The Road to Woodstock (9 page)

To help deal with the brewing crisis, we hired a local attorney, Sam Eager. Since we had a signed lease with Howard Mills and the zoning board had given John and Joel the green light in April, we
thought we were in the clear legally. We didn’t realize that in places like Wallkill, new ordinances could materialize on demand and that our rights, as well as our hold on the site, were much more tenuous than we thought.

In the meantime, Don Ganoung ran into trouble at the place where he’d chosen to reside. He rented a room above the local brothel (which was disguised as a bar), where he met the daughter of the mayor of Middletown. The police raided the place in a drug bust and found Don with the mayor’s daughter in his room. That put yet another strain on our relations in the Wallkill township, where things were moving from bad to worse. It was all too similar to my experience in Miami.

The phone line at our field office was getting bombarded with death threats from hippie-hating residents, and one night someone fired a shotgun into the walls of the barn. Mills and his wife were being terrorized by callers who threatened to burn down their house if they didn’t pull the plug on the festival. With the headline
WALLKILL FACTION GIRDS TO BLOCK FOLK FESTIVAL
, the Middletown paper reported that a Concerned Citizens Committee had formed to stop us from proceeding. The Wallkill town attorney sent us a certified letter demanding that we submit for the board’s review an extensive array of documents detailing all aspects of the festival, from security to water and sewage to parking and traffic—most of which was still up in the air.

My experiences in Miami had taught me about dealing with conservative people and small-town officials. That was good training for what was coming in Wallkill. Having spent time in the Catskills with my family in the fifties, I had an idea of what we were up against. But I thought we could overcome the prejudices against us—and the counterculture we represented. I’ve always felt common ground could be found among all people. When it came time to attend the Wallkill Town Board meeting with my core production crew in June, I thought
that by hearing us out and seeing us face-to-face, the local residents would come to understand our point of view. I’d never had problems communicating with people. No matter what, I could reach most people. It didn’t hurt that everyone on my team of experts was a good talker.

That June night after the Wallkill Town Board meeting, we were both exhilarated and worried. I thought we had been convincing, but we knew we had a long road ahead if we wanted to stay in Wallkill.

“I’m going to pull your acts! YOU’RE OUT OF BUSINESS!”

I’m sitting across the table from the most powerful promoter in the industry—the guy who invented it all. Bill Graham is glowering at me and talking real loud. “I’m going to buy them out from under you,” he promises. He looks eight feet tall. It’s only the pickled herring he’s eating that brings him into focus for me.

A few days earlier, he’d called John Morris and started threatening him. John had worked for Graham at the Fillmore and was totally intimidated. A nervous wreck, John burst into my office: “We’ve had it! Bill’s going to pull the plug!”

“What Bill? What plug? There’s no plug here,” I tell John. “Calm down.”

“You don’t understand!” he says. “It’s Graham—he’s got the power and he can do this! He can shut us down!”

I realize that John firmly believes we’re completely fucked. “Call him back and set up a meeting. I’ll take care of this. Trust me, John. Don’t worry.”

It’s early June and I know my bookings are solid, the contracts are signed, deposits have been paid, and the festival is being discussed all over the country. For the first time ever, we are creating a national event. Graham’s important, he’s the most influential rock promoter in the country, but he’s not God, I tell myself. I also know that Graham generally tries to get exclusive deals for engagements within a fifty-mile radius of the Fillmore East. Our festival is nearly twice that distance from the
city.

In Bill’s world, he has me at a huge disadvantage. I need to bring him into my world. So John and I meet Bill at Ratner’s, the Jewish dairy restaurant next door to the Fillmore, on Second Avenue. “This is my business!” Graham pounds his fist on the flimsy table. “Where do you come off, trying to screw with me, kid?”

I breathe a silent sigh of relief. I see there’s a real problem here—not just some irrational, ego-driven thing. This, I think, I can deal with. I flash on an incident back in Bensonhurst: Some of the neighborhood hitters, who owned the schoolyard, picking on my cousin, who was sort of geeky. It was always up to me to get him away from them without getting punched out myself. It was about gaining respect by not showing fear, and being able to alter the dynamics through a sort of empathetic insight into what’s driving things.

“First of all—we are doing this. Nobody is going to stop this thing, not even you,” I said to Bill, looking him in the eye. “What’s your problem with us? We’re not competing with you. We’re almost a hundred miles away.”

