The Road to Woodstock (31 page)
Read The Road to Woodstock Online
Authors: Michael Lang
A crowd of musicians gathered onstage and watched intently as they opened with a lively “Chest Fever.” Levon, Rick, and Richard alternated lead vocals as they played tracks from their album
Music from
Big Pink
: “Tears of Rage,” “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “The Weight.” Some of the songs they played wouldn’t come out on vinyl for a few years. I thought they sounded fantastic, but because they were musically subtle and seemed to be playing more for themselves, they didn’t connect so well with the kids in the bowl.
ROBBIE ROBERTSON:
After three days of people being hammered by music and weather, it was hard to get a take on the mood. We played a slow, haunting set of mountain music. It seemed kind of appropriate from our point of view. We were thinking, “Those poor suckers have been putting up with a lot of stuff, so maybe we should send out a little spiritual feeling to them.” We did songs like “Long Black Veil” and “The Weight,” and everything had a bit of reverence to it. Even the faster songs sounded almost religious. I thought, “God, I don’t know if this is the right place for this.” I looked out there and it seemed as if the kids were looking at us kinda funny. We were playing the same way we played in our living room. We were like orphans in the storm there.
When the Band finished, we made another complicated set change to get Johnny Winter on. At times like this, we really missed the use of the stage turntable. It was way past midnight and the weather had turned cool. For about an hour, Winter heated things up, playing spectacular slide on a mix of Texas blues, R & B, and early rock and roll, including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” to end his set.
There was another big equipment shift to set up for the next act, Blood, Sweat and Tears, an eight-piece jazz-rock band with a horn section. Driven by drummer Bobby Colomby, they’d recently had back-to-back hits: “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and “Spinning Wheel.” A highlight of their set, “And When I Die,” would be their next one.
GREIL MARCUS:
The scene onstage Sunday night was a curious one. The
groups were hanging out there, performing, setting up, digging the other musicians; the Band; Blood, Sweat and Tears; and Paul Butterfield. Now, no doubt that in terms of prestige, the Band was king that night, to the other musicians if not to the audience. As Helm, Danko, and Robertson sat on amplifiers listening to Johnny Winter, stars of the past and present came over to say hello, to introduce themselves, to pay their artistic respects. David Clayton-Thomas, the young Canadian lead singer for Blood, Sweat and Tears, flashed a big grin and shook hands vigorously—a man on the way up, his group outselling everyone in the country, and impressing the audience far more than the Band did that night but still very much in the shadow of the men from Big Pink who play real music that comes out of real history.
Musicians, journalists, and plenty of others gathered onstage, eagerly anticipating the next group: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Neil Young had just joined the band, and they’d played only one concert, the night before in Chicago. We all wanted to hear their debut album performed live.
GRAHAM NASH:
When we got out of the helicopter, we were greeted by John Sebastian. We lit one up and had a party in Sebastian’s tent—there was mud halfway up his legs. He told us graphic stories about the rain and mud. Backstage was totally chaotic.
We weren’t afraid of the crowd—we were more concerned with our peers. I think Stephen and I were a little nervous that Hendrix, and the Band, and Blood, Sweat and Tears were there. And I think Neil was nervous about playing with us.
DAVID CROSBY:
We were scared. Everyone we respected in the whole goddamn music business was standing in a circle behind us when we went on. Everybody was curious about us. We were the new
kid on the block, it was our second public gig, nobody had ever seen us, everybody had heard the record, everybody wondered, “What in the hell are they about?” So when it was rumored that we were about to go on, everybody came, standing in an arc behind us. That was intimidating, to say the least. I’m looking back at Hendrix and Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm and Grace and Paul, everybody that I knew and everybody I didn’t know.
I was also toasted because we had some of that pullover pot, that incredible Colombian gold that a friend of mine named Rocky had brought to the festival.
Around 3:30
A.M.
, Graham, Stephen, and David stepped onstage and started the set alone. Then Neil, bassist Greg Reeves, and drummer Dallas Taylor joined them. Stills and Young played a breathtaking acoustic version of “Mr. Soul” from their days with Buffalo Springfield. The crowd and everyone backstage were entranced. “Long Time Gone,” another high point, would become the opening track of the film
Woodstock
.
GREIL MARCUS:
Their performance was scary, brilliant proof of the magnificence of music, and I don’t believe it could have happened with such power anywhere else. This was a festival that had triumphed over itself, as Crosby and his band led the way toward the end of it.
