The Road to Woodstock (21 page)
Read The Road to Woodstock Online
Authors: Michael Lang
AUGUST 15, 1969
“Hey, Richie, how about going on in about an hour?”
“No, man, not me! Get somebody else! I don’t want to be the first act out there!”
“Come on, your band’s here—you can handle this! Think about how cool it will be—to be the first artist onstage.”
“No, man, my bass player’s not here. And if the show’s starting late, and I go out there, the crowd’s gonna go crazy and toss beer cans at me!”
“Well, think about it…”
It’s three o’clock Friday afternoon and I’m trying to convince Richie Havens to kick off the festival. We’ve advertised that the music starts at four—and though people don’t seem restless, some have been huddled in front of the stage since Wednesday. I don’t want to risk the audience waiting too long without music. I’ve been through that before and I don’t want to repeat it.
I’ve been awake for nearly forty-eight hours straight, I’m on my third wind and running on fumes. We’ve been busy since dawn, trying to finish
a million things so we can get the music under way. This is the part I love best: seeing everything come together, the final pieces falling into place. We’ve been working on this thing for what feels like a lifetime—and the exhilaration of opening day, combined with the unprecedented numbers of people, is just the juice I need to keep going.
But with the weather forecast not looking good for the weekend, there’s lots of doom talk about potential disasters. Mel, Stan, John Morris, and Chip alternately accost me with problems, ranging from leaking water pipes to angry landowners complaining about trespassers to our unfinished fence (Mel recommends taking down what’s left of it). John and Joel are despairing over the thousands of “freeloaders” who keep increasing by the hour. The roads continue to worsen and we’re worried that crucial supplies won’t make it through.
We’ve added to our helicopter squad to ferry in musicians staying at the Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson’s in Liberty. Among the first to arrive are Richie Havens and his guitarist and percussionist. I’ve spotted them hanging out in the nearly finished artists’ pavilion and figure I’ll at least broach the idea. Richie is a pro—he started playing Village coffeehouses in the early sixties. A tall man with a powerful voice and a unique rhythmic guitar style, he’s always seemed fearless. Our opening act, Sweetwater, a folk-rock band from L.A., is apparently stuck on the road driving from the motel in Liberty. Their equipment truck is in another traffic jam. I don’t want to press the issue right now with Richie, but I don’t let him out of my sight—knowing I may need to hit him up again in an hour or so.
RICHIE HAVENS:
Me; my guitarist, Deano [Paul Williams]; and my drummer, Daniel Ben Zebulon, were squeezed into the helicopter’s glass-bubble cockpit. We were sitting behind the pilot with two conga drums, two guitars squeezed between us. The glass surrounded us, top to bottom. Looking below my feet, I could see the ground clearly, as if I were sitting on air. We banked a bit to the left and the sea of trees changed into a different kind of sea,
just as beautiful. My mouth dropped when I saw all those people, hundreds of thousands of them. Definitely more than the two hundred fifty thousand reported in the New York papers the following morning, a whole lot more like half a million on the first day.
It was awesome, like double Times Square on New Year’s Eve in perfect daylight with no walls or buildings to hold people in place. The people filled the field and formed a human blanket across the road to the other side of the hill and into the forests all around the field, where nobody could possibly see the stage. Our helicopter landed right behind the stage. Once I got out, I looked around and saw three roads blocked by the blanket of people, especially the road on the bottom of the hill that went to the staging area.
It was quite mellow everywhere I looked. Even the people nearest the stage weren’t clamoring for anything to happen. It was a summer day and they were having a good time in the country. Some were smokin’ pot, dancing to portable radios, or throwing Frisbees around. Some were lying in the sun or taking naps or making out under blankets. But most of all they were meeting or hanging out with each other. No matter where they came from or how old or young they were. The vibes were good on this spot.
T
he last twenty-four hours had been a nonstop race against time. The crew worked through the night, trying to finish the stage and—as the sun came up—finally setting the forty-foot wooden turntable in place. If we can just keep going, I thought, I’m certain everything will be fine.
As if in answer to this thought, a beautiful woman arrived backstage with a large plastic bag of white powder. A good Samaritan had ordered a pound of cocaine to distribute to the various crews who’d been working all night and now had to get through what was sure to be a sleepless weekend. At about 8
A.M.
, all the crew heads gathered
backstage in front of the production trailers. Just as the powder was dumped onto a card table to be divided and distributed, the clouds suddenly opened up and rain poured down like a fire hose. Before anyone could move, the sparkling granules turned into a gooey mess. People scrambled for the white paste as it ran in rivulets into the ground.
