The Road to Woodstock (19 page)
Read The Road to Woodstock Online
Authors: Michael Lang
JOHN ROBERTS:
We didn’t want to repeat a lot of the same mistakes that we’d made at Wallkill. So we paid a lot of attention to the politics—who we had to know, what we had to do, who we had to convince, who we had to stay clear of; there was a lot of work done in those areas. PR became extremely important.
Don Ganoung and Rona continued to take the lead in our public relations, but were occasionally joined by Elliot Tiber. Elliot insisted on putting the Earthlight Theatre troupe at our disposal and offered the El Monaco as the site for a free preview of festival theater for the White Lake residents. Talk about a disaster. Before a crowd of old-timers, farmers, and families, the actors stripped off all their clothes as they performed a scene from
Oh! Calcutta.
The townsfolk went running.
Somehow a rumor got started that Peter and I planned to have a big shipment of pot at the festival, supposedly sent up from Miami. The story went that the Monday before the festival the boat carrying our supply was stopped by the Coast Guard just off the Keys. All untrue.
The countdown began on Monday, August 11, as thousands of people began to filter in. We’d announced that the campgrounds would open on Wednesday, but that did not seem to deter those who wanted in early. We were on a twenty-four-hour clock trying to finish the stage, the towers, the concessions, the roads, the parking lots, the plumbing, the drinking stations, the medical facilities, and the kitchens, and take care of the hundreds of other details still to be completed. People were
arguing over manpower and equipment. There just wasn’t enough to go around.
The fence around the perimeter was only partially up, and I didn’t see any sign of ticket booths. I assumed that Joel and Keith O’Connor, who handled the box-office operation from the Woodstock Ventures office, were overseeing their delivery and placement, but somehow the ticket booths never appeared. I later learned that local garage owner Ken Van Loan had attempted to tow two dozen or so to the site at the last minute but got stuck in traffic with the very first haul and had to turn back.
We’d been so busy getting ready we’d nearly forgotten about our recent legal troubles. Paul Marshall had assured us that the attempts to stop the festival by the summer camps and home owners wouldn’t amount to anything. We wouldn’t know for sure until mere days before opening day—when they met before the judge on Tuesday, August 12. Paul, Don Ganoung, and Wes arrived that day in Catskill at 10
A.M.
to meet with the state supreme court justice, and it turned out that Paul, as a kid, had gone to one of the camps filing the complaint. He chatted up the camp owner, “Uncle Davy,” before the proceedings—which helped, I think.
During the court session, Paul noted that we’d spent $1,400,000 and were committed to another $300,000 by the time the festival was over; by then, we’d sold 124,000 advance tickets. Finally, after a long day of Wes, Don Ganoung, and Paul Marshall making assurances that we had the means to protect the petitioners’ properties, they all agreed to drop their complaints.
Our final legal hurdle was over. In just three days’ time, the Aquarian Exposition would open on schedule.
AUGUST 13–14, 1969
“Our concession stands aren’t ready! A hundred thousand dollars’ worth of food is going to rot, thanks to you! Who needs this? We’re splitting from here unless we renegotiate our deal!”
“You asshole! You were supposed to have your shit together, and you’re just using this as an excuse to sweeten your deal!” With that, Peter Goodrich slams his fist into Jeffrey Joerger’s face.
I didn’t see that coming.
As Jeff goes down, he yells, “You motherfucker! You hit me!” He goes for a knife he has stashed. Lenny Kaufman, whom I’ve hired as special security, catches this, and when our eyes meet, I nod and he moves toward Joerger to restrain him.
“I’m getting my gun!” Jeffrey shouts as he backs into his trailer and slams and locks the door.
It’s Thursday morning—the day before the festival—and people are pouring in. We’ve lost count since yesterday, but we’ve probably got sixty thousand people already nestled in the bowl and camped in the woods. The
guys from Food for Love showed up Tuesday night and have been pissed off ever since because their booths are only halfway built—our crews keep shifting back and forth between the priority projects yet to be completed before opening day. The stage is still not finished. The incessant rain has resulted in a mud pit around its perimeter, which delayed the installation of the concrete footing until just a few days ago. The same abysmal weather conditions have also slowed progress on the concessions for crafts and food. Even the roads we’d built keep turning into swamps.
“Look, Jeffrey, let’s work this out!” John Roberts yells into the slammed door of the trailer. “We’ll have a meeting tonight and resolve this situation.” John says he wonders about Joerger’s sanity, and I’m thinking, Gun?
John, Mel, Joel, and I see that we have a problem. We’ve got the free kitchen at the Hog Farm with plenty of granola and brown rice, but if Food for Love doesn’t come through with hot dogs and hamburgers, we’re going to have thousands of angry, hungry kids on our hands. We radio over to Wes and fill him in on the situation.
“Work it out with them—do whatever it takes,” Wes advises. “The last thing we need are starving kids, especially since we don’t have any New York City cops.”