GRAHAM NASH:
I thought we did a lousy set. When you consider playing acoustic guitars to four hundred thousand people and trying to reach to the back of the crowd with songs like “Guinnevere,” it was absurd. But we certainly gave it our best shot. Sure, the “Suite” was a little out of tune, but so what?
DAVID CROSBY:
We were good, thank God. It went down very well.
The people who were my close friends—Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, Garcia, and a lot of people—they were all thrilled. They said, “Wow! You tore it up! It worked!” They loved it, everybody loved it. How could you not love it? “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes”—what’s not to like?
Another friend I’d gotten to know in Woodstock, Paul Butterfield, was on next—it must have been 6
A.M.
by the time we got his large ensemble set up. Paul was a great harmonica player and vocalist from Chicago, and could vamp on blues for hours: “Born Under a Bad Sign,” “Driftin’ and Driftin’,” “All in a Day.” His hot horn section included saxophonist David Sanborn, and he had Buzzy Feiten on guitar. I recognized several of his band members from town.
By now the crews were fried. But everybody held on and kept going. Out in the bowl, people continued to drift away. That was a big relief, really, because the thought of a half million people trying to leave at once was horrifying. Instead of a finish, everybody was just letting it go. I had a feeling the festival wouldn’t end so much as wind down—like a big sigh.
The band of twelve Columbia students, Sha Na Na, had anxiously been awaiting their turn since Sunday afternoon. They worried they’d never get to do the thirty-minute slot I’d given them. Around 7:30
A.M.
, they came out in their gold lamé suits and DA haircuts. They breezed through a number of early rock and roll standards like “Get a Job,” “Teen Angel,” and “Duke of Earl.” Their enthusiasm and energy seemed to revive the sleep-deprived. Michael Wadleigh and his crew were preparing to film Hendrix, and quickly managed to capture “At the Hop” and a couple of other numbers.
JOCKO MARCELLINO OF SHA NA NA:
In the performers’ pavilion, we talked to all these people. We were the little kids. But they gave us a certain
respect. We almost didn’t play. We just snuck in. We were getting pissed. I love Paul Butterfield, but he went on forever. I didn’t like him that day. Finally, we got to play right before Hendrix. By then it was a refugee camp, most of the people were gone. I met a guy, years later, who had been tripping the night before. Fell asleep and woke up when we were playing and had no idea what we were, thought he had gone on a terrific trip.
Jimi Hendrix had arrived Sunday around noon, and I’d met him and Michael Jeffrey backstage. I suggested that Jimi could go on at midnight because we’d been running late all weekend. But Jeffrey said no, he wanted Jimi to close, no matter what time. Jimi’s new band had been together for only a short time. They’d been staying at Jimi’s house in West Shokan and working up material to play at Woodstock.
We had rented a cottage near the backstage area, where I took them to pass the time. Occasionally Jimi would drop by the stage or performers’ pavilion. At one point during the evening, it became clear that the show would not be over until early morning. I checked to see if Jimi would change his mind about the midnight slot. But Jeffrey was still set on closing.
Finally, at 8:30
A.M.
on Monday, Hendrix and his band headed to the stage. The fact that only forty thousand people remained didn’t seem to bother him. His set that morning would turn out to be the longest of his career—two hours. He started by introducing his new group: Billy Cox on bass, Juma Sultan and Gerry Velez on percussion, Larry Lee on rhythm guitar, and Mitch Mitchell on drums. “We got tired of the Experience and every once in a while we were blowing our minds too much, so we decided to change the whole thing around and call it Gypsy, Sun, and Rainbows…We only had about two rehearsals, so…nothing but primary-rhythm things, but, I mean, it’s a first ray of the new rising sun, anyway, so we might as well start from the
earth, which is rhythm, right?”
After tuning up his white Strat, he launched into “Message to Love,” followed by “Hear My Train a Comin’.” The band seemed suited for improvisation, and songs turned into long jams. Jimi had a serenity about him that morning, even on “Foxey Lady.” Larry Lee took lead vocals on a couple of songs, including Curtis Mayfield’s “Gypsy Woman.” Both Lee and Jimi kept retuning their guitars, and at one point Jimi said, “We’ll just play very quietly and out of tune.”
The massive stage was sparsely populated compared to how packed it had been all weekend with musicians, crew, and friends. Jimi, a red scarf around his head and wearing a white fringed and beaded leather shirt, looked almost like a mystical holy man in meditation. His eyes closed, his head back, he’d merged with his music, his Strat—played upside down since he’s a lefty—his magic wand. Though he was surrounded by his band, he projected the feeling he was all alone.
