The Road to Woodstock (20 page)
Read The Road to Woodstock Online
Authors: Michael Lang
Short Line had added extra buses from Port Authority in New York to Bethel to meet the demand, and a few people were flying into the small Sullivan County airport, but most were traveling to the festival by car. As caravans began to stream into White Lake, the townsfolk hung out on the sidewalk, watching as if it were a circus parade.
Abbie Hoffman later told a funny story about the Short Line bus ride from New York that his wife, Anita, related.
ABBIE HOFFMAN:
Anita told me about how this bus was comin’ up the thruway and how it was all freaks and everyone laughin’, singin’, and passin’ around dope, and the bus stalled in traffic and the kids saw this cat standin’ in the road needin’ a ride and they all started jumpin’ up and down and yellin’, “Pick him up! Pick him up! Pick him up!” and the bus driver began sweatin’ all over and shoutin’ out things about company regulations and other kinds of horseshit. A sort of instant people’s militia was formed and they’d started up the aisle when all of a sudden the bus doors opened and this freak with a knapsack on his back came aboard. Everybody was jokin’ and clownin’ and even the bus driver felt better. He didn’t accept the joint a cat tried to lay on him but he scratched the guy’s shaggy head of hair and smiled.
Short Line later ran an ad quoting bus drivers about the joys of transporting kids to Woodstock. One of the drivers, Eugene Jennings, said, “We were stuck in traffic for three hours up there and the only noise I heard was jokes about the
EXPRESS
sign on the bus. Their fashion may be a little sloppy, but they were clean and generous. It’s sort of live and let live with them.”
After a couple hours of sleep Wednesday night, I woke up to the first sunny, cloudless day I could remember in over a week. This has
got to be a good sign, I thought. Sure enough, some problems worked themselves out on Thursday, though others developed in their place—like the Food for Love standoff. By that afternoon, as Joe Fink had promised, police began arriving from New York, reporting for duty.
WES POMEROY:
Finally on Thursday, we got word that a bunch of cops wanted to talk to us. They showed up and said, “We’re here, we want to work,” so I sent Don Ganoung to talk to guys like “Robin Hood” and “Errol Flynn.” They were all using aliases. They wanted to be paid in cash and more money than we had promised. We felt like we were being extorted but we had no way out of it. We did hire them for twelve-hour shifts for a hundred dollars a day, which is double what we were going to pay—and we had to pay them in cash. I was very angry about the whole thing, but there was nothing I could do. There was another level of security we used, guards for houses and farms. They were special deputy sheriffs—we set up a guard service for those folks who lived there.
That evening, Wes and John Fabbri called me over to meet the 276 cops who showed up for orientation and to receive their “uniforms” and walkie-talkies. “Here’s the boss,” they said as my introduction. Amazingly, nobody laughed. I reminded the police that their job was to help people, not to hassle them for petty offenses. To have a good time. And not to get
too
high. That drew a laugh.
The other good news on Thursday came from Artie—he’d finally gotten us a film deal. From his years in the music business, he had two contacts at Warner Bros. who had the clout to make a deal. Before coming to Warner Bros., Freddy Weintraub ran the Bitter End in the Village and Ted Ashley owned the talent agency Ashley’s Famous, which handled the Cowsills—whom Artie had managed. Ted had become president of Warner Bros. Pictures and Freddy vice president. Artie met with them on Thursday.
ARTIE KORNFELD:
I said to them, “If there’s a riot and everybody dies, you’ll have one of the biggest-selling movies of all time. If it goes the way we hope it will go, you’ll have a wonderfully beautiful movie that will make us all a lot of money.” We sat there with pencil and paper and wrote out our movie deal—fifty percent split, Warner and Woodstock Ventures after negative costs, then we had to bring Wadleigh in to make a deal with him to do the direction, and that was the movie deal. It was for a hundred thousand for film footage—it was only signed by Ted Ashley and me. That’s how it happened. And then I got into a limousine and went upstate, and the limousine broke down, and my wife and I wound up hitchhiking up to the festival.
JOYCE MITCHELL:
I was at the meeting that Artie Kornfeld had with Freddy, and one of the questions Freddy asked me was “How many groups do we have releases from?” This was after Michael had sent me to try to get releases, and I think we had releases for maybe half a dozen acts—and none of the majors.
