The Road to Woodstock (24 page)
Read The Road to Woodstock Online
Authors: Michael Lang
Merry Prankster Ken Babbs and artist/photographer Ira Cohen
© BARON WOLMAN
PENNY STALLINGS:
It was like the earth tilted as the entire baby boomer demographic tried to get there.
JOYCE MITCHELL:
My office was a trailer and it was there that the
New York Times
reporter called the paper and said we were a disaster site. I wanted to choke him, but you know, “freedom of the press.” I was just on the other side of the footbridge, and I was running communications—messages to the stage. I was fighting with Jimi Hendrix’s agent to try to get him to come.
I had originally wanted Jimi to play an unannounced acoustic set on Friday to kick things off, but he hadn’t turned up yet. By four thirty, I knew we had to get someone ready to go onstage. The only other possibility besides Richie was Tim Hardin. When I approached him, he was strumming his guitar and singing to himself in the artists’ pavilion. “Hey, Tim, you want to open this thing up?”
“No way, man! I can’t go on now—not me, not first! I can’t deal with that!” He looked at me in desperation. “I’m waiting on my band.”
I knew he was fragile—he’d only recently kicked a heroin habit by getting on methadone and I didn’t want to push him. Tim was a friend, and I was a big fan of his music and was hoping he’d be at his best onstage. This could be a big break for him.
It had to be Richie—I knew he could handle it, and his powerful but calm demeanor was just what we needed to set the tone for liftoff. Regardless of what he said, he was ready and needed the least preparation and gear. When he saw me coming, Richie looked scared, and tried to walk away.
RICHIE HAVENS:
Here was Michael walking slowly toward me and I knew exactly what he was going to say. I could see his smile getting larger and larger as he came closer. Then he cocked his head
to one side and said, “Richie, please help us out. Oh, man, you’ve
gotta
help us out.”
When I realized he was serious this time, I could feel my heart start to freak out. And I was pleading with Michael. I said, “Michael, I’m supposed to be number five, not one.”
“Please, Richie, man, please!” I was finally convinced.
At 5:07
P.M.
, dressed in an orange dashiki and white pants, Richie Havens walked out onto that huge stage with his big Guild acoustic and propped himself on a tall wooden stool. Flanked by his percussionist and guitarist, he started talking to the crowd like he was at the Café Wha? “You know, we’ve finally made it! We did it this time. They’ll never be able to hide us again!”
“Get Together,” “I’m a Stranger Here,” “High Flying Bird,” “I Can’t Make It Anymore,” “Handsome Johnny.” After about forty minutes of playing an energized set of folk tunes, Richie stood up from the stool to end his performance. We still weren’t ready with another act, so I gave him a nod to keep going. Like the trouper he was, he just kept going and going. He’d get up to leave the stage and we’d send him back. He didn’t have a set list to draw from—but returned with song after song, and his band followed along. Finally, drenched with sweat, he gave us the look that this—his sixth or seventh encore—was it.
RICHIE HAVENS:
I’m back out there one more time, when finally I’ve completely run out of songs and know I’ve got to get off, no matter what the situation is. So I started tuning and retuning, hoping to remember a song I’ve missed, when I hear that word in my head again, that word I kept hearing while I looked over the crowd in my first moments onstage. The word was:
freedom.
And I say to the crowd: “Freedom is
what we’re all talking about getting. It’s what we’ve been looking for…I think
this
is it.”
I start strumming my guitar and the word
freedom
comes out
of my mouth as “FREE-dom, FREE-dom” with a rhythm of its own. My foot takes over and drives my guitar into a faster, more powerful rhythm. I don’t know where this is going, but it feels right and somehow I find myself blending it into an old song—“Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”—a great spiritual my grandmother used to sing to me as a hymn when I was growing up in Brooklyn. It’s a beautiful song, a song I hadn’t played in six or seven years. The rhythm is strong and my foot is driving me.