“You have booked almost my entire spring season,” he says. “Audiences are not going to buy tickets to see these acts individually at the Fillmore when they can wait and see them all at once at Woodstock,” he explained in a slightly softer voice.

The solution pops into my head. “Okay, I got it,” I say. “I had no idea we would be affecting your box office. I think we have a way for this to work out for both of us. I’m planning on adding acts to the bill up until the week of the festival,” I tell him. “Send me your schedule from now through August and I won’t announce an act that’s playing the Fillmore until after they’ve appeared there.”

There’s silence for a few moments and I can tell he’s shifting gears and coming to terms with this new situation. He may not like the idea that we exist, but he really has no grounds to keep up the assault. “Okay,” he says. “That works.”

Graham announces most of his shows and loves to introduce the acts,
so I invite him to the festival to emcee one of the days. I can tell he’s flattered, yet he declines. He’ll come up but won’t announce, he says: “You’re the producer—it’s your show. We both can’t be God on the same day.”

B
y the third week in May, things were crazy busy in New York; the office was buzzing and expanding rapidly. I’d hired more people, including Peter Goodrich, an old friend from Miami. A raconteur and streetwise guy, Peter had been a fixture in the Grove. One of those guys who knew a little bit about everything and a lot about art, Peter was forty-one and specialized in pre-Columbian art
and
Colombian gold. I later found out that he and Joyce Mitchell were acquainted in Miami in the fifties. He seemed to know everyone who was cool, from Miami to L.A.

I needed a confidant like Peter, someone who could think on his feet and someone I could completely trust. I put him in charge of concessions, everything from crafts to Coca-Cola. We were creating a bazaar in the woods for purveyors of clothing, candles, ceramics, pipes, painting, and sculpture—all manner of countercultural items from outfits like Earthcrafts, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Fur Balloons, and Xanadu. Vendors would pay a $300 fee to rent a booth, which we would build, and hip boutiques like A Different Drummer and Limbo signed up.

We would also construct concession stands at various locations around the site for food and drink. The most difficult task for Peter was to find a company to handle the food. We originally thought locating a food vendor would be a no-brainer and that this would be a big profit center for us. As it turned out, the large food-vending companies like Restaurant Associates, which handled ball parks and arenas, didn’t want to take on Woodstock. No one had ever handled food services for an event this size. They didn’t want to put in the investment capital necessary to supply such a huge amount of food, on-site
kitchens, and personnel, plus transport everything upstate. And what if we didn’t draw the crowds we projected? I hoped Peter could convince Nathan’s—a favorite from Coney Island—to work with us.

Another crucial person in our office was Kimberly Bright, whom I hired for $100 a week to light incense and place flowers around. She added a certain tranquility to the space and would lead yoga classes some afternoons. We’d list her as “spiritual advisor” in the Woodstock program book.

My vision for the festival had evolved into a complex, three-dimensional picture encompassing multiple elements: physical and emotional, spiritual and practical, artistic and commercial. The interplay between them all was hard for some to grasp. Except for a core group, staff members didn’t have to understand the big picture, as long as they accomplished their individual assignments. I hoped John and Joel would come to see, beyond the money, what the festival could be. Artie got it completely but didn’t really know how to attain it. So I devoted myself to the task of staying true to the ideals Artie and I had developed at the beginning of this adventure. I made sure senior staff
like Mel, Chip, John, Chris, and Joyce were all on the same page as far as production and design. But in terms of the big picture, I knew that everyone would get it when it all came together in the end.

I saw and appreciated the different qualities among our production staff: With John, it was his swagger balanced by his knowledge of the business. Joyce was worldly and had a background in management. With Chip and Chris, it was seeing the quality of their work and the depth of their experience. The fact that they were not intimidated by the project gave me a lot of confidence in them and the people they recommended for certain jobs.

My contract with Chip provided him with an additional $6,000 to hire a stage manager, designer, and construction foreman. Chip chose Steve Cohen, a Carnegie Tech graduate and draftsman who’d worked on production at the Fillmore and the Philadelphia Folk Festival. Chris, Chip, and Steve became the nucleus of the production crew. All three, along with John Morris and Bert Cohen, had strong opinions about the stage design, so I ran a “competition” where anyone on our team could present a design.

I had a few requirements: I didn’t want the stage to be jarring or fancy; I wanted it to feel familiar and very organic. I wanted something substantial that would give everyone confidence. As at Miami Pop, I wanted a design in which the crew could set up the next band while an act was onstage so there’d be no long gaps between acts.

