The Road to Woodstock (7 page)
Read The Road to Woodstock Online
Authors: Michael Lang
But during our meetings and site surveys, Mel and I had quickly clicked. He was a very practical, “get it done” guy, and he understood what I was trying to do. I needed someone to be site manager, and he seemed to have the right skill set and my kind of vision. When the three were leaving, I asked Mel to stay on. He agreed to join my staff for a flat fee of $8,000.
MEL LAWRENCE:
I was hooked on being a general and said, “I want to do this.” I liked Michael. He had an air of confidence—and he made
you
feel confident. This quality gave you faith in him.
Mel had entered the concert business through radio and had been involved with some big concerts in Hawaii. He worked on the country’s first pop festival, the Magic Mountain Festival in Northern California, and handled staging, fencing, and traffic operations at Monterey Pop the following week. As our site manager, he could help in all these areas and more.
MEL LAWRENCE:
Our first planning meeting for Woodstock took place in a luncheonette on Sixth Avenue. Michael, Stan, and I started one of my patented outlines, which can run fifteen or twenty pages. We sort of laid out the festival on napkins.
On the last Sunday in March, John and Joel went for a drive upstate to look around, increasingly desperate to find a site. Heading back to the city in John’s Porsche, they saw a sign on Route 17 that read:
MILLS INDUSTRIAL PARK FOR RENT
. It was two hundred acres in the township of Wallkill, in Orange County, about a ninety-minute drive from New York City. The asking price for a four-month lease was $10,000, pending approval from the local zoning board. Joel and John paid $1,500 as a deposit for a two-way, thirty-day option on the land. They appeared before the Wallkill Zoning Board on April 18 and told them we’d be having an arts fair at the Mills Industrial Park with a possible forty to fifty thousand people attending over a couple of days. They downplayed the rock and roll component, perhaps a bit too much, and promised to take out liability insurance for the event. The Wallkill Zoning Board members seemed a bit dubious but told them they had no objections to our plans.
When I checked out the Mills Industrial Park, my first reaction was horror. The flat, bulldozed property looked as if it had been raped. Buzzards were flying around. It was as far as you could get from the feeling I was looking for. I had pictured walking into an open, pastoral scene of beauty and calm that could make you feel comfortable and at peace. This was ugly, cold, hard, and dirty and felt as if someone had taken what they wanted from the land and left the debris.
John, not unreasonably, was getting anxious, and after talking to Mills and showing the site to Mel, I was persuaded that we could transform it into an acceptable landscape. It would never be idyllic, but it did have electricity, water, and access from major roads. Our festival’s name would remain Woodstock, no matter where it was held. I was not going to give that up. The name Woodstock had come to represent the heart of what I hoped to accomplish.
We rapidly started filling staff positions. Most of the technical people came through Bill Graham’s Fillmore organization. The top lighting director in rock and roll, Chip Monck, had worked at Monterey
and at Mel’s Miami Pop Festival. He’d started his career at the Village Gate, had run the lights at the Newport festivals since their inception in 1959, and had designed the lighting for the Fillmore East. He rang me up about the festival after he heard about it from Hector Morales.
CHIP MONCK:
I went to see Hector Morales and Hector said, “Hey, this curly-headed kid has been in here and he’s booking every bit of talent in the world.” I wasn’t working at the moment and thought, It sounds like it’s going to be something pretty big! So I called up Michael and said, “Gee, let’s have a cup of coffee and put our heads together.” I contacted Annie Weldon, who was John Morris’s wife at that time, and said, “Can I bring this kid over and introduce him to you and John? Will you please just politely host the evening so we can get this thing moving?” So we met at their place on Thirteenth Street and Sixth Avenue.
“Hector explained to me what you’re booking,” I said to Michael, “and I really want to know more about it and if we can be of help.” Michael laid out his vision—without revealing too much but giving just enough. It was up to us to lock in and agree. That’s what you do with a promoter or a skilled entrepreneur. You take orders. Michael was understated, and when he got into a hole or into a corner, he did his famous mumble.
