The Road to Woodstock (18 page)
Read The Road to Woodstock Online
Authors: Michael Lang
LISA LAW:
They just handed it to me. There wasn’t any problem at all. I used the money frugally. My job was to make it as easy as possible for the people in the kitchen so they could produce the biggest amount of food. And Yasgur kept us supplied with yogurt, milk, and eggs. We’d get these flats of eggs every day. We were purchasing them from him, but it was right there from his dairy farm, so it was really nice. Right away the campers were arriving, so we were cooking continuously and trying to get our act together for what we were going to do.
I still hoped to add a few more surprises to the show, particularly some artists living in Woodstock. Paul Butterfield agreed to perform with his Blues Band on Sunday night. Fred Neil had moved up from Coconut Grove. His song “Everybody’s Talkin’” was the theme song for
Midnight Cowboy
(and would soon become a huge hit for Nilsson). This made him even more reclusive than he already was, but he said he’d play Friday night. We added him to the press release listing the lineup. Then, a couple of days before the show, he called and said he wasn’t going to make it.
Bob Dacy—whom I’d known in the Grove and now ran Woodstock’s Sled Hill Café—arranged a meeting for me with Bob Dylan at
his home. Dylan’s songs were important in my life, as they were in the lives of countless others. I just thought I’d tell him that we’d all love to see him there, unannounced, of course. His wife, Sara, made lunch and we all talked about what I had planned. I explained the reasons why I hadn’t made an offer to have him officially on the show. I knew he was uncomfortable with the mantle of “prophet” that he’d been tagged with by the press. He’d rarely played in public since 1966. Bob was the most important artist of our generation, and because of my respect for his artistry, I underestimated the side of him that is about business. Maybe if I’d offered his booking agent a large enough fee, he’d have played—like he would at the Isle of Wight festival not long after Woodstock. In any case, during the two hours we hung out, he was cordial and said that maybe he’d stop by.
Later that week, Al Aronowitz wrote in the
New York Post
:
The day before, it had rained so hard the mud was deep enough to give you a good headstart to China…The owners of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair were busy acting like people who had half a million dollars to spend. Meanwhile an hour and a half away, where Woodstock really is, Bob Dylan was coping with rumors that he was going to make a surprise appearance at the festival. “I may if I feel like it,” he said. “I’ve been invited, so I know it’ll be okay to show up…My opinion of that festival is not any different from anyone else’s. I think everyone is probably going to have a good time, but I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t.”
A few days after the festival, I was crossing Tinker Street in Woodstock and happened upon Bob, riding in an open Jeep with Bernard Paturel from Café Espresso. As they drove by, I waved and gave a sort
of “sorry you didn’t make it” shrug. With a grin, Bob tipped his hat and nodded back with what I took as a “me too.” (Twenty-five years later, Bob would finally take the Woodstock stage.)
As at Miami Pop, I planned to film and record the festival, only this time Artie and I had a bigger vision for the film. We had been trying to sell the movie rights, but so far, no luck. D. A. Pennebaker had filmed the Monterey Pop Festival, but the movie had been a flop, so studios saw concert pictures as loss leaders. Early on, Artie and I had talked about the importance of capturing the building and preparation of the site. I had become friendly with Alan Douglas, whose multimedia company was active in music, film, and photography. He agreed to help fund some of the early filming and offered to raise the money to make the picture. In addition to documenting the setup, we discussed sending film crews to California, Texas, and Ohio to travel to New York with groups of people, documenting their experiences en route to the festival and beyond. Unfortunately, with the move to White Lake, time just got away from us and we couldn’t pull off the far-flung filming.
ALAN DOUGLAS:
I kept pushing him—“Michael, we’ve got to get started”—so it was about two weeks before the festival was to begin and there was no film deal yet. Although we were basically a recording company, we were making books and films and other things and there were what we called “underground filmmakers” around my office and I had a film-editing suite downstairs. So I said, “We’d better send some guys up there and start shooting,” because at that point, they were building the stages and they were preparing the fields, and I thought that if, in fact, they were going to do a film, that would be an important part of it all. I had two hippie filmmakers from London working with me, Malcolm Hart and Michael Margetts, and a well-known New York filmmaker,
Marty Topp, so we equipped everybody. I gave them the film and rented cameras and sent them up to Woodstock a couple of weeks before, and the first two weeks of preparation that you see in the film was shot by our people.