T
he last two days before the festival were forty-eight-hours of nonstop fires to be extinguished—
literally
and figuratively. On Wednesday, Lee got a call at the telephone building office that set the tone for what was to come.
The week before, Joe Fink had come up and surveyed the area and all seemed fine with our plan for the “vacationing” police to work in shifts over the three days. We had made arrangements to house, feed, and transport the cops from the city, with the stipulation that they would not bring weapons. But then, in the East Village, the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers started handing out antagonizing leaflets: “Let’s all go to Woodstock and greet the New York fuzz who’ll be
unarmed and give them a real warm welcome.” On top of that, Chief Leary saw the photos of the Hog Farm’s JFK arrival splashed over the papers and read that they’d be joining New York’s finest on security detail. So he pulled the plug on the whole thing.
On Wednesday morning, a teletype went out to every precinct in New York City: “It has come to the attention of the Department that certain members of the force have been engaged to do various work assignments during the Woodstock Music and Art Fair…Permission will not be granted for extra employment where, as a condition of employment, the police officer’s uniform, shield, gun or exercise of police authority is not to be used.” It was understood that whoever went against orders could be fired. Joe called Lee with the bad news that the 346 cops we’d selected weren’t coming. When Wes found out, he was livid.
WES POMEROY:
Chief Leary shut the door on us…he sent out orders that no New York cop’s going to work up there. It was because of the Hog Farm! He said he’d just found out about it, which was bullshit—and so here we are with our whole Peace Service Corps gone to hell.
LEE MACKLER BLUMER:
Wes and Joe Fink started plotting how to overcome it. We were feeling overwhelmed already from seeing the numbers of people who were on the property before there were gates and knew that security was in deep danger.
Wes felt betrayed by the brotherhood of police, and even the
New York Times
ran an editorial admonishing Leary for withdrawing the police at the last minute. Joe stayed in contact with Wes all day, promising to convince some of the men to disobey orders and surreptitiously moonlight for us. Wes reached out to local police agencies and
prison officials to try to get people to fill in but was turned down by most. We had to do something—the police were part of the strategy we’d used to convince town officials to let us do the festival. In addition to wanting cops as peacekeepers, we needed them to direct traffic and deal with medical emergencies.
I didn’t want to take any chances with not having any sort of professional security. There were going to be numerous cash payments, between the gates and concessions, so I called a friend, Lenny Kaufman. A former biker, bouncer, and adventurer, Lenny was always steadfast in tough situations and I trusted him completely. I had him round up six or seven men he had absolute confidence in and told him to bring them to the site that night.
Wednesday was another rainy day and it made some of the final electrical work very dicey. The trailer next to the main electrical terminal had stairs that were “hot.” The electricians couldn’t ground them for some reason, so every time you walked up the steps, you’d get a shock. They rushed to complete the elevator for transporting amps and equipment thirty feet up to the stage from the loading area.
Bill Hanley arrived with the special equipment he’d designed to carry the sound as far away as the outer reaches of the grounds. He’d built a custom mixing board and deluxe speakers and had taken out a $3 million insurance policy on the equipment. Cranes were used to place six speakers and horns on top of the towers, and monitors were bolted to the front of the stage. Eddie Kramer, whom I’d met with Hendrix at Miami Pop, would record the concert, along with Lee Osborne, from a sound trailer behind the stage. Ahmet Ertegun had bought the audio rights for Atlantic—Crosby, Stills and Nash’s label.
In addition to the main stage, Hanley put in a smaller sound system for the free stage over by the Hog Farm. There, we’d finished a puppet theater and the playground area the day before. We’d been installing a chain-link fence around the entire site, separating the free area from
the section closer to the main stage. I later found out what was happening to some of the fences from Abbie Hoffman’s friend Roz Payne.
ROZ PAYNE:
I got there a few days before the festival and camped with the Hog Farm. There were teams of workers putting the posts and wire fences around the property to keep people out who didn’t have tickets. Every night after they would leave, Paul [Krassner], Abbie, Jean-Jacques [Lebel], and I would take down the fence. We left the posts, but took down the wire. We’d do other actions too. We found a sign that said
NO TRESPASSING
, and Jean-Jacques wrote over it with paint
PEOPLE’S BULLETIN BOARD
, and we put that up instead. We made a sign that said
HO CHI MINH TRAIL
for the main pathway through the woods.
All along, we put the word out to the Movement people that there would be free areas. I knew they were crafty enough to sneak people in, but I thought that between advance ticket sales and people buying tickets at the gate, we would do okay financially. With all the rain delays, I stopped caring about the fences and focused on getting the stage and sound together so the concert would start on time.
