationship. I told them that they were putting too much pressure on me, that I was going to Denver, and then signing Artie’s papers when I got back. I said, “It’s up to you guys. Work it out!” I later heard that after I left, Joel panicked, thinking I had
flipped out and split for good. All I wanted was for them to take care of what they had to do, and let me take care of what I had to do. Joel went to see Artie that weekend and they started a dialogue. They resolved things enough so that our partnership remained intact.

Late June found John Morris spending an intense evening at booking agent Frank Barsalona’s apartment in Manhattan with Pete Townshend. John had asked Frank, who ran Premier Talent, to help us book the Who. The band had been performing their brilliant rock opera
Tommy
all spring, touring the United States and playing mostly theaters and halls. John and I agreed that the Who was what we needed for Saturday night. But Pete Townshend was dead set against doing Woodstock, even though Frank tried to convince him that it would be a huge boost for the band’s career. Apparently, the band was exhausted and wanted to return to England as soon as the tour ended.

So Frank invited both Pete and John to his home for dinner. He figured, if necessary, they could spend all night talking Townshend into playing Woodstock. That evening, John and Frank kept bringing up the subject, even though Townshend refused to be swayed. When the Who’s road manager John Wolff showed up around 1
A.M.
, Frank reminded them that the band had to return to the States the same week as Woodstock for an August 12 concert at Tanglewood promoted by Bill Graham. Still, Townshend and Wolff said no. Frank and John Morris stayed up all night, refusing to give up, and outlasting Pete, who by 4 or 5
A.M.
was dozing off. They kept waking him up until finally, at 8
A.M.
, Townshend couldn’t take it anymore: “Okay, we’ll do it!” he said. “Just let me go to fucking bed!” After a bit of a negotiation, John Wolff agreed to a $12,500 fee, half of which was paid upon signing the contract. The contract also spelled out our “no star billing” policy: “Artists are billed in alphabetical order. This is a festival concept therefore placement of act is at the discretion of promoter.” (The
Who would later include a facsimile of our contract inside the album cover for
Live at Leeds.
)

Now that most of the booking was complete, we needed to create a visual that would carry our message in ads, posters, and billboards. Early on, we had announced the Aquarian Exposition with a poster by David Byrd, but it was not the image we were looking for. John Morris suggested we give graphic artist Arnold Skolnick a shot. I gave Arnold the copy and told him the main message was “three days of peace and music,” and that I wanted a dove perched on a guitar as our image. The bands’ names would all be the same size and in alphabetical order, and there would be a description of the site. Many people thought that not emphasizing the acts in our advertising was counterintuitive. Every other concert event before (and after) Woodstock had focused on the acts—but that was just the point. Woodstock was not to be like any other event. Woodstock was to be advertised as an event that was about us: our culture, our music, our art, and our values.

A few days later, Arnold returned to my office with a mockup of the poster. It was perfect: inspired by some cutouts made by his young daughter, he had crafted the simple image in primary colors of a white bird perched on the neck of a blue-and-green guitar set against a red background.