by Bob Spitz
Most women found Monck strikingly handsome. Waves of dirty-blond hair tied back into a ponytail and great muttonchops that grew the length of either side of his face made him the embodiment of the great Southern California dream. He was strong, cocky, and overpowering.
After returning to California in 1967, Chip was introduced to Lou Adler who hired him to stage Monterey Pop. Performers became more demanding as the money grew, and by 1968, most acts were concerned with the theatrical components of staging—penny-ante dramatics controlled by technicians stationed at control decks in the audience. Monck had been doing that for over a decade and when the demand became great, he found himself besieged by offers to do lighting for every top rock group. Naturally, Bill Graham had to have someone as talented as Monck under his roof, and it wasn’t long before Chip became technical coordinator of both the Fillmore East and the Fillmore West.
Hector Morales first approached Monck about joining Woodstock backstage at the Fillmore East after a characteristically late show (many groups played five-hour sets that lasted until four o’clock in the morning). Chip was only mildly interested, citing that “everyone and his mother was planning” a similar event. He did, however, reluctantly agree to meet with the promoters as a favor to Morales.
The meeting took place a few blocks from the Fillmore at the home of John Morris, a garrulous twenty-four-year-old graduate of Fillmore East management who was in the process of raising capital for a multimillion-dollar Virgin Islands resort. Lang handled the sales talk with the usual savoir faire, pausing occasionally as Stan Goldstein added an unnoted virtue or two, and before long, Monck’s indifference was a thing of the past.
“The only trouble is,” he explained, “I’ve got a slew of commitments for the summer, paying gigs for Graham and a couple of other guys. My blocking out a couple months to do your festival might put me out of commission too long. It’d hurt my credibility. It sounds great though.” He pondered it for a few seconds. “I’ll try to work it out. Meanwhile, you might want to talk to John Morris, here, about a place on your staff.”
Morris appeared flattered by the suggestion but, in Goldstein’s estimation, was overly eager to get involved with the festival for someone caught up in a monumental land development deal. Woodstock had to be small peanuts by comparison. There had to be a bit more to his enthusiasm than met the eye, Stan deduced. And there was. Morris, as he later discovered, was a coattail surfer who rode a regular wave of bad luck. He always seemed to have his hands in a half-dozen scintillating projects controlled by close friends, only to be dumped as each one took off.
Still, Lang and Goldstein liked Morris. There were a number of ways he could be of value to them, especially when it came to dealing with performers. Because of his experience with Graham, he knew how to examine contracts, could execute the attached riders, and had a talent for being able to deal civilly with that nefarious species called the road manager, many of whom had remained friends after Morris left the music business. Morris had been a road manager himself for the Jefferson Airplane, and Lang assumed that he could learn from watching Morris operate. But, most of all, Morris was Michael’s link to the ubiquitous Bill Graham. Graham had most of the world’s major acts under contract for summer tours, and Lang knew that if he was going to penetrate those tour schedules, to lure the bands to Woodstock on one of their “open” days, some form of conciliation was going to have to be worked out with Graham. A trade-off of some kind. Michael might consider volunteering his staff’s services free of charge for a Graham promotion, or donating ad space in the festival program book—anything. But something had to be arranged, and fast. Otherwise it’d be like pulling teeth to attract those sought-after groups who were not about to risk alienating Graham for one day’s work. Michael was forced to seek the promoter’s blessing, and John Morris could wind up being his ace in the hole.
Lang chased after Chip Monck without shame. Soon after their meeting in Morris’s apartment, Lang called on him again to toss around some ideas about lighting a show of Woodstock’s dimensions. As with the other experts Lang had seen, his primary interest was to tap Chip’s knowledge so that, one day, he could ably challenge Graham’s heavyweight title. Michael never gave instructions or even offered suggestions to his compatriots in those early meetings. Instead, he established an affinity with the creative people by asking: “Whaddya think we should do?” and making mental notes. It was a street leader’s method of self-education and, ultimately, survival.
