Read The Road to Woodstock Online
Authors: Michael Lang
The Road to Woodstock (8 page)
In April and into May, Stan made the rounds in Wallkill, quietly setting up accounts with utility companies and investigating local businesses and contractors. As long as we were under the radar, all was well in Wallkill. But, by late May, once word hit the local papers, anti-Woodstock forces began to coalesce.
STAN GOLDSTEIN:
There were incipient rumblings; there were all these questions about what our intentions were, and it seemed the best way to deal with that was to make myself available at a town hall meeting [in the first week of June]—to answer questions.
Preparing to relocate to the Wallkill site, Mel hired an assistant. He contacted an old friend from Bensonhurst, Barry Secunda, who managed the East Village nightclub the Electric Circus. Barry recommended his girlfriend, Penny Stallings, a Texan who’d just moved to New York after graduating from Southern Methodist University.
PENNY STALLINGS:
I was very much adrift. I had a college education and nothing to do with it. I was totally at a loss in New York. I was a pure Texas girl with lots of makeup on and extra-blond hair—very
not
natural—and at the office I landed right in the middle of hippie town. Except for Mel, who was very preppy and a businessman, everybody else was funky and long-haired, and the women wore no makeup. They looked great, and I wanted to do that, but I couldn’t. Life in the office was fabulous—just hilarious. I was always laughing at the ongoing craziness—a total circus all the time.
Stan was like Allen Ginsberg. He was verbose and really smart. He had Michael’s ear. Joyce vetted everything before any interaction with Michael. You had to go through her, and quite often she decided that it was not necessary for you to talk to him after all. She was the protective person who ran interference for Michael.
She was in the “grown-up” group. She looked completely opposite from me. She wore no makeup and had that great bohemian fuzzy hair, salt and pepper. She was a very good-looking woman, and that added to her power.
I called Chip “Manners the Butler,” a character on a TV commercial at the time, because he was so very British without being British. He was funny, gorgeous, and very cool. He and John Morris were really nice and awfully indulgent with me, because I knew less than nothing about what we were doing.
The first week in June, Mel took Penny and a small staff to Wallkill to start preparing the site, which needed extensive work to restore the land from industrial damage. On the property, we discovered old farm machinery and talked about how to deal with that. Mel’s idea was to create characters out of them, which I thought was great. When Mel worked on the Miami festival, he had hired Bill Ward, a sculptor and art professor at the university there, to engage his students to create artworks at the Gulfstream Race Track. We wanted something like that for the Wallkill site, and Bill agreed to bring a crew to New York.
Mel and I mapped out everything. We wanted the place to be conducive to people feeling comfortable, safe, and close to nature. Based on crowd flow, we started locating the placement of the various elements: the stage, the camping area, the toilets, the kitchens, the concessions. Mel began with the landscaping and site development; we saved the stage construction, piping, and plumbing for last; I had a feeling that we should avoid putting down anything permanent, just in case we ran into insurmountable problems there. Confident that Mel and I were clear on the plan, I left him to do his part—the same went for Chip and the other senior department heads. Once I knew they understood exactly what I expected, I didn’t try to tell them how to do their jobs. Mel and his team stayed in Wallkill, while I drove
back and forth to the city, where Chip, John Morris, and Joyce still worked out of our production office in the Village.
MEL LAWRENCE:
We set up an office in a big red barn on the site with Stan, Penny, the purchasing agent Jim Mitchell, and some others, and started solving the logistical problems. People would hear there was going to be a festival, and show up and say, “I’m a carpenter,” “I’m a gardener,” and I’d say, “Okay, you’re hired!”
The Miami crew arrived during early June too and started brainstorming ideas. There was poison ivy and oak all over the Mills property, and spraying herbicide took up a lot of man-hours. We put everybody up at a Catskills resort that Mel remembered going to as a kid.
PENNY STALLINGS:
We all stayed at a kosher bungalow colony in Bull-ville called Rosenberg’s. Rosenberg’s was suspended in time, in the 1950s. It was a place where you ate three meals and sat around in between, and the people looked it too—they were
quite
large. The food was overcooked brisket and potatoes, and the only thing any of us could eat was the apple pie, which was out of this world. We had our meals at the same time as the other guests, and it was hilarious.