Deano and Daniel are following along, getting into it, chanting phrases back at me. But “FREE-dom” is always there, like an unspoken bass line or a distant refrain. This was the same feeling I’d been experiencing all along. The feeling that Bethel was such a special place, a moment when we all felt we were at the exact center of true freedom. I’m singing it, “FREE-dom, FREE-dom,” picking up the rhythm another beat, and the pulse of it is carrying me and connecting the whole Woodstock Festival for me in my very last moments onstage. I felt like I could feel the people I couldn’t even see on the other side of the hill…“Clap your
hands! Clap your hands!”
And they all did!
As I watched Richie walk offstage after his incredible set, I spotted my father, a big smile on his face, sitting on the downstage scaffolding. The best seat in the house.
How to follow Richie? Artie and John Morris supplied the answer in the form of Swami Satchidananda, an Indian spiritual leader who wished to say a few words to the crowd. My old friend Peter Max, who’d been studying meditation and yoga, had brought the swami and a group of his followers to Woodstock.
ARTIE KORNFELD:
There was no discussion about it, because as soon as it came up, Michael thought it was cool. I was looking at it as “what a great vibe to put out.” He put a wave of peace out there.
JOHN MORRIS:
There’s this teeny-tiny little man in a robe…I brought him up onstage and he sat there and in his squeaky voice talked to the people…It was part of the calming influence. It was like an invocation.
Though not booked to perform, John Sebastian was a familiar face hanging out backstage. After his band the Lovin’ Spoonful had broken up the previous year, he’d been spending time in California, living in a commune with the Firesign Theatre and writing songs for his first solo album. He’d just happened to run into the Incredible String Band at the Albany airport Friday morning and they invited him to join them in the helicopter we’d sent to pick them up.
JOHN SEBASTIAN:
I ended up backstage mainly because I knew everybody; these were all people I had played with, hung out with, sat around tables smoking dope with. This was absolute community. I felt very much at one with the whole group. I was quickly given all the passes I would ever need, and started wandering around backstage. Everyone was coping simultaneously with the fact that it had become a free festival. The mechanics about getting people on and off the stage had been thought about, but it was a monumental task. So all those who weren’t onstage found themselves helping with food or helping with lodging, helping any way they could.
I wandered around and found an eight-by-eight Volkswagen bus tent that had become a dressing room. I felt like I was right at home. I swept out the tent and began to batten it down a little bit. It had been put up very fast and people obviously had bounced around inside of it and shaken its moorings. So I started to fasten it down and Chip Monck came along at one point, and says, “Geez, you know about this.” And I said, “Well, I have been living in a
tent just like this for the last couple of months.” He said, “Terrific, you’re in charge of this tent.” I said okay. The entire Incredible String Band put all their instruments inside. They had an oud and a twelve-string, and a sitar, and mandolins, and banjos. We’re hiding this stuff in the extremities of the tent so none of the moisture would get in.
It was still early, so I decided, I’ll make a circle around that crowd—just to see what’s going on. It was a long walk, took three hours. I wandered up into the wooded area where there was a jungle gym, various craftspeople had set up their little worlds. Incredibly magical to wander through this area and see the various factions of this community of souls who had come together. I was not recognized at all.
We had saved an area backstage for friends and family. My mother and father were amazed by what they saw. They wanted to stay for the whole thing but had left their dog in their car and had to leave to check on her. Soon they would call to say that because of traffic, they were unable to reach their car. I sent a helicopter to pick them up, then their dog Jody, and take them to Monticello. It was like my life flashing before my eyes: I’d invited Ric O’Barry from Miami, who’d also tried to get Fred Neil to come. Peter Max was there, and lots of friends from Woodstock, the Grove, and Brooklyn. I’d barely been home in weeks and my relationship with Sonya had pretty much come to an end—but she was there, along with other friends from the Grove. I’d invited Train but they were in the studio, finally recording their first album for Vanguard, the same label as Joan Baez and Country Joe and the Fish.