I got about a dozen submissions—including models constructed from Good Humor sticks—of different types of stages, some pretty wacky. One looked like a birthday cake, with spiral decking rising
into the sky. Those outrageous designs didn’t fit what I was trying to do. I wanted something more rustic, as if it was growing out of the ground. Like the Soundouts but on a huge scale.

It finally boiled down to three finalists: Bert Cohen, Chris Langhart ( John Morris’s choice), and Steve Cohen (Chip’s pick). Bert had designed the stage for Mel’s Miami festival and devised a similar idea for Woodstock featuring a pair of large turntable-style platforms connected by a kind of trolley system so band setups could be alternated on each stage. A giant umbrella-shaped structure formed a roof, connected to the stages by tall shafts shooting up from between the platforms. The top twirled around and was decorated with two dozen flags. I decided it was too fancy for a pastoral landscape.

Chris’s stage focused on a single circular platform, flanked by a pair of eighty-foot-tall telephone poles supporting a crossbar shaped like a peace sign. A canopy, with lights mounted underneath, sat on top, attached to the poles by a series of cables. Chris said he was going for a “modern, whiz-bang thing” and had been inspired by some Japanese ice-rink drawings he’d seen. It was an interesting idea but provided no quick means for switching from one band to the next. I passed, but Chris took on another assignment: a beautiful, rough-hewn concept for the artists’ pavilion, where musicians would hang out when not onstage: an open, airy, sculptural structure made from thirty-four telephone poles—looking like Lincoln Logs—with a white fabric “roof” hung over the crossbeams.

Chip was pushing for Steve’s stage design, and after making a few suggestions, I agreed. A pair of seventy-foot telephone poles anchored in blocks of concrete would secure the stage to the ground. On top of the poles would be a massive mushroom-cap-shaped roof, where more than 250 lights would be affixed. It featured a massive turntable system consisting of three half circles on wheels, for quick band transitions. Planned to be the largest stage constructed at that time, it would cost an estimated $20,000.

In late spring another really energetic and bright woman joined our staff. Lee Mackler (now Blumer) was hired to work for Wes in security and community relations. Like me, she grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, Sheepshead Bay. Very worldly, she’d lived in Africa for a while, then had come back and worked for Dick Clark, handling the Monkees tours with the then-unknown Jimi Hendrix as the opening act. She put in a stint at Albert Grossman’s office, followed by Bill Graham’s, where she met John Morris, who recommended her to us.

By early June, I was focused on wrapping up as much of the booking as I could. I planned to ease into the festival weekend by making Friday the folk day, with Saturday primarily presenting artists from the West Coast, and Sunday featuring the bigger international rock bands. Bookings for August 15 were nearly complete, at a reasonable expense: Tim Hardin, who had become a friend ($2,000); the Incredible String Band, a psychedelic folk-rock group from England ($4,500); Ravi Shankar, whose music had been part of the soundtrack at my head shop ($4,500); Richie Havens, an incredible performer, then as well as now ($6,000); Arlo Guthrie, whose “Alice’s Restaurant” epic had become a part of the fabric of the sixties ($5,000); and Joan Baez, one of the keepers of the flame ($10,000). We had hoped to persuade Donovan and Johnny Cash to perform, but each declined. The bril
liant songwriter Laura Nyro was a possibility, but her stage fright prevented her from accepting our offer.

Simon and Garfunkel would have been great for Saturday’s lineup, but after touring earlier in the year, they’d had enough of each other and didn’t want to perform that summer. The Doors were also at the top of our list, but since Jim Morrison’s arrest in Miami in March, he’d become really paranoid. He told his booking agent he didn’t want to play Woodstock for fear of being assassinated onstage.

There were still slots yet to fill for Saturday. We had some great Bay Area bands lined up: In addition to Creedence Clearwater Revival, Canned Heat, and Jefferson Airplane, Bill Graham had confirmed the Grateful Dead ($7,500). I’d booked Janis Joplin ($15,000) through Albert Grossman, who also gave us the Band ($15,000). Albert liked the policy of “favored nations,” as long as his nations were the ones favored.

The Band was to be part of the festival since the beginning.
Music from Big Pink
had broadened the musical landscape and made a deep impact on me. I had gotten to know Rick Danko and Richard Manuel, and I was hoping Dylan might show up with them. He had not toured since 1966, and I didn’t want to push it with him. Bob felt put upon by so many people in the counterculture laying claim to him. I didn’t want to add to that burden—so I didn’t make an offer.