Bill Ward came from Florida with his wife, Jean, who could weld. I learned “the macho” from her—she’d grown up with brothers in Pennsylvania, so she had all these talents that no other woman I’d ever known had. Bill and Jean drove around looking for ancient farm equipment to make organic grown-from-the-ground art.
BILL WARD:
When we first showed up, we had all these hippie kids working with us, and we rented three or four pickup trucks and a station wagon, and we’d go into town and buy supplies like shovels,
rakes, and hammers. The people were glad to see us at first, because we were spending money. But then I started running into trouble. I realized when I showed up with a truck full of funny-looking kids, they were the focus of negative attention. I didn’t look much better—I wore blue jeans, a denim jacket, and a baseball cap. Since I was the oldest one there, I was unofficially left in charge at the motel, and the Rosenbergs came to me and said, “Can’t you get these kids to wear shirts and shoes at dinner?” They were very happy to see us when we got there, because the season hadn’t started, and they were making money off of us. But when other people started to arrive, they began to get picky and wanted us out of there.
Back in New York, swamped with meetings, I needed an assistant. Through a musician friend of Stan’s, we found Ticia Bernuth (now Agri), a fascinating woman about my age who’d spent the past few years traveling around the globe.
TICIA BERNUTH AGRI:
When I heard about the job, something just came over my body and I said, “It’s got to be me—get me the interview!” I had come back to New York after being in seventy-two countries and traveling all around the Middle East. In 1965, I’d had this desire for exploration and seeing the world. I lived in Italy, and from there I started traveling—Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, North Africa, all over Europe. I had a sleeping bag and lived on a dollar a day—it was very free and easy in those days. During my interview with Michael, he asked me about myself, and I started talking about being in Saudi Arabia and driving through the desert, and coming across Arabs with bejeweled sabers who took us to a guest palace. I told Michael a lot of good stories like this, and that’s probably why I got hired.
JOYCE MITCHELL:
I was one of those who interviewed Ticia. When I heard her stories about the Sahara, I thought, “This is somebody who will keep Michael on time.” She was wonderful.
PENNY STALLINGS:
Ticia had red hair almost down to her waist. She was tall and skinny with very long legs and a teeny little skirt. She was very good looking—the perfect glamorous hippie secretary.
TICIA BERNUTH AGRI:
Everybody was really friendly—like you already knew them. I remember one of Michael’s staff, Peter Goodrich, talking about hot dogs—miles and miles of hot dogs. He said we needed enough hot dogs that if we lined them up, they’d go all across the United States.
The day Ticia came in, I was interviewing candidates for probably the most important job on our staff, head of security. She sat in while I met with a former deputy from Florida who was talking about barbed wire and attack dogs. Ticia and I gave each other a look that said, No way. It was nice to see we were in sync. After the man left, I told Ticia, “There’s another security guy flying in tomorrow from Washington—Wes Pomeroy. Why don’t you go pick him up at the airport?” I could tell when I met her that Ticia would not be intimidated by meeting and talking to anyone. I needed that ability, because I was dealing with a world that went beyond my own experiences and travels. To interact with all kinds of people, she needed to be comfortable in her own skin, smart enough to handle whatever came up, and conversant with everyone from politicians to rock stars to sanitation engineers. I thought, Let me see what she does with Wes—see if my reading of her is correct. She handled it really well and I knew she’d be a great personal liaison for me.
Wes Pomeroy was recommended to us by the Association of the Chiefs of Police. He was described to us as “not your typical law en
forcement officer.” He had never been a chief of police but was well known in the field. During the Johnson administration, he served as deputy director of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), reporting directly to Attorney General Ramsey Clark. When Nixon was elected, replacing Clark with John Mitchell, Wes was asked to stay on. But Mitchell and the Nixon administration changed the LEAA’s role from being a department that taught police and administrators how to deal peacefully with civil unrest, to primarily being a supplier of weapons (shotguns, tear gas, nightsticks) for local police departments. Wes had served as the Justice Department representative in Chicago during the ’68 Democratic National Convention, where he had tried in vain to negotiate with Mayor Daley to avert the riots. He had just resigned from the Nixon administration to set up a security consulting firm. His Nixon credentials, I thought, would give us credibility with state and local police.