As he almost reverently started the national anthem, the bedraggled audience, worn out and muddy, moved closer together. Those of us who’d barely slept in three days were awakened, exhilarated by Jimi’s song. One minute he was chording the well-worn melody, the next he was reenacting “bombs bursting in air” with feedback and distortion. It was brilliant. A message of joy and love of country, while at the same time an understanding of all the conflict and turmoil that’s torn America apart.
ROZ PAYNE:
I was working in the bad-trip tent when he started to play it. Everything seemed to stop. Before that, if someone would have played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” we would have booed. After that, it became
our
song.
TOM LAW OF THE HOG FARM:
I was standing right in front of him. Nobody
was in the audience hardly. I felt like he was the defining poet of the festival with that piece of music. It was like taking you right into the heart of the beast and nailing it.
GRAHAM NASH:
Hendrix was okay. I had heard him better. But “The Star-Spangled Banner” was unreal. As creative a two minutes as you can probably find in rock and roll.
MEL LAWRENCE:
I woke up to Jimi Hendrix. I was in my trailer on the hill, and I looked down on this depressing scene of the quarter-filled bowl full of trash and people walking out on Jimi Hendrix. Then I heard “The Star-Spangled Banner” and it gave me chills.
Jimi segued from “The Star-Spangled Banner” into “Purple Haze.” I thought about Miami in May ’68 when Hendrix descended from a helicopter and played that song on the Gulfstream stage. It seemed that day had presaged this one.
On Monday morning, Jimi ended his set with an instrumental piece later named “Woodstock Improvisation,” followed by the haunting “Villanova Junction,” and finally, around 10:30
A.M.
, “Hey Joe.”
It was over.
What had seemed an eternity now felt like the blink of an eye. Nothing would ever be the same again.
THE AFTERMATH
Monday, August 18, 1
P.M.
: I’m looking down on the grounds where I’ve been entrenched for the past three weeks. It’s a very different view from what’s been described to me by those who flew over during the height of the festival—when, for miles, all the eye could see was a blanket of people. A guy in Sweetwater said it looked like fields and fields of wildflowers. Now it’s fields and fields of mud.
I have to get to the bank on Wall Street to meet Joel, John, and Artie, and one of the helicopter pilots has offered me a lift.
As we turn east, I spot something there, in the bowl near the front of the stage: an immense peace sign. It’s made up of garbage—shoes, blankets, cans, bottles, papers, T-shirts, sleeping bags, and watermelon rinds. The kids who have stayed to help with the cleanup have created this symbol of what we all hope will be our legacy.
I keep this image with me as I head to Manhattan and the Bank of North America. Leaving the world of Woodstock for the world of Wall Street, I wonder what I’m literally flying into. John, Joel, Artie, and I will
be together for the first time since Thursday. I know we have some unpleasant financial business to deal with—I’m just not sure how unpleasant. Other than the time on Saturday when the Brink’s truck driver arrived at my trailer and I sent him home empty-handed, this is the first time I’ve focused on finances since the festival began. Hopefully, any problems can be resolved. But I don’t know how many checks John has written over the weekend or how much money has yet to be collected from advance-ticket outlets.
A
fter Jimi Hendrix ended his two-hour set Monday morning, the festival was officially over. Because people had been gradually departing since Sunday, traffic moved smoothly, directed by three hundred state police, sheriff’s deputies, and volunteer firemen. People hitching rides held signs with their destination, and Short Line buses ran nonstop from Monticello to New York City. One newspaper described some pretty outrageous departures: “Eleven young people rode fenders, bumpers, hoods, and the roof of a ’57 Chevrolet that scraped the road surface at each bump. A reporter saw three youths tied to the luggage rack on the roof of a Ford station wagon bearing New Jersey license plates…”
Another paper reported that White Lake residents continued to assist festivalgoers, “obviously touched by the plight of the foodless, moneyless, housingless youngsters. Some opened their homes to them for the night and others gave away free food and water. Monticello Police opened up the small town park to provide a sleeping place for those waiting for Short Line buses.”
PARRY TEASDALE:
I knew a couple who lived nearby, whose son—a friend of mine—had been killed in Vietnam. When they heard about all these kids with nothing to eat, they said, “There are kids who are hungry, and we’re going to feed them.” They packed up
every hot dog they could get and went to the festival and fed young people.
CHRISTINE OLIVEIRA:
We got out of there Monday afternoon. We’d stop because we didn’t know exactly which back roads to take home and we didn’t have a map, and people would say, “Do you have enough to eat?” They’d come out with sandwiches.