The gods had spoken again.
Last-minute decisions had to be made. I approached Chip Monck and John Morris and told them they were to handle MC duties. John had already been on the mic, testing it on Thursday when Bill Hanley and his team got the PA up and running. John has announced concerts at the Fillmore and loves the spotlight. Though Chip’s never done this before, he is articulate and has an authoritative presence that will make him a good MC.
CHIP MONCK:
At seven in the morning on the first day, Michael came over to me onstage while I was working and said, “Chip, since there’s not much lighting to do, you have another job, master of ceremonies.” All of a sudden, you can actually hear my knees knocking together! I was terrified! He was just, “Do the job and get it done.” The first thing I announced was for people in the bowl to stand up and move back from the stage. Then all of the little notes started coming up about “Harold, please go to the blue tent in the back for your pills for your diabetes”—of course, that meant somebody was going to make a dope deal.
By Friday morning, at least two hundred thousand people were packed into Max’s fields. With the fences down, we all knew it was impossible to collect or sell tickets—even though people were looking for places to buy them—but we kept batting around ideas on what to do. I could not locate Keith O’Connor or Joel, so I called Mel to find out what had happened to our ticket operation. He said he was out of
the loop. Apparently, the portable booths to be staffed with ticket sellers had never arrived.
The original plan was that the gates to the main field would open at 1
P.M.
—but, of course, there were no gates. Artie thought we could get women “dressed in diaphanous gowns” to pass the hat—and he hadn’t even been dosed yet. When I saw the cameras filming our rather tense discussions, I ushered everyone away from the lens. Though I wanted Woodstock to be documented, there are limits.
Later that afternoon, after talking to John and Wes, we came to terms with what a couple hundred thousand people already knew. John was devastated. I had John Morris make an announcement from the stage, stating the obvious: “The concert is free from now on.” Following the applause, he went on: “The people putting this on are gonna take a bath—a big bath…” Our hope was that this message would inspire people to pitch in and help their neighbors; we were all in this together no matter what.
JOYCE MITCHELL:
We were pretty sure it was going to be a free festival long before it was announced. It was a combination of all the various underground groups who came to Michael, plus the fact that we knew we could never get that damn fence built in time. There was an awful lot we knew that we didn’t share with other people. It wasn’t conspiratorial—it just
was
. It was really clear from Michael’s point of view that what was important was getting the festival on.
WES POMEROY:
I felt like I was letting them down, like somehow I had failed, but I had to be honest: I told John, “There’s not anything we can do about it—I can’t protect your money,” and I suggested that if they wanted to, they could set up a couple of places where they encouraged people to donate. I thought that would be pretty effective, because people were feeling grateful. Some people were
asking, “Where do we give our money?” But for some reason, that wasn’t carried forward.
Chip and John kept reassuring people from the stage that the concert would begin soon. We started playing the new Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills and Nash albums over the PA and the vibe seemed good. At one point Stephen Stills called John Morris in the production office. David Geffen or someone had told him about the crowds and he and the band were getting nervous about the gig. “Listen to this—we’re playing the record and people love it!” John reassured him, holding the receiver out so Stills could hear “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” followed by applause. “Okay, we’ll be there!” Stephen said. “We’re coming in by helicopter Sunday.”
At one point, Bill Graham turned up backstage. John Morris tried to engage him and commiserate about the traffic difficulties and crowds of people. Bill was at a loss; no one had ever had to deal with the things we were facing. “It’s time to stop being a promoter—and be a producer!” he told me. “You’ve got all these people here! What are you going to do with them?” “We’re going to take care of them, Bill,” I said, as I climbed the stairs to the stage.
Around 4
P.M.
, I was at a sort of command post Chip had set up off to the side of stage right. That’s where I would spend much of the weekend. I heard the roar of motorcycles and saw a group of about twenty bikes coming up West Shore Road, right behind the stage. Concern swept over me for a moment when I realized it was a gang of bikers from the city. When they passed by, I noticed how polite they were being to the people moving aside so they could get through. As they moved on, they were swallowed up by the crowd.
ROB KENNEDY, FESTIVALGOER:
The audience was one living, breathing organism. There were no boundaries. There were naked people, high people, straight people, and every kind of people in between. It was
a very cool crowd. A funny story: One of my friends brought a
very
large Sherlock Holmes–type pipe. The stem was at least ten inches long and it had a huge bowl that
always
induced cough attacks. After a particularly bad fit of hacking, another of our friends got furious and heaved the thing as far as he could behind us into the crowd. The pipe owner got really upset and started yelling, “Throw it back. Throw it back!” Suddenly it reappeared—still burning—right upside the head of the guy who threw it away. Instant karma!