He was looking at having maybe two hundred and fifty thousand people. My feeling was we were looking at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. It was going to be huge and it was going to be everybody, and it had to be done correctly. Any time anybody saw Michael and realized what he was doing and what the accomplishment could be, they immediately signed themselves on.
Chip came on board for a $7,000 salary. A charming and unflappable guy, he had a good grasp of what we were trying to put together.
Chip’s friend John Morris sort of talked his way into a job. He had been concert promoter Bill Graham’s right-hand man at the Fillmore, and he knew numerous artists and their managers. I hired him to do artist relations—he would help with some of the booking and then work with the agents and managers on fulfilling the individual riders listing the technical requirements for each artist. During the festival he would be the artist liaison.
Chip and John both recommended Chris Langhart as our technical director. An acknowledged genius by everyone who worked with him, Chris taught theater design at NYU and had set up the plumbing and engineering plans for the Fillmore East. He would do the same for us.
CHRIS LANGHART:
There came to be salary negotiations, and Michael [was] very street wise. We finally settled on a figure—a low and a high—having argued it back and forth. He announced he would flip a coin, and as far as I was concerned, the low and the high were a little far apart. I said, “We’re not having that flipping of the coin routine, because I have a student in my class who can flip a coin reliably twelve times out of thirteen.” And this wide, Cheshire cat smile [came] onto his face, so we settled on [a] figure, and from then on we got on pretty straight ahead.
I hired Bill Hanley to build our sound system. I say
build
because a system that could provide sound for the size crowd we expected did not exist. Originally for the job, I’d considered Owsley Stanley, who designed the Grateful Dead’s massive system and was their sound engineer (as well as the country’s leading manufacturer of LSD). But Hanley was the best live soundman in the business and that’s what I needed. I met with him and explained the size of the project, and he seemed interested and eager to tackle it. “I know how to do it,” he said. “I can build you a system that will work.”
A company called Concert Hall Publications, operated by Bert Cohen and Michael Foreman in Philadelphia, had worked on Mel’s Miami festival, primarily in staging and promotion. Artie knew Michael, who sometimes wrote for the underground press. We hired them to develop our advertising campaign and to create the festival program book. They wanted to do more, though, and Bert somehow convinced John and Joel into commissioning him to design the interior of the Woodstock Ventures offices on West Fifty-seventh Street. Though all four of us realized the absurdity very early on, Bert turned the new office space into an over-the-top psychedelic casbah. Meant to evoke an environment like the black-light poster rooms in my head shop, or the interior of the Electric Circus, the offices consisted of platforms arranged at various heights and were carpeted in chartreuse. This misguided attempt at hipness shot right past cool and landed on ridiculous.
I hated the design, but there were other reasons I wanted a separate office. The advertising, ticketing, and business operations would be located uptown, and I needed to work without interference. Because of the nature of John and Joel’s complete unfamiliarity with the milieu, let alone the technical side of putting together a show or anything to do with production, I couldn’t see a way to bring them into the specifics of my plan. I didn’t think they’d get it or go along with it. From the start, I thought we would each focus on our individual roles. I would produce, Artie would promote, and they would deal with finance and ticketing. If I took time to explain my work to John and Joel, the festival would never happen. So I opened a separate office for production on Sixth Avenue, in the Village. That’s where we would put it all together.
Stan Goldstein had an uncanny ability to come up with just the right person for many of the positions we needed to fill. One of the most indispensable was Joyce Mitchell, who became the administrator of the downtown production office. A striking brunette, she was in
her thirties and had hung out with the Beats and writers like Terry Southern and James Baldwin. She’d been the media coordinator for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and before that, she’d produced programming for armed forces radio shows hosted by Merv Griffin and Eddy Arnold. She’d moved to New York in 1957, after graduating from the University of Miami and then living in Paris.
JOYCE MITCHELL:
I met with Michael and Stan somewhere near Lincoln Center for hamburgers. This curly-haired kid said to me, “What would you do about toilet facilities if you had a hundred thousand people in a field?” And I said something to the effect of, “Well, I’d have two backhoes—one for digging and the second for covering the other trench.” And either he or Stanley said, “Well, that’s a better answer than we got from the U.S. Army—you’re hired.” And I said, “What for? To dig latrines?” That’s how it all began. I don’t think I walked away from that meeting knowing what I was getting into. Michael did tell me that they wanted to throw the biggest rock and roll party ever.