I spent Monday morning wrapping up as much business as I could before leaving for the meeting at the bank. Mel and Stan were going to oversee the cleanup. We estimated it would take about $50,000 and a minimum of two weeks to restore the land for Max and the other farmers whose fields we’d rented. About eight thousand people were still camped in the surrounding areas, including the Hog Farm and other commune members. Many began helping to remove trash from the grounds. Mel started looking for volunteer assistance, to aid the cleanup crews we’d hired. He began with the Boy Scouts.
MEL LAWRENCE:
The cleanup was really interesting. People as far as twenty miles away were calling and saying we needed to clean their barn—they were looking at this situation as an opportunity to get their property cleaned up. We had a front loader push everything into a big pile and load it onto a truck; there were thousands of sleeping bags and articles of clothing left behind.
PENNY STALLINGS:
We had so much to do to clean up. Mel referred to the site after everyone left as looking like Andersonville, a Civil War prison camp. The ground was smoking from all the humanity that had been there.
HENRY DILTZ:
What was left was muddied junk. Bags of food, clothes, all soaking wet and trampled in the mud. With all this stuff lying
around just like dead bodies. You’ve seen those old pictures of battlefields on glass plates, of bloated horse bodies, cannonballs, dead soldiers lying in the field. That’s what it looked like.
Staff members gathered at my production trailer. Until our financial situation was settled, I had to explain that we couldn’t pay anyone. While this was going on, reporters were there asking questions. When a
New York Times
reporter inquired about our financial status, I told him we’d spent a lot more than we’d made: “So many came…and we had to take care of them. It was worth it.” The writer went on to report in the
Times
: “Today a trailer serving as a business office was filled with young workers expecting to be paid. They were told to take only what they absolutely needed until the sponsors could obtain cash. In the spirit of sharing that has marked the weekend, champagne and cigarettes were proffered.”
Stan stayed in Bethel for the next three weeks during the bulk of the cleanup and dismantling process. He created request forms so that neighbors could file claims for loss and damages or just to ask for trash removal.
STAN GOLDSTEIN:
I stayed to calm fevered brows. There were two immediate fallouts: A group of very vocal, unhappy people in whose fields and lawns people had settled, who claimed all kinds of damage from the marauding hordes. Then there were the other people who said, “Wow, what a miraculous thing you guys have done…the kids were great…how did you manage to do it?!” Of course, most of the merchants and businesspeople in the area were very happy. They’d never done so much business in such a short length of time.
Various people began filing lawsuits, including the president of the Monticello Raceway, which had planned a race for that weekend;
eventually, about eighty lawsuits would be filed. (Most would be settled out of court or dropped.) Politicians started calling for an investigation into the festival. One, Representative Martin McKneally (R-Newburgh), flew over the site in a helicopter and issued a statement saying, “The stench that arose from the hill on Yasgur Farm will remain in the nostrils of the people of Sullivan County for years to come.” He went on to compare the smell to “Egyptian filth.” State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz announced he had been contacted by officials from New York City to investigate the festival. Lefkowitz was concerned about ticket buyers who could not get to the festival. As tickets were not collected, it was impossible to tell who had made it to the site and who hadn’t. John and Joel later settled on paying a lump sum of $25,000 to the state to cover any such claims.
While people were clearing the site, various tools and equipment just disappeared. We had told the Hog Farm they could take any equipment left over in their area and they took us up on it.
ROZ PAYNE:
I stayed a few days after the festival was over—everyone’s leaving, the piles of garbage are being left, and here we have sound equipment from the stage, we have a printing press, we have generators that are left behind, we have a field hospital. Most people are gone by this time. The Hog Farm is picking up bottles. I contacted people in New York to bring up the largest rental truck they could find. I also had a friend of mine drive up my little red Volkswagen. We filled up the U-Haul truck with the entire field hospital, except for a small refrigerator, which we put in the back of my VW. We put the printing press in the rental truck—whatever we saw, we took. Somebody took air conditioners from the trailers. We gave the printing press to the Black Panthers, which they printed their newspaper on. We gave the field hospital to the Black Panthers Free Clinic.
PENNY STALLINGS:
The Hog Farm started loading building equipment that we had rented into their buses, and I said, “No, no, you can’t do that—we need it for next year.” The festival was going to happen again, I thought—from that point on, there would be a gathering of the tribes, a sea change in philosophy and political thinking in the country.
But Mel said to me about the equipment, “What do you care? Just let them take it.” That was the hippie philosophy—we all share. But I knew John would be paying for it. He was a wonderful guy and I wanted him to pay for the next one the following summer.