Lang and Monck began to hit it off as friends. The two were “movers” in a microcosm of followers, young men full of confidence and purpose who could lay back and unwind over a joint and still take care of business with unyielding tenacity. Here was that beautiful irony indicative of the generation’s anti-Establishment heroes who wallowed in the splendors of cutthroat capitalism—fighting to excel in the very thing the movement rejected. They masqueraded as hippies although they also shared an affection for spending large sums of other people’s money. But an even stronger bond was their abnormal respect for one another: one could look into the other’s eyes, realize a lie was in progress, and still place unabiding trust and well-being in his judgment.
As their friendship progressed, Michael asked Monck to lay out a lighting design for a six-hundred-acre city and not to give cost a thought. “I want it to be very colorful, like an acid trip,” Lang advised him, “much more than the usual alternating shades of red and blue. I want the audience involved.”
Chip suggested they hire the Fillmore’s resident light-show designer, Joshua White, but Michael shook it off. “That’s old news, man. Nobody’s turned on by light shows anymore. No, I want something new and unique, something that produces a natural high. Can you do it?”
“Without worrying about bread? Yeah.”
With that agreed upon, Monck signed a five-page contract guaranteeing Chipmonck Industries Corp. the sum of $7,000 for Chip’s semiexclusive services and an additional $13,000 for “the said Mr. Monck” to employ a stage manager, designer, and construction foreman at his sole discretion.
The next day John Morris was hired as production coordinator. His only stipulation was that neither he nor Chip earn more than the other. It had something to do with a duel of egos that had been going on between them for years. Michael agreed, and presented John with a contract for $6,000. Based upon an element of trust—one of the Love Generation’s principal commandments—John waived inspection of Chip’s contract and committed his name to the binding agreement, thus becoming the tenth member of the festival’s executive staff.
• • •
While trust and slogans of Peace and Brotherhood were enlisted to front the hippies’ public call to unity, it was a combination of those very qualities that ultimately turned their euphoric dream into a nightmare of paranoia. Bruce Cook in his book The Beat Generation attributes much of the souring process to the pseudomystical lyrics of rock music, which, he asserts, had “begun to load them with such heavy intellectual fright.” But, more so, there was strong evidence that the movement had overdosed on its own idealistic double-talk. Love. Peace. Beauty. Truth. Spiritual togetherness. Brotherhood: the hippies revolted against the Establishment and suspected anyone over thirty. “Fuck the system! Fuck the pigs!” When they began to tire of those unifying threads, their shopworn togetherness converted to enmity, and brother began fucking brother. It was all one could do to survive out there on the streets. Much of that had managed to seep into the hippie hierarchy as well. There were the power struggles to determine who was the most peaceful. There was a war going on in America with “Peace” as its battle cry.
None of this, of course, escaped the upper echelons of Woodstock Ventures Incorporated. For some time, Michael Lang had been worrying about how he was going to bring his newly acquired staff of groovy, laid-back, very together dudes under the same roof with “uptight cats” like John Roberts and Joel Rosenman. Cohabitation had always been one of Lang�
�s primary objectives, but this was carrying it to extremes. As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t a prayer that cool personalities like Chip Monck and Mel Lawrence were going to feel loose around the office. What’s more, Michael himself was growing uncomfortable there. He found Roberts too regimented, too convinced there were proper business practices one had to subscribe to in order to succeed, and that was contrary to Lang’s concept about how the Woodstock operation should be run. He felt it should represent the new, relaxed way of bringing business people together. Wasn’t that why they had told Renee Levine, their bookkeeper, to come in each morning after she woke up—that’s when the office officially opened for her? Hadn’t they dispensed with dress codes for the same reason? Wasn’t inner peace their universal aim?