Michael Wadleigh signed on as director with Warner Bros. on Friday. The studio ended up giving us another $50,000 that day for extra helicopters to transport artists to the site. And when the musicians arrived, Artie would walk with them from the artists’ pavilion to the stage to get their permission to be filmed. They would be paid an additional 50 percent of their performance fee for film rights. The movie would make lifelong careers for many of the acts who performed that weekend. Some artists, though, would never agree to be in the film; Neil Young (who joined Crosby, Stills and Nash right before their performance) and the Grateful Dead said no (they didn’t appear in the Monterey Pop movie either). Albert Grossman refused to allow any of his artists to be in the film, though Warner Bros. eventually got Richie
Havens on board—the Band and Janis Joplin would finally appear in the director’s cut twenty-five years later.
At one point, we could have owned the film outright. Before Artie signed the Warner Bros. deal, Bob Maurice contacted John Roberts, pleading with him to invest $100,000, which they really needed to pay for Kodak raw stock, cameramen flying in from the West Coast, and other expenses. In exchange, Woodstock Ventures would own all the rights. It was a gamble and John was so overwhelmed with our skyrocketing costs and underwhelmed with what he saw as potential for the film, he said no. He thought it was unlikely that a documentary film would ever make a cent.
All afternoon on Thursday, people poured into the site. The film’s associate producer Dale Bell, Michael Wadleigh, and their crew arrived, including documentary cameramen David Myers and Al Wertheimer, among others, and editors/assistant directors Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, just out of NYU Film School. John Binder, the unit supervisor, later remembered asking Michael Margetts for the lay of the land, who told him, “‘When I see something interesting, I just press the button’—that set the tone for the whole movie. You couldn’t organize Woodstock, and nobody did.”
DALE BELL:
I had put together eighty people in four days to get them up there by Thursday morning, after begging, borrowing, and stealing all of the camera gear so that we would have the same interchangeable gear—lenses, magazines, cameras, motors. Thank God for Michael and Chris Langhart and Steve Cohen and Chip: I had asked for a lip on the front of that stage—plywood four-by-eights, strung at about four feet below the level of the stage so that our guys would have absolutely perfect camera angles. We
knew that everything was going to be handheld. We knew that we needed eight magazine changers and assistant camera people under the stage all the time when there was music, just changing magazines and keeping track of who shot what, and what camera roll it was.
Some of the film crew began shooting local residents and their reactions to the festival, as well as people abandoning their cars on clogged roads, which by midafternoon on Thursday were already backed up for miles. Tiny Route 17B was becoming a twenty-mile-long parking lot, and we started hearing reports that the delays on the larger Route 17 were beginning to back up into the New York State Thruway.
PARRY TEASDALE, UNDERGROUND VIDEOGRAPHER:
I was twenty-one that summer and knew the area because my grandmother had a summer house nearby. I got there early in the week, set up camp, left briefly, then came back with some friends on Thursday night. I remember feeling, as we were walking along Hurd Road, that we were in a sea of humanity. Everyone was going only in one direction—
in
. And there really wasn’t any room for vehicles, they couldn’t make it in. It was way too crowded. All around me it was dark, and all you could hear were people walking and talking quietly. Occasionally somebody would sing, or somebody would bang on a drum, but I felt what I thought it must be like to walk on a pilgrimage in India.
ROB KENNEDY, FESTIVALGOER:
I was sixteen and hitched from northern New Jersey with three of my friends. We split into groups of two and hitchhiked up Route 17, and interestingly enough both groups hit Bethel at sunset on Thursday, so we didn’t have too much trouble reuniting. It was a fairly long walk in, and we stopped as we got closer to the festival grounds to set up tents and eat some
thing. By the time we did that, my friend Mark had found the festival site and came back beaming. We were all getting off on acid pretty heavy and wandered on to the festival. We brought meager supplies that got consumed rapidly. But I don’t remember being hungry much. We all had tickets that proved to be totally unnecessary. I had sent for my Friday ticket by mail and bought my Saturday and Sunday tickets last minute from another friend who didn’t go. Once we were on the festival grounds, we pretty much staked out one area so we wouldn’t get lost from each other. On acid, the numbers of people were overwhelming. The concept of finding your way back to a huddle of four friends when you went to piss was mind-boggling. So we pretty much hunkered down in one spot from Thursday night through Sunday morning. I don’t think any of us believed there were that many hippies in the USA. We were the only freaks in our high school at that time. We knew there were some in surrounding towns, but we had no idea. That was one of the most empowering aspects of Woodstock. We realized we had the numbers.