Michael and Malcolm were juiced and jumped in with both feet. They rented a car from Avis, removed the top of the trunk, and Michael would shoot from there while Malcolm drove. It seemed as if they were always shooting, day and night. They even got a shot of Wes Pomeroy’s daughter Ginny riding horseback with a Hog Farmer.
When Joel arrived in Bethel the week of the festival, he was a bit nonplussed and unsure where to put his energy. We were still dealing with permit issues, and the box-office operations needed attention. I was hoping he would focus on those areas, but Joel seemed more interested in trying to figure out what I was doing. He was particularly upset by the film crew Alan Douglas had sent. It seems he saw this as self-aggrandizement on my part, and he repeatedly denigrated the wisdom of spending any time or resources on making a movie. Joel, of course, would later become the beneficiary of our efforts, when the film became Woodstock Ventures’ greatest asset.
I really liked the documentary work of the Maysles brothers—David and Al—and we met several times with them and their producer Porter Bibb. David and Al checked out the site and seemed interested in making the film independently but were having trouble finding the financing. They recommended Wadleigh-Maurice Productions to shoot the performances. About my age, Michael Wadleigh was a Columbia University medical school dropout who’d become a filmmaker. He had won an award for his documentary
No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger
. Producer Bob Maurice was a tenacious guy determined to make the film. With a handheld camera, Wadleigh had recently filmed some exciting live-music performances of Aretha Franklin and James Brown, and was eager to do more. Wadleigh-Maurice Productions had
been working with an experimental new split-screen editing machine that could result in three different images onscreen at once. They thought it was the way to go to capture the excitement of a live performance. Their associate producer Dale Bell began gathering 16mm film stock and putting together a team with enough cameras to shoot three days and nights of performances.
DALE BELL:
The Saturday before the festival began, our little group of six people in a couple of cars went to White Lake and met Michael Lang for the first time. If I had any wisdom at all, it was to say, “Let’s shoot it, let’s hold on to the negative, and let’s wait for people to come to us, because once we have possession of the negative and we have recorded it, we are in control.” That was part of the philosophy that Bob and Michael and I were developing. So we went up there and left a camera and sound and a producer behind. It was like, “You’re the placeholders and you just shoot whatever walks and talks.”
I wanted to hire someone to photograph the event, and Chip recommended Henry Diltz. Based in L.A., Henry had just shot the cover of the debut album by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Before becoming a rock photographer, he’d been in a folk group in Hawaii. It turned out that he had known Mel there, and he fit in with everybody right away.
HENRY DILTZ:
I enjoyed going down every day to where they were building the stage. It was like a huge battleship—it looked over this green field and the blue sky and it was really like an ocean. These hippie girls who ran the kitchen would bring lunch out to the site where guys were all building this thing. Michael Lang had some kind of an old motorcycle that he’d come riding on through
the alfalfa fields with his leather vest on and his curly hair. He looked sort of like a cherub. Chip and Michael and Mel were like brigadier generals. People were issuing orders and getting stuff done and things were carried out in a very crisp and efficient—but very friendly—way.
PENNY STALLINGS:
Michael was inventing it as he went along. He was so intuitive about the way he operated that it all worked. You had all of these guys almost afraid of Michael—which was really fun for those of us working for them. To see them sort of befuddled, not knowing how to deal with him. That was quite fun to observe. Michael was the quiet, mysterious presence deferred to by the guys who were older and who were the “real deal” in terms of having some experience doing concerts and promotion and working at the Fillmore. Many of us younger staffers saw Woodstock as a very political event—we were going to show the world who we were, how big we were. But Mel and John and Chip didn’t necessarily look at it that way. They were just working, not smoking pot, not amused by the whole hippie ethos, didn’t live with us, didn’t hang out with us—they weren’t buying into it. Michael, their boss, did.