Joel and Michael’s personalities were about as compatible as those of a clergyman and a hooker. Joel did not trust Lang to so much as make a bank deposit without finding a way to siphon off part of it, much less to represent the best interests of the company in which they were partners. Nor was he subtle about his distrust. According to Michael, it was Joel’s manner, the way he condescendingly spoke to Lang and Kornfeld as one orders a dog to “sit” and “stay.” He seemed openly contemptuous of their hippie mannerisms, looking sideways at John throughout group conversations as if to say: “Get a load of this nonsense.” Michael interpreted these nuances as threats and, in retaliation, began complaining to Goldstein that “Joel never told anyone the truth about anything.” He felt as though Rosenman would tell him one thing and then run to Roberts with another story about how Michael was up to no good. “Joel lies, man, and I just can’t get into that shit. He’s also an imcompetent—bad news.”
Michael was in a bind. He knew that if he brought the music and press people to the office, it would destroy the ethereal image of the festival; they would see through John and Joel’s plastic hippie veneer and would be immediately turned off. Additionally, it would reduce his own credibility as a spokesman for the generation to that of a media joke. But even more important, he would be forced to defend his partners’ attitudes to Mel and Chip—and he just could not bring himself to do that.
The third week in May, Michael took steps to alleviate his quandary by negotiating for alternate office space in a building around the corner from John Morris’s apartment in Greenwich Village.
It was a measure of separation that perplexed John Roberts. Roberts had been under the impression that he and Joel had made sweeping strides in their personalities as a means of bridging the generation gap. He had even assumed, perhaps prematurely, that Michael and he were friends. There had been many occasions when they took long walks together around Manhattan discussing their divergent ideologies and comparing upbringings. And they weren’t all that different.
Now Michael wanted them to remain apart.
“Why?” John asked him, hurt by the suggestion. “What’s going on? Why do you want to take an office way down there when it will be impossible for us to remain in constant contact?”
“Because it won’t happen uptown,” Michael answered quietly as if it were as plain as day.
“I don’t understand. What do you mean ‘it won’t happen uptown’?”
“It just won’t.” They stood silently, facing each other for a moment. Michael smiled, assuming he had made himself perfectly clear.
“Michael—we’ve just finished taking these offices, spent a lotta bread fixing them up to suit you guys. We don’t need another office.”
“Not we, man—me. The production staff. We need a big place to spread out and get in the groove. Y’know, where these guys can draw and work on stage plans and be creative and everything. Your place isn’t even finished yet. Like, I need a place right away for my staff to get to work. Otherwise, we’re nowhere.” He also mentioned that ticketing wasn’t being handled properly by Joel, and his gang needed a productive atmosphere although, in fact, Joel had nothing to do with ticketing. “Artie’ll stay up here with you cats and handle publicity, and that way one of us’ll always be around. I’ll be poppin’ in all the time, too. Relax, man.”
John considered Michael’s argument for the separation of powers and saw nothing particularly wrong with it. Nor did Joel. They would need a lot more room than the Fifty-seventh Street offices offered if they wanted to construct staging modules and to be able to work on those oversized drafting tables Michael said they needed. There were only two empty offices in the back of the uptown office, and those would eventually be taken over by the mail-order operation. What did it matter anyway if Lang and his crew were downtown? They were all working toward the same end.
Weren’t they?
4
On May 20, 1969, Michael Lang, Mel Lawrence and his assistant—an attractive young blond girl from Texas named Penny Stallings—Chip Monck, an administrative office manager they had hired for downtown named Joyce Mitchell, John Morris, and several assistants moved into the second and third floors of a small commercial building at 513-A Avenue of the Americas between Twelfth and Thirteenth streets, a few blocks from the heart of the Village. That same night, Chip Monck stole onto the premises with a few tools and planks of wood, and when the office opened the next morning for its first day of business, the staff found handmade oak desks and draftsman’s tables built into the walls. Michael’s aim was to provide his specialists with a twenty-four-hour-a-day production facility, a place to which they would each have a key, without specific hours, where they would come to work when the spirit hit them.