TICIA BERNUTH AGRI:
Michael interviewed Wes and they had an immediate rapport. Wes wasn’t into doing anything but peace and love. We had come through hard times in this country and Wes was trying to heal hippies’ negative view of the police.
I asked Wes how he would handle the possibility of people arriving at Woodstock with the intention of crashing the gates. I knew that the traditional law enforcement approach of confrontation and force would bring nothing but grief and bad vibes. (And later in the summer, I’d see my theory come true at pop festivals in Newport, Atlanta, and Denver.) Other candidates I had interviewed for the job had suggested everything from double rows of barbed-wire fencing with dogs roaming in between, to armed guards every fifty feet, to walls like those at Attica. Wes, on the other hand, asked what
my
thinking was on the matter—a good sign.
I told him that Woodstock would be open to everyone. If you could not afford a ticket, there would be a free stage, as well as a sound system to allow you to hear the band on the main stage. There would be free camping and free kitchens. We would have fences and gates to the main concert area, but I believed that if we offered a fair admission price for all that the festival offered, most people would respect the gates and buy a ticket.
Wes thought this was not only the smart thing to do, but the right thing to do. We both knew there was really no way to police and control a crowd of the size we were expecting. What you had to do, then, was set the right mood and create the right atmosphere and the audience will do the rest.
We also discussed drugs: “If people are smoking marijuana,” Wes said, “then let them. I’ve never seen pot make anyone hostile.” If there were hard drugs being sold, we decided, we would try to root out the dealers and hand them over to the authorities. We agreed that enforcement inside the festival grounds should be handled by us. Wes had the clout to make that stick with the local cops. He was an enlightened person in the unenlightened world of law enforcement. Unconcerned with stereotypes and rhetoric, Wes approached his job with wisdom and an insight into human behavior.
After being hassled nonstop by the cops in Miami, I was so relieved to find someone whose idea of law enforcement was to help, not harass. Wes seemed less concerned with being judgmental and more concerned with being prudent. That was the key for me—not so much that he agreed with our politics. I knew we had found our man.
WES POMEROY:
I liked what I saw. These were really interesting, idealistic guys. They were smart. They had a lot of big ideas that didn’t scare them. They thought they could do something, and I thought, Yeah, maybe they can. You don’t see people like that very often—
they had a lot of bucks they were willing to put behind it, and Michael seemed to be someone who they all respected. I was very comfortable in my role, and they were comfortable in who I was, and it was a very exciting thing to do.
Wes recommended we hire Don Ganoung, who had been both an Episcopal priest and a colleague of Wes’s in law enforcement at the LEAA. He would handle community relations and become Stan’s ally in dealing with the increasingly hostile Wallkill townspeople. Don was a very friendly and freewheeling type. He was in his thirties and wore his collar with grace and humor. The first week in June, Stan and Don went together to a Wallkill Town Board meeting to answer questions and try to allay concerns about the festival (this would pave the way for the town hall meeting I’d attend two weeks later).
STAN GOLDSTEIN:
The opposition coalesced very, very rapidly, and I got beaten up pretty bad. I had been informed that we had a permit, but in fact, we didn’t. There was simply a nonbinding ruling that we didn’t need one. I further learned that John and Joel had misrepresented the festival to the town: There wasn’t going to be any loud music, there were going to be fifty thousand people or less, and it was going to be a nice quiet country and folk festival without a lot of noise and tumult. There was no discussion of camping. It became clear to me almost immediately that we were headed for trouble. I reported back to Woodstock Ventures: “We have a real potential problem here. We do not have a permit. We do not have the authority to proceed, and this is going to get messy, and what do you mean you don’t have an attorney?”