The Road to Woodstock (4 page)

Most of the touring bands from New York and California played a large rock club in Miami called Thee Image. The biggest acts performed at Dinner Key Auditorium, located in what was originally a Pan Am seaplane hangar on the waterfront in the Grove. That venue
would later ban rock bands, after Jim Morrison was arrested for allegedly exposing himself onstage during a Doors concert there in March ’69. In late 1967, I started promoting a few shows at an outdoor amphitheater on Key Biscayne. The acts included Ravi Shankar, who’d been a sensation at the Monterey Pop Festival in June. I looked for interesting places to hold concerts, including the Seminole Indian reservation in the Everglades, where you could smoke pot without being hassled by the police. I met with tribal elders to discuss the possibility. They liked the idea, but we couldn’t work out the timing.

Anyone involved in the underground—from Timothy Leary to Jerry Garcia—would stop by my shop when in Miami. One December day, Paul Krassner, the publisher of
The Realist,
dropped in. I’d met him in New York a couple of years before when I took his class “From Mickey Mouse to the Green Berets” at the New School for Social Research. With him was Captain America himself, Abbie Hoffman. Abbie introduced himself and we connected right away. He had a great sense of humor and was committed to spreading the counterculture and infiltrating the mainstream. He and Paul dreamed up the Yippies, or Youth International Party, while they were hanging out in the Keys. Abbie and I would cross paths again in New York, and he’d eventually play an important role at Woodstock.

Another intriguing scene in Miami surrounded the Seaquarium, home to the various bottlenose dolphins that played Flipper on the weekly TV show. Their trainer, Richard O’Barry, would become a pioneer in animal rights. A sort of mystic when it came to dolphins, Ric had become aware of dolphins’ intelligence and their desire to communicate. After Cathy, one of the dolphins that played Flipper, became depressed and “committed suicide,” Ric had an epiphany. Realizing that it was inhumane to hold dolphins captive in tanks, he began a lifelong crusade to free them. Ric and Fred Neil became close friends, and Fred was convinced he could communicate with dolphins through music. Many of Fred’s friends came to Coconut Grove to hang out with Fred and the dolphins.

Ric and I were neighbors and became friends. Inspired by what had happened the year before at Monterey, we decided to put on Florida’s first-ever music festival. We wanted to present a diverse lineup in an outdoor setting over the course of multiple days, much like Monterey. My kitchen became our office and we formed a partnership called Joint Productions, along with a drummer named James Baron and my friend and attorney Barry Taran. In April, after the Grateful Dead played three nights at Thee Image, the club’s owner, a
slightly shady character named Marshall Brevitz, called to say he wanted in on the festival too.

We looked for sites and chose Gulfstream Race Track, in neighboring Hallandale. Ringed with palm trees, it was one of South Florida’s oldest horse-racing tracks, the site of the Florida Derby, and had a mile-long dirt track and a grass infield, as well as grandstands for seating. We came to an agreement with the Gulfstream management just as racing season ended in late April. Marshall Brevitz could put up his end of the money only if we held the concert within three weeks, so we picked May 18 and 19 as the dates. He suggested I see Hector Morales, a booking agent at William Morris in New York, so I flew north to meet him.

“You want to put on a show of that size in three weeks?” Hector repeated when I explained that I wanted to sign six or seven big-name artists to perform for an audience of twenty-five thousand. “You’re nuts!” But as we talked a while longer, I convinced him to help. We managed to sign an impressive roster of talent: John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, the Mothers of Invention (led by Frank Zappa), Blue Cheer, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Hendrix had been touring the United States that spring and this would be a last-minute final show. We rounded out the bill with some local groups: a Latin-tinged pop-rock band from Tampa, the Blues Image; a Miami free-jazz combo, the Charles Austin Group; and a garage band called the Evil.

We had to scramble for sound equipment and staging. Because of the time crunch, I decided on flatbed trucks that could be rolled onto the racetrack. The idea was to create a series of three separate stages lined up so we could rotate setting up and breaking down equipment. That way, one band could quickly follow the next.

For sound, we turned to Miami’s venerable Criteria Studio, then known mainly for recording jazz and R & B artists but where the
Grateful Dead had just cut a few songs. It was the major recording studio in the South at the time and would later become famous as the studio responsible for Derek and the Dominos’
Layla
and the Allman Brothers’
Eat a Peach
. DK introduced me to Criteria’s recording engineer Stanley Goldstein—who not only helped us pull this off but would become a major player in putting together the team for Woodstock. Ric and I met with Stan at Criteria to determine what we’d need for the festival.

We lucked out in that Mack Emerman, head of Criteria, trusted us with their equipment and gave Stan the green light to work on the festival. Stan’s ability to improvise impressed me. A quick study, he was not afraid to try something new. I also met Bob Dacey, a filmmaker willing to shoot the festival on spec. With the lineup finalized just days before the festival, we didn’t have much time for promotion. We quickly created a few versions of festival posters, some featuring a portrait of Hendrix, to distribute around town. Tickets cost $5, with an afternoon and evening show slated for both Saturday and Sunday. We also rented out booths to various vendors to sell assorted psychedelia.

My father came down the day before the festival opened, and I took him out to the track and explained what we were up to. He soon got to the bottom line: “How do you think you guys will do financially?” he asked. I answered by pointing over to the betting windows. We both laughed.