In the woods near the concessions area, a casbah of drugs and paraphernalia sprang up. Wares included an assortment of acid, THC, mescaline, peyote, mushrooms, several varieties of grass and hash. Booths sold rolling papers, pipes, roach clips, cigarettes.
People kept pouring into the site all day. It took eight or more hours to drive the one hundred miles from New York. Traffic came to a standstill on the thruway miles before hitting exit 16, which led to a very clogged Route 17. Eventually, the state police would no longer allow cars to exit there. The twelve-mile-long Route 17B had stopped moving since Thursday night. By Friday afternoon, traffic was tied up within a twenty-mile radius of the site.
GREIL MARCUS, MUSIC JOURNALIST:
The intrepid
Rolling Stone
crew thought it would be bright to beat the traffic, so we left the city early in the morning and headed up…We got to Monticello, a little town eight miles from the festival…Eight miles of two-lane road jammed with thousands of cars that barely moved. Engines boiling over, people collapsed on the side of the road, everyone smiling in a common bewilderment. Automotive casualties looked like the skeletons of horses that died on the Oregon Trail. People began to improvise, drive on soft shoulders until they hit the few thousand who’d thought of the same thing, then stopping again. Finally the
two lanes were transformed into four and still nothing moved…A lot of kids were pulling over and starting to walk through the fields. Beat-out kids heading back told us nothing moved up ahead and that we had six miles to go. It was a cosmic traffic jam, where all the cars fall into place like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle and stay there forever…It was an amazing sight, the highway to White Lake: It looked, as someone said, like Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow.
JONATHAN GOULD, FESTIVALGOER:
We cut from the herd of cars mired on Route 17B and struck off on our own. After a couple of miles of dusty gravel road, we came upon Sullivan County’s tiny airport, which turned out to be more of a strip than a port, surrounded by a collection of shabby hangars and utility buildings. I have no memory of any of us articulating the next step in our plan. For my part, I was wearing what any seventeen-year-old self-respecting crypto-hippie/wannabe rock musician who had just returned from London would wear for a three-day outing in the boondocks of upstate New York: a closely tailored suede sport jacket, a blousy yellow shirt with balloon sleeves, and a pair of crushed velvet bell-bottom trousers. My hair came down to my shoulders; aviator sunglasses completed the effect. My friends Tom and Chris were more modestly dressed—in my recollection, they wore denim from head to toe. Our costumes implied a narrative: I was a rock musician, these were my roadies. Imbued with this fantasy, we walked across the parking lot and joined a line of about twenty-five colorfully dressed people on the edge of a weedy patch of tarmac where the helicopters were landing and taking off. The only thing I remember was the feeling of waiting for someone in a position of authority to say to us, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The helicopters kept landing and taking off, each one carrying two passengers seated beside the pilot. Eventually it was our turn.
Chris and I crouched low and ran across the tarmac (we’d seen this on TV), climbed into the bubble-shaped glass cabin, clicked our safety belts, and away we went.
I’d never been in a helicopter before, much less seated in the open doorway of a low-flying helicopter as it hurtled across the hilly farmland of upstate New York. It was a blessedly short trip. We came up over a rise and there, arrayed in a great bowl below us, was the largest assemblage of people I had ever seen. We circled once over this multitude and descended toward an open patch of ground that was just to the left of the stage. Throughout the flight, Chris and I had avoided eye contact as we channeled all of our attention into trying to look like the sort of people who flew in helicopters all the time. Now we braced ourselves for the moment of truth when we would touch down and our role as brazen imposters would be exposed. Sure enough, as soon as we landed, a pair of fierce-looking hippie-roadie types came running toward the helicopter. (I remember thinking, At least they aren’t cops.) One of them leaned into the doorway and shouted over the engine roar: “Do you need anything?” Did we
need
anything? Well, no, not just now, thank you. We unbuckled our seat belts, climbed out of the glass bubble, assumed our now-expert helicopter crouch, and ran across the field, escorted by the two hippie-roadies, who were giving us a quick orientation course. (“The backstage area is over here. The food tables are over there.”) Tom’s helicopter landed a few moments later, and he too emerged unchallenged. We were at Woodstock, our feet on the ground, our heads in the clouds.