We finally realized that Steve Cohen had overdesigned the stage roof. For two weeks, the weather had prevented us from putting all the pieces of the puzzle together. The wooden trusses turned out to be way too heavy for our purposes. We never got them properly covered with canvas to make them rainproof. The roof was meant to have cross trusses where the lights would hang. But we couldn’t get the cross trusses up, so Chip would eventually light the whole show with twelve Super Troupers from the towers. “We have 650,000 watts sitting under the stage rusting!” Chip would remind us.
We rented two massive cranes for a thousand dollars a day to assist in the construction of the stage and towers. The cranes became
trapped next to the stage because the wooden fence encircling the stage, and other construction, prevented us from getting them out before people started arriving.
CHIP MONCK:
What we needed was a real heavy-duty rigger with a full company behind him, and production direction that was exceptionally solid, and grown-up and heavy-duty contractors. But we didn’t have them, and everybody said, “Don’t worry, it’ll happen.” We didn’t have a contractor. We should have done it as though we were constructing a building. There should have been a site supervisor, there should have been an ironworker, a couple of welders. The design was terrific, and it had layers and layers of canvas that were almost like fish scales. It would have been beautiful. We should have had a complete crew that was nothing but staging. We had only four guys who were doing scaffolding. It was a big mistake. You can’t do things like that on a dime. We were all fairly overcome by the size of the thing.
I rented the lights from Charlie at Altman Stage Lighting in Yonkers. In the end he was really pissed off because his five hundred C-clamps—at six dollars apiece—were all locked tight with rust. So they had to be thrown away. There were three arcs, precisely 100 feet out on the left and 15 degrees right of the center line of the stage; there were another three on another tower. And then almost 15 degrees off your exact right and left were two more follow spots. So we only had the ten. That was just enough—there was no ambience, there was no background, there was nothing else. The only other scenic element really was what we call a carnival socket, which are the little lamps that usually hang in an old-time used-car lot, with the piece of cable and lots of little lightbulbs—we had little 7½-watt lightbulbs, one every foot, and they were on the guy wires that held the scaffolding towers in
place. And that’s all, so you wouldn’t walk into them in the dark, but also they gave some sort of flavor.
We kept experiencing a drop in water pressure—we had fourteen miles of water pipes that began springing leaks once people arrived. Chris had brilliantly placed plastic cases with vintage army crank phones at locations along the pipeline, so that when a leak was found, a call could be made from the spot and the crew could more quickly fix the problem. We had hundreds of
DANGER
signs made up and placed next to the pipes to prevent people from stepping on them and causing more leaks.
It was obvious there were going to be lots more people than we’d originally told Max, so I went over to his house to talk to him about it. People were already coming by the tens of thousands. “We were thinking up to two hundred thousand people would come, but it looks like it could be more,” I told him. “But we’ll take care of it.”
I barely got the words out before he ducked back under the oxygen tent in his bedroom. Miriam was worried about the crowds and chaos being a strain on Max—rightfully so, because it would have been a big strain on anyone. When he emerged, after his dose of oxygen, Max seemed unfazed. He knew the size of the facility we were building and that our preparations were as sound as possible. For two weeks, he’d been there constantly with us, and I guess the numbers didn’t come as a complete surprise to him.
WES POMEROY:
[By Wednesday], there’s no more time for planning. You just deal with what you’ve got, that’s all. A lot of people would call and say, “What are you going to do about this? We’ve got a lot of people out here in my field!” We negotiated with them and we’d commit ourselves to buy the crop. People were coming in there and camping all over their young alfalfa and ruining their crops, and we were in a bind. We just made sure
that if the claim was correct and we were able to verify that, we’d take care of it.
It was very much like a military operation logistically. The dynamics are all the same—you do all the planning you can, and you get all your supply lines built, and you get all your supplies ordered that you need to have—food, latrines—and you get going, and if those lines break down, then you build other lines.
We had a detailed shift plan for security, covering general patrols and direction and admission to the parking lots. With the New York cops out of commission, Wes conceived a strategy with the state police that included one-way traffic and certain roads that would be open only to emergency and service vehicles. When Wes called the state troopers on Wednesday to put it into effect, the man who headed up the designated New York State Police barracks decided not to cooperate and refused to implement the traffic plan.
STAN GOLDSTEIN:
Not only did we now have no more traffic plan to implement, we also did not have police to stand on the roads and direct people to the leased parking lots. When people didn’t know where to park, they simply parked wherever they could, which turned the roads into what they turned into. As a little sidelight: The New York state cop in charge of that barracks who refused to cooperate with us is the fellow who subsequently was in charge of the retaking of Attica prison. He gave the order to fire and later tried to cover up the fact that he and his men killed the hostages.
When the state police tossed our plan, they set up a roadblock at the nearest exit off the thruway, where they’d stop any suspicious-looking cars and search them. Eight kids were arrested on various drug charges, some for possession of pipes. We’d arranged for lawyers to come up to offer free legal advice for these very circumstances.
Eventually, there’d be about eighty drug busts—not too bad, though, considering the numbers who came.