Though some of the local officials were angry about the havoc and inconveniences, many had positive things to say. Sullivan County sheriff Louis Ratner told reporters, “I never met a nicer bunch of kids in my life,” and another cop said, “When our police cars were getting stuck they even helped us get them out. I think a lot of police here are looking at their attitudes.” Though there had been alarms sounded about medical emergencies, in the end, Dr. Abruzzi reported that his team had treated about five thousand people since Thursday, but almost half of the cases were cut feet. “It’s about what you’d expect for a city of over three hundred thousand people,” he said of the number of people they treated.
We got roundly criticized by the
New York Times,
which particularly upset John and Joel. The Monday edition ran an editorial,
NIGHTMARE IN THE CATKILLS
, condemning us:
The sponsors of this event, who apparently had not the slightest concern for the turmoil it would cause, should be made to account for their mismanagement. To try to cram several hundred thousand people into a 600-acre farm with only a few hastily installed sanitary facilities shows a complete lack of responsibility.
In contrast, Max had kind words about us. Monday afternoon, he held a press conference at his farm, where he told the assembled journalists: “The kids were wonderful, honest, sincere, good kids who said, ‘Here we are. This is what we are. This is the way we dress. These are our morals.’ There wasn’t one incident the whole time. The kids were polite, shared everything with everyone, and they forced me to open my eyes. I think America has to take notice. What happened at Bethel this past weekend was that these young people together with our local residents turned the Aquarian festival into a dramatic victory for the spirit of peace, goodwill, and human kindness.”
No one was sure exactly how many people were at the festival. Aerial photographs were studied and estimates averaged around 450,000 to half a million. The White Lake historian Charlie Feldman was certain “there were 700,000 people there. The attendance estimate is based on aerial photos and there were thousands of people under trees,” who couldn’t be counted.
Arriving at the Wall Street heliport by midafternoon, I rushed into the executive offices of the bank. I entered a large, darkly paneled room and looked around for my partners. They were not easy to find, with all the lawyers, bankers, and bankruptcy attorneys in attendance. I finally spotted them in the president’s office surrounded by John’s brother Billy, an attorney; several more lawyer types; and an older gentleman who turned out to be the bank president. When I first poked my head in, I had noticed a large fish tank against the wall. I thought, Could that be piranha? It was at that moment the smell of fear and angst and anger in the room washed over me.
Unbeknownst to me, Artie had invited a couple of people along to the meeting. While still pretty stoned at Woodstock, he’d told Albert Grossman and Artie Ripp about the Monday appointment. Apparently, both were interested in forming a partnership with Artie and
me. They suggested raising money to buy out Joel’s and John’s shares of Woodstock Ventures. They believed the Woodstock film was going to be huge and there was great value in the corporate name.
ARTIE RIPP:
I was like a closet rabbi and thinking how do we make this thing work—how do you realize other opportunities after this? The undertaking itself had been like the Normandy invasion. I was friends with Albert Grossman, who was clearly a power player because of the acts he controlled and his influence in the business in general. We went on the helicopter from Woodstock with Artie. We fly to Wall Street and we go to the banker’s office—and here’s a guy who’s got both a picture of Chairman Mao on the wall and a piranha in a fish tank in his office. Already I know this guy is off the fuckin’ cliff someplace. He wants to make it clear that he’s an out-of-the-box thinker and left of right and right of left and not anyplace near center.
ARTIE KORNFELD:
I walked into the meeting with Artie Ripp, and the banker was throwing meat in his piranha tank. After coming from this beautiful experience, I was seeing everything that I hated about the world of capitalism.
The meeting had been going on since nine that morning. John had been writing checks all weekend to pay a long stream of people who managed to get to the telephone building. Now he and his family were going to have to guarantee over a million dollars to the bank to make good on those checks. The other option was for Woodstock Ventures to declare bankruptcy. The bank officials said they would hold all checks until Thursday, by which time an accounting of whatever incoming funds there were could be completed.
Regardless, there was no clear financial picture to be had at the meeting, or at least no one was interested in giving one to me. At a
minimum, I was expecting the four of us to sit down and assess our situation and explore possible solutions. We were not without assets. We had created a huge amount of goodwill; we had the film and recordings of what had become an event of historic proportions. But it became clear that John’s brother Billy was representing the Roberts family, who for all practical purposes had taken over control of Woodstock Ventures. The Roberts clan was taking an admirable position in backing John, taking us all out of the bankruptcy fire, but I sensed they had no interest in seeing our partnership continue. The die had been cast before I even touched down at the heliport.