The first thing they wanted me to do was to set up the production office. All of the various production managers—Mel Lawrence, Chip Monck, John Morris—were arguing about who got what space. John wanted more space. But the ones who needed the space were Mel and Chip because they were doing broad design work. Mel created this big three-dimensional mock-up of the Wallkill site. I worked right outside of Michael’s office. Things started pretty professionally.
Very smart, Michael had all the department heads meet together regularly. Michael’s method of management was that we should all totally understand what others were doing—so that we could shift into each other’s place if we had to. Michael’s managerial ability really impressed me. We did an awful lot of wrangling, we made up budgets, we were really playing it by ear.
Michael just said, “Find me the money.” Fortunately, I had taken a college class in accounting, at my father’s insistence, so I was able to create budgets and keep production reports running. It was all so fast and furious.
Through Chris Langhart, we found Jim Mitchell, who’d been a theater professor at NYU. He became our purchasing agent and helped take some of the work off Joyce’s plate. Jim set up accounts with various companies to obtain equipment and supplies. Slowly losing his sight, he was not in the best of health but was a hard worker nonetheless.
Our production office was very proletarian, just two floors in a brownstone, filled with desks and filing cabinets. Chip scavenged all the furniture, building some of it himself, and set up the office in less than forty-eight hours. We hired a receptionist who was a free spirit, but everyone else was grinding out the work. People could smoke pot whenever they felt like it, and we were having a good time, but nobody was goofing off. It was not a party. We had work to do and not a lot of time to do it and we had a budget, but it was sort of created from smoke. We didn’t have any money to waste. Joyce dealt with John and Joel’s bookkeeper uptown, a formidable redhead named Renee Levine.
JOHN ROBERTS:
[Renee] became an indispensable part of our organization. To the staff in general, she was a mother figure. To Michael and Artie, she was the barricade that stood between them and reimbursements for their bizarre expense vouchers. To Joel and me, she became a loyal and trusted friend, the keeper of the checkbook, the ear-splitting voice of sanity, and the shrewd Jewish kvetch who always knew a bum when she saw one—and she saw plenty…She stood up to lawyers, accountants, agents, rock stars, and even armed policemen. All of them, like us, got a lot more than they bargained for.
Artie worked in the uptown office with John and Joel, and the relationship soon became strained. Artie was expressive with his ideas, some realistic, some not. John and Joel were focused on making money, and they wanted to see practical matters handled efficiently. Artie was starting to get a little too high and at times would lose focus, and they were becoming exasperated with him. Artie, on the other hand, would complain about John and Joel being too square and not appreciating his contributions. I’d tell him not to worry about it—“just keep them on track so I don’t have to deal with this.” Increasingly, they called me to complain about Artie being irrational or high or just not present, and I’d say, “Okay, I’ll talk to him.” But I couldn’t constantly run uptown to deal with their conflicts. Had I been older, maybe I could have figured out a way to bridge the growing gap between them. But I didn’t have the time or the belief that, given the personalities, it could be done. I was working twenty hours a day and just didn’t have the answers to these questions.
I was spending so much time in New York, I’d rented rooms at the Chelsea Hotel, where Mel and I—and whoever else needed a bed—would crash. Meanwhile, Stan had relocated to Wallkill in April to troubleshoot any problems there before we set up our base of operations.
STAN GOLDSTEIN:
I was the advance man into Wallkill, so I was the first person to actually go up there and move in. I began to introduce myself and us to the local folks. I went to the newspaper, the Middletown
Times Herald-Record
, met the editor Al Romm and his staff, and told them about our plans. Up till that time, there had been no public notice. I went to see Jack Schlosser, the supervisor of the Wallkill township, and we had what seemed at the time to be a cordial meeting. I visited with the mayor of Middletown, who was not so cordial, but it was okay. And then I began to connect with local businesspeople.