May 18 was magical. About twenty-five thousand people turned out and settled on blankets in the grass or perched on the stands, facing the stages set up on the western end of the track. The music started around noon. A handful of freaks, looking like they could have been from New York or San Francisco, were scattered among the crowd, but much of the audience looked like straight college kids. The
Fort Lauderdale News
had a field day, running an article entitled
FLOWER CHILDREN STRANGELY MANNERLY: REPORTER RUBS ELBOWS WITH WEIRDOS
: “Call them hippies, flower children or whatever, this genera
tion has much to its credit. They are gentle people, likable, polite to strangers and to each other. I spoke briefly with the most sloppily dressed, with the longest hair, and with the weirdos. All were pleasant, well mannered, gentle spoken. And all agreed they were there to hear the music they like the most and to see others of their ilk.”

The paper’s basically positive stance was the opposite of the
Miami Herald
’s, which warned that hippies in the neighborhood could wreck an area’s real estate value and was quick to report on the few thefts that occurred at the festival—eight-track players and tapes stolen from cars.

Most acts performed two sets, except for Hendrix. Jimi and the band had missed their pickup at the airport, and while the Mothers of Invention played, we realized that Hendrix was overdue. In a panic, we paged the Experience’s tour manager Gerry Stickells at Miami International Airport and found out that they’d missed their pickup. So we chartered a helicopter to ferry them to the show. Soon we heard the whir of blades overhead. Jimi, Noel Redding, and Mitch Mitchell landed in spectacular fashion just beyond the stage. I don’t know who was more ecstatic—me or the crowd. Dressed in a white ruffled shirt and a black fedora, Hendrix played a blistering set. As I watched from the scaffolding that evening, everyone in the audience looked totally engrossed and amazed by what was coming off the stage. I found out later that the Experience was
experiencing
STP:

As with most of the performances, Jimi’s was recorded: For years, “Foxey Lady,” “Fire,” “Hear My Train a Comin’,” and “Purple Haze” have floated around on bootleg recordings. On the Internet, fans still rave about the show: “the most mysterious and fascinating JHE gig,” “the greatest set I ever saw from anyone ever.” In addition to the documentary footage, ABC had been following Hendrix around and shot some of the performance. Linda Eastman (later McCartney), a good friend of Jimi’s, took some great photographs of the Experience, and Hendrix’s sound engineer Eddie Kramer (who would later record the Woodstock performances in ’69) shot some of the festival too. Decades later, the Petersen Museum in L.A. exhibited the Stratocaster Jimi played, which ended up with Frank Zappa that day. He got it, he said, after Hendrix broke its neck, doused it with lighter fluid, set it ablaze, and threw it off the stage. Frank replaced the guitar’s melted pick guard and broken neck and played it for years.

The show on Saturday ended with a fantastic fireworks display—the finale was a spectacular peace sign lighting up the sky. Things seemed too good to be true. They were. Because South Florida had been suffering through a lengthy drought, with no sign of precipitation, we decided to forgo expensive rain insurance. Unbeknownst to us, on Saturday, officials had ordered the clouds seeded over the Everglades. The result was a monsoon on Sunday—torrential downpours, hail, lightning, and fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Four inches of rain fell through the day and night, which cut attendance way down. Adding to our problems, it turned out that counterfeiting of tickets took a chunk out of our gate both days. On Sunday, we got two or three acts on early and then it just went completely to shit. Dark clouds threatened the Mothers of Invention’s set, and Zappa recommended the covered grandstand to the audience, in case it poured, but—“Of course, if sitting in the rain is your thing, well then, just groove.”

No grooving for us. We had to stop the music while waiting for a break in the downpour. Hours passed, and a guy climbed up on the
empty stage and tried to incite the drenched audience to riot. Before putting John Lee Hooker onstage, I had to get $750 in cash from the box office to pay him. When I opened the door, I discovered a nasty standoff in progress. John Ek, our head of security, was threatening the Brink’s driver who’d arrived to pick up the gate proceeds. A heavy-handed character, Ek was famous for having invented the Ek Commando Knife, which he would describe at the drop of a hat. It’s a long, thin knife, very narrow at the hilt, so when you stick it into someone, you can break off the blade. Ek figured we were in financial trouble because of the rain and demanded to be paid before any cash left the premises. The Brink’s guard, whose mission was to collect the box office receipts and transport the cash box to the bank, was not about to back down. They were yelling at each other, with me in the middle; then both sides went for their guns. I was petrified, but I knew there was a possibly more dangerous situation brewing outside. I instinctively tried to change the energy in the room.

“Hold it right there!” I shouted as I put my hands up. “This is still our money and nobody is taking anything anywhere until I get some music on. I’ll be back and we’ll work this out.” While they were absorbing this new information, I grabbed the cash and rushed to find John Lee. He took the stage and played that remarkable set, and I returned to the box office to work out a compromise.

Though there was a respite during John Lee’s set, the rain never really let up. The last act of the day, the (very) Crazy World of Arthur Brown, finally got to go on. They more than lived up to their name, and at the end of their big psychedelic hit “Fire,” Arthur kicked the organ off the stage. I later found out that, in the wee hours of the morning, he set out for Fort Lauderdale on foot. After the concert, several of the bands went back to their hotel to party at the bar.