Chip laid claim to the front part of the second floor as a design department and hired a young man from the Philadelphia Folk Festival production committee named Steve Cohen to work out a stage design. Chip was working on one of his own, but so were Bert Cohen and Chris Langhart, the latter a prodigal genius who taught technical design at nearby New York University and worked nights at the Fillmore East. Michael had requested an unusual stage design, something “rustic” to complement their surroundings and to contribute to the all-around “good vibes,” as well as being functional. Also, the stage had to accommodate enough equipment for two bands at the same time so there would be no break in the show while the roadies set up and broke down the gear. It was a tall order for them to come up with a perfect blend of those ingredients and required that more than one person contribute to the design. So Chip made a contest out of it: the most ingenious design would be used as the stage.
John Morris requisitioned the middle section of that floor and settled down to coordinating activities with the various bands that were already under contract.
Each act had a rider attached to its contract that stated the additional services the producer of the festival was required to provide for them in addition to salary: equipment, exotic pitches to which the pianos were to be tuned, assistants for sound and equipment, microphones, food, modes of transportation—each was spelled out down to specific brand names that were to be on hand or else the contract could be nullified. Morris performed an overall breakdown of the riders to see what communal equipment could be rented to mutually satisfy a number of acts; that would trim costs considerably and prevent the festival’s making arrangements for many of these things with too wide a variety of outside contractors. Then, he mailed each performer’s manager a form letter inquiring as to the band’s expected time of arrival and the number of rooms required for hotel accommodations. It had been decided by Lang that band members would have to double up in rooms, otherwise they’d never find enough hotel space to accommodate everyone. There was also the task of ordering bank checks for one half of each performer’s salary as a deposit to satisfy contract requirements (the remainder was to be paid by check immediately preceding the performance). It seemed endless, but Morris was used to addressing these details with almost automatic execution and had things pretty well under control.
The third floor primarily belonged to Lang. It consisted of a wide entrance area governed by Joyce Mitchell and enclosed sp
ace directly behind here where he continued to barter by phone for the services of outstanding performers. As of May 21, the Band had agreed to join the show in a Sunday afternoon slot for a fee of $15,000, a signing that no doubt delighted Michael as he considered that group to personify the Woodstock ethic—cultural rogues who hung out in the country, did their music without regard for commerciality, and projected a homespun, backwoodsy feeling by just being around. They had also been Bob Dylan’s backup band, and Lang was hoping that their playing at the festival would attract The Man himself. Michael had talked to Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, about that possibility, but so far, he had not gotten so much as a nibble. Lang had also sent a letter to John Lennon pledging any sum if the Beatles would put in an appearance; however, Lennon wrote back that he could only guarantee the services of the Plastic Ono Band. Lang let the whole matter quietly drop.
To round out the cast of production office regulars, John Morris hired Kimberly Bright, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a New York State senator, as the festival’s “spiritual adviser.” Attired in the barest of essentials, Kimberly had such duties as buying fresh flowers each morning for the staff’s desks, keeping incense burning in the ashtrays, and leading daily yoga exercises on each floor, for which she was paid one hundred dollars a week. Michael, it was said, considered her contributions vital to the tranquility of the working atmosphere.
Lawrence and Goldstein were not downtown office regulars, each preferring to work out details on his own. Mel Lawrence spent most of that third week in May assembling what he found to be his most valuable tool on a weekend music project: a checklist. “You don’t have a checklist, you don’t have shit!” he’d say to anyone asking how he intended to begin his work. He spent hours going over accounts of past festivals and large gatherings, making note of their most minute details: water, food, roads, the going rate for manpower, heavy equipment rental, taxes, security, licenses, insurance—everything. And once the list was assembled, he would not let it out of his sight for the duration of the assignment. It was like having his eyesight; without it he was as good as lost.