CHRISTINE OLIVEIRA, FESTIVALGOER:
I was friends with Michael and Sonya in Coconut Grove and moved to Woodstock not long after they did. After watching Michael run in and out of town, planning the festival for months, we had to go, and he gave us tickets. We were
camping near the Hog Farm off to the side, and we were, I guess, sort of the elite, but I didn’t know that. Our area had its own little amphitheater, so the people who performed would come over and play where you could hang out and nobody would see you. The Hog Farm was really together in terms of getting food organized for people and staying on top of sanitation. I hate crowds, so I mostly stayed in this part because you could hear everything anyway. I thought, “This is a once-in-a-millennium thing.” A lot of it I attribute to Michael’s energy drawing it there.
The first day I sat in that audience in front of the main stage for four hours, and finally I thought, “I can’t sit here anymore.” It was not a bad crowd, but I had to get up. Most people were so stoned. They were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, and had never been away from home. I was already twenty-six. From the stage, they’d call, “So and so, come and get your diabetes medicine,” and that was a shock to me because I had never heard of so many people being diabetic.
I got up and walked around. There were pipes lying across the ground, and the water system broke down, and the roads weren’t really in properly to get the cars in and out. They were building the stage right up to the last minute. They were even working on stuff while the first acts went on.
They had this little village and woods, with concessions and beautiful stuff—leatherwork and tie-dye, but it was the whole culture. It was gorgeously set up, with a big jungle gym and a playground. It was this magic utopian village.
ABBIE HOFFMAN:
It got to be a really beautiful scene with people looking out for each other. I got Bobby Neuwirth, Rick Danko, John Sebastian, and others to come down and do a little concert at the free stage. It was quite special. Joan Baez waited for an hour in the rain to go on, without telling anybody who she was.
JOHN SEBASTIAN:
Rick Danko and I went over to the large tent where the Hog Farm was cooling out acid casualties. The people were lying on canvas cots, and [Hugh Romney] was walking around in a white outfit. Every kid who came in would come up to him and say, “Hey, man, take these and don’t let me ever see them again.” Rick and I tried to think of all the songs we could play for the mentally disoriented. It was hard-core easy-listening music.
Little impromptu jams were going on backstage too. At one point, Jerry Garcia and Mimi Fariña were singing and playing together. On the main stage, the Friday programming was easing in. We’d located Sweetwater, and they finally arrived, after we picked them up in a helicopter. But they suffered through some sound problems due to all their instrumentation, including flute, cello, keyboards, conga, drums, bass, and two lead vocalists, Nancy Nevins and Albert Moore.
ALEX DEL ZOPPO OF SWEETWATER:
We had a fairly eclectic band. We had a mixed racial, mixed gender band—Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Irish. We’d take anyone! Seven people and very strange instrumentation—no guitar. We were unfortunately a complicated act to stage. We were used to going on without a sound check, but we weren’t used to
being
the sound check! And from what we know, Albert ran into someone he knew and dropped a little of that brown acid, which was not a good idea.
FRED HERRERA OF SWEETWATER:
We were the first electric group onstage, with mics for the amps and drums. So we were essentially the sound crew’s sound check. They were adjusting levels all the way through our set, so everything was intermittent. I could sort of hear from the main speakers what was going out to the audience. But I could not hear what was going on on the other side of the
stage, and they could not hear us. We were trying to listen to our amplifiers, but we were so spread out that even the bass I played, which was cranked up quite a bit, would just get lost. It would just get sucked up outside in the air there.
With a haunting tenor voice, singer-songwriter Bert Sommer performed “Jennifer,” “She’s Gone,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “America” and other ballads, while sitting cross-legged onstage, backed by electric guitars. Artie would produce his next two albums.
More of the musicians had been showing up at the Holiday Inn in Liberty, and we sent Joyce over in a helicopter to make sure everything was okay there.
JOYCE MITCHELL:
Everyone was at the motel, and they were fighting over rooms—there weren’t enough rooms. Janis was there. I tried to cool her off in the lobby because she was very drunk and very demanding. The Grateful Dead were sweethearts. They said they would share rooms. The Who were there and it was difficult to get Keith Moon settled down. The son of a bitch tried to rape me! I had to really push him to get out of his room. He was grabbing me.