We put out calls to all the suppliers and staff who had not shown up and urged them to get there immediately before they got stuck in traffic. Dr. Abruzzi finally arrived, and seeing how many people were already there, he arranged for more medical supplies and personnel. Urgent calls went out for additional helicopters as it became obvious we needed them not only to transport sick people but to ferry supplies.
John, who arrived Wednesday morning, and Joel, who’d been on-site since Monday, were really upset about the thousands of people already inside the bowl. All along, we’d said the camping area would be free. But now it looked like the prime spots in front of the stage had already been taken by people who arrived early—before fences, ticket takers, and booths were in place. John talked to Wes about how to
handle the thousands of people already inside, and he advised him to let it go, that there was no way to clear out that many people without inciting a riot.
WES POMEROY:
It was like being in combat, everything was changing. But you knew what you had, so you just changed with it. It didn’t get really hectic until just about the day before. When all the people started coming at us, we saw them coming in and we started dealing with them as best you could. We knew that we would have no fence and no gate—and that was a great disappointment. But the fence was irrelevant, and there was a hole dug under the fence—and the idea was that they’d quietly let out the word that you could sneak in if you wanted to.
BILL GRAHAM:
I went up the day before. I walked around constantly and it was a sight to behold. I thought at the time that it couldn’t come off smoothly because it was such a huge thing and there were no blueprints. It was a first. I knew there were going to be some faults—namely traffic. Ninety thousand mice trying to get into one hole, there had to be some problems.
Thursday night, John, Joel, Peter Goodrich, and I met again with the Food for Love guys at their trailer. They wouldn’t venture outside but sent their attorney to tell us they refused to operate the food concessions unless they got 100 percent of the profits, after reimbursing the $75,000 John had fronted for food. John had really counted on this income and we were all outraged at their extortionary tactics—but as Wes advised us, we agreed to their demands in hopes of fixing it afterward.
Later that night, the Diamond Horseshoe, where nearly two hundred of our staff had been staying, caught on fire and everyone had to flee—luckily no one was hurt. Probably more than half the people
staying there were at the site, up all night working. The fire trucks couldn’t get through the jammed roads, but those at the hotel managed to put out the fire. Apparently it was an electrical short in the basement that started it.
Journalists who were arriving in droves kept asking me if we were going to pull it off, was there going to be three days of peace and music? Was the audience going to be peaceful, or would there be violence and chaos like at the other festivals?
“If it turns bad,” I told a reporter from the
Washington Post,
“they’re not turning against anybody but themselves. Our festival is being done by the people who
are
the culture. If it can’t be done this way, then I was wrong, wrong about
everything
!” Ticia, who was by my side, as she had been for the past few weeks, spoke up. “If it comes out the way we dreamed it,” she said, “then people are going to have a different view of this culture—of
us
.” Ticia couldn’t have been more right.
“Take charge and keep moving”—Harry Lang’s words would come back to me many times that weekend.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15
Richie Havens
Sweetwater
Bert Sommer
Tim Hardin
Ravi Shankar
Melanie
Arlo Guthrie
Joan Baez
SATURDAY, AUGUST 16
Quill
Country Joe McDonald
Santana
John Sebastian
Keef Hartley Band
Incredible String Band
Canned Heat
Mountain
Grateful Dead
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Janis Joplin
Sly and the Family Stone
The Who
Jefferson Airplane
SUNDAY, AUGUST 17
Joe Cocker and the Grease Band
Country Joe and the Fish
Ten Years After
The Band
Johnny Winter
Blood, Sweat and Tears
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Paul Butterfield Blues Band
Sha Na Na
Jimi Hendrix