You had the dreamers who would come in—like Tom Edmunston—who would say, “We’re going to have a giant scented sphere and everyone will touch it.” And what that would be and how you would build that, no one knew. Michael liked those ideas—he wanted those ideas, wanted that input. On the other hand, how would you really do it? Well, you wouldn’t. The artists who came up from Florida—Ron Liis and Bill Ward and Buster Simpson—they actually did do art installations. They did some really wonderful and zany art there, but there were many other extremes, too, that just sort of evaporated along the way.
BILL WARD:
Ron’s a born leader—he’s six four and looked like a hippie. He had a big beard and wore a vest with bells on it. He was a good artist, and had a good eye for things and took over the crew, and they built everything. Eventually, Mel got me to try to talk to Ron, who was driving him crazy. Ron would just do things his own way, whatever was expedient. Apparently at one time—I wasn’t there when this happened—he purloined the stage crew’s forklift and a fistfight ensued. Ron was inclined to just take whatever he wanted.
We had a great crew: Buster Simpson was a friend of Ron’s from the Middle West, and he came out. Buster is now a very successful sculptor in Seattle. Buster really had his head on straight, and another on the crew, Herb Summers, is a very talented artist, a good thinker, and easy to get along with—and they all pitched in. Buster and his girlfriend did those outdoor conceptual sculptures. They made an open tepee and suspended a large rock in the middle by ropes, and they built a vertical structure with baby chicks in it.
PENNY STALLINGS:
At one point, Buster wanted to get a little girl in a polka-dot pinafore just to skip through the festival. That was the kind of thing they were doing—just wonderful.
Throughout the lush green bowl that opened out to the stage, the crews dug holes and placed poles with beautiful appliquéd banners Mel had commissioned from a guy in the Bronx. Five feet long with peace symbols and other designs, the banners quickly vanished once the audience arrived.
We realized we needed a footbridge between the artists’ pavilion and the stage, so Chris designed one. That was the thing about Chris; if I could imagine it, he could build it. This one rose about twenty feet above the road and provided an awesome view as you walked across it.
Chris calculated how much weight it needed to support by quizzing John Morris about Jimi Hendrix’s weight and the weight of the typical groupie and multiplying that by ten or twelve. Some of the artists from Miami painted gorgeous murals to decorate the sides of the bridge.
In those last few weeks before the festival, we were also scrambling to get our medical operation set up. Early on, we’d been seeking advice from the Medical Committee for Human Rights in New York, and Don Ganoung and Wes had been in discussions with doctors in the Wallkill area, but we had to start over in Sullivan County. Bill Ward recommended Bill Abruzzi, a doctor in nearby Wappingers Falls, whom he had met volunteering during the civil rights march from Montgomery to Selma in 1965. Completely sympathetic to our cause, he signed on and began designing a medical plan. Based on our audience estimates at the time, he recruited six doctors, thirty-six nurses, and eighteen medical assistants (for whom we covered malpractice insurance) at a cost of close to $16,000. (Eventually numerous volunteers would pitch in, totaling some twenty-five doctors and two hundred nurses.) The three local hospitals were put on alert. Don Ganoung also hired a local ham-radio group to help us with on-site communications. He notified the local employment office to solicit workers for the duration of the festival weekend: We needed seventy parking lot attendants, three hundred workers for the food concessions, and two hundred people to pick up garbage around the site each day. Mel located a company with a huge trash compactor—one of the first of its kind—to have on-site to help with cleanup.
The more money we spent, the better we were treated by the community. We were buying materials locally and hiring residents, and as that happened, it changed some of the negative attitudes in town and began to endear us to them. More and more White Lake residents got into the Woodstock spirit. They became supporters because they liked
what we were doing, and they saw everybody working hard. During those last two weeks before the festival, it seemed as if thousands of